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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.

My DS7 has been playing on the computer since he's about 2 1/2. DD3 is not as interested as he was at that age, but she will occasionally play an alphabet game or something. Both my husband and I are comp sci people and use the computer a lot, so it would feel a bit disingenuous to not let them have SOME usage!

DS gets 20 minutes on a timer a day and that's it. We don't have any gaming systems, but he is begging for a WII (and he shouldn't hold his breath). He got his first game boy from his grandparents for x-mas. Which also counts as computer time. He is amazing adept at researching things on his own and finding new things on the net. It's a bit frightening. Needless to say, he gets lots of supervision.

I actually WISH we had a nintendo DS so we could play Brain Age or something along those lines. My parents have some of those kind of games and I think they're great fun.

DS4 has been playing computer games since 2. Like others, we allow, but don't encourage. When I need to do my work, I get priority. There are so many great free games online now - we have found good ones on smart-kit.com (site created by a neurologist), which led us to jayisgames.com, a site that holds competitions for all those smarties creating games (and they're all available to play). As a prize for taking his IQ test, DS4 chose a JumpStart World computer game for 2nd grade. I don't know how great that is, but he really wanted it for some reason and likes it.

One (sort of) useful thing: I think withholding computer is the only thing that works for a consequence right now - DS4 doesn't care about other things. I'm thinking the long MN winter is contributing to this computer use. Once it's nice outside, we won't be able to get him in.