My daughter is a video game pro

My daughter is supposed to study Chinese today through Rosetta Stone program. However, after waking up from my afternoon siesta, I found her ogling on the computer – not with some Mandarin but with some online video games. Looking at her, playing like some pro, hitting the keyboards at the right places, I now can see her future, and it spells D-O-O-M.

I know what she’s doing isn’t right. But I just can’t help myself from smiling, from admiring her ability to learn such game by herself. I am no fan of video games or rather I don't wanna waste my time with such. Well, a waste of time, a conclusion from scary stories I heard from some nocturnal friends getting addicted by such, sleeping late or rather not sleeping at all, ending up like zombies on class, stoned and learning nothing.

Okay, fair enough, I had my share of confession too. I got addicted with plants vs zombies once. I felt like a zombie myself, can’t wait to wake up and kill some zombies first thing in the morning. I found them too adorable to resist. Discovering my vulnerability on wasting my “precious” time, I am now dodging away from video games. Well, ironically I often ended up equally wasting my time on Facebook. In fairness to video games, its benefits can't be ignored too. As my husband used to insist, video or computer games are said to improve the players’ multi-tasking/hand-eye coordination skills, as well as their problem solving, motivation, cognitive and decision-making skills. Hmm sounds interesting.

Now going back to my daughter, crawling out of my bed, I hugged and kissed her. She’s just like her father, a cute smarty video game addict.  Then just in time, I saw her score printed on the screen, and I can’t believe what I saw, O points!  That’s right, zero points. Gosh, this is so hilarious. Judging from the way she raced out from her enemies’ reach, I thought she was some gaming pro. The gigantic silver screen on my head printed with some soothing words of “It’s alright, I have a video game addict but smarty kid” was slowly shattered into pieces. My daughter after all is just a normal curious 9-year old little girl, far from being a video game addict. As to how she fared with her gaming skills, fair enough, she’s got my genes, a video game slow learner hehe.

Sour-graping it may sound, this is good, she should be better off concentrating her way on learning Mandarin or Mathematics, than with such well they said, brain-stimulating video games, but I call it, life-wasting games LOL. Nevertheless, I can’t disagree, a video game played in moderation may not be that bad.