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Are video games bad? Are they a negative force in society?

Until Eve Peyser began playing video games with her boyfriend, that’s what she thought:

When I reached my early college years and began to fancy myself an intellectual type, I adopted the familiar cerebral framework about why video games are bad: They’re culturally worthless and — while not the source of mass shootings, as conservatives argue — a drain on young men’s brains, maybe even their humanity, hobbling their ability to form real bonds.

But after she actually got the hang of how to play, she writes in her recent Op-Ed, she began to see video games in a completely different light:

It took a couple of months to crack me, but my view began to change with the first game my boyfriend persuaded me to play, Earth Defense Force: You get to be soldiers fighting aliens that look like massive bugs, horrific creatures dead set on total world invasion. They sprayed fatal toxins at us as we tried to kill as many of them as possible with guns and explosives.

Initially, I was terrible at it, hopelessly smashing the gazillion buttons on the controller. But for the first time, I was playing a video game with somebody who loved me, who wanted to teach me how it all worked. All so we could have more fun together. And we did.

My boyfriend’s gaming never actually put a strain on our relationship, but when I started playing with him, it went from being one of his boy hobbies I could never possibly understand to an experience we could share, something that highlighted why we worked so well together.