in a meaningful glance at this point, he argued with her about something she was trying to teach the class. He even argued with the authors of their textbooks, she said. Almost every parent-teacher conference I had in elementary school was some version of this one. Later, as Gray aged and became more defiant and even, at times, abusive, toward me, I would think back to these parent-teacher conferences and the frustration of the teachers. I considered the principal who had paddled him in kindergarten, without my permission, and wondered whether that experience had contributed to turning him against authority. Some of the bosses in the games Gray played as a boy were fat, little men that put me in mind of that principal. Had he ever thought of him while he was slaying the principallook-alike bosses? In those early days, I didn’t appreciate the value of the pure play element in video games, their autotelic nature. I’d spent my adult life as an educator and wanted there to be something other than play. Something educational, something useful. Because Gray was constantly having to make decisions in the games, I told myself they were teaching him problem-solving skills, as well as fine motor skills, that the games helped him think creatively. I knew of studies that suggested even firstperson-shooter games could contribute to building a more capable person, improving visual attention as well as the brain’s ability to spread attention over a wide range of events. Although Gray mostly played games either with friends or alone, sometimes we played together, especially games that could be played on a computer: puzzle games like Myst, evolutionary games like Darwin’s Dilemma, role-playing games like Baldur’s Gate. It was a way of bonding, not unlike the way my family had bonded when I was a girl by playing Monopoly, Twister, Life, and card games like Hearts (none of which
Sheryl St. Germain
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