games

For reals though, my parents were vehemently down with the initial pikemon craze, I was 6-7 in 98 and they noticed how much reading is involved in the video and card games, there's a bunch of math in the card game (there is in the video game but they didn't really play them and it's optional as hell). They thought the TV show sucksd and Digimon was a better cartoon but were pretty quick to notice this was really helping me learn some basic shit. I'm certain Pokémon gave me the early gains in reading comprehension and analysis cause knowing the most about Pokémon made you cooler than other kids. I found out you could find fan translated versions of Japanese episode scripts with screenshots from the Japanese broadcast making for a pretty solid summary of what was coming in 6 months cause people posted that kind of stuff in the early late 90s to 2000s interwebs. There were kids in my class who were certain I had some sort of inside connection to the Digimon production cause I'd read fan translations and was doodling Digimon in class that would appear in the show later on. So Digimon appropriately taught me that using the internet as a resource of arcane info and not a place for flash games could be useful as hell. My early gamer years also helped me be a wise consumer, once again my folks were pretty smart in getting me some gaming magazine subscriptions (they were like $12 for a year, so it wasn't a big deal) so I could compare write ups and reviews and make informed choices as to what I'd want for Christmas and stuff. My cousins and friends would have game shelves filled with obvious shovelware, I learned to be choosy fast and once again, my folks were very cool with frequent game rentals cause it was like $15 to get 3 for a week and you could test drive before making a full commitment. This is partially cause they also really like video games, I'll be heading over soon for Christmas eve and we will be getting drunk and playing Mario Kart. So yeah, tldr: gaming can for sure learn yiu stuff and I have pretty cool parents who are at the very least informed consumers.