My almost ten year old son has played video games since he was about 4. His first game was Spyro and he played it on a Gameboy. It was great for keeping him entertained and quiet backstage when he was doing plays. Before that, he had only done education computer games.
Lately he has been playing Yu-Gi-Oh World Championship 2008 and Phoenix Wright Ace Attorney on his Nintendo DS, Roblox and PHUN (a physics game) and Who Wants to be a Millionaire, freerice.com and runescape.com that he found free online, Wii Sports on the Wii, and Chessmaster on the XBox and Final Fantasy, an RPG game.
He does a lot of 60 minute free trials of games that he finds online. He does a lot of online research before he buys a game and he often seems more knowledgable than the people working at Gamestop. His older friends call him to get advice about games and they love to come to our house so video games are good for social reasons also.
He says his past favorites are Pokemon, Brain Age, Age of Empires, Guitar Hero, and all of the Tycoon games. He also liked the game Capitalism because he could play as either an entrepreneur or manufacturer.
He says he would love to learn to design video games when he is older.
Because he has hypotonia and motor dyspraxia he can't do sports like most of the other boys his age. He says he doesn't like Dance, Dance Revolution and only plays it because I "force" him to.
I think the early use of video games really helped his reading, comprehension, vocabulary and spelling abilities because he had to read well in order to play the games he wanted to play.
I wish they would make more games like Brain Age.
