>>2 I beg to differ.
My parents divorced around when I was 9, I ended up just sitting at the good old Pentium Pro box for the whole day, day after day.
I feel that computers are a very large element of how I changed from a kid who didn't give a shit about anything but trends and pop-culture to who I am today.
Consider, firstly, that I was an immigrant. Moved to the US at 5 years old, didn't know a word of English. I advanced relatively slowly, and once I caught up to my peers, I basically stopped until it was time to catch up again.
Then, along came the Computer. First game I remember playing, on that computer? One Must Fall.
Once I got my senseless Giant-Robot-Fighting urges out of the way, though, I began playing Discworld.
There I was, a 9 year old, whose English was atrocious at best, trying to play a very, very wordy game targeted at adults, set in the world of a series of books (Which were also mostly targeted at adults.) From that point on. By the time I had finished the game, my English abilities had improved greatly (I remember receiving a compliment from my ESL [English as a Second Language] teacher, wondering how I managed to turn around and pick so much up in a couple of months, including things that she didn't even teach yet)
Along with Discworld, I also played Ultima 7 and 8 - Neither one quite as wordy as Discworld, but certainly, they have good deal of words in them that a 9 year old probably doesn't know (I remember asking my older brother, "What's Dexterity?.. Oh, and Agility?... What's a Titan?", he just gave me his dictionary eventually)
Ah, and Day of the Tentacle - An excellent game. That got me interested in American History somewhat (I didn't even know the name of the president back then. Bill Clinton? Who's that?). I went off and borrowed a book on American History after playing through the game. When Fifth grade came along, I was top of the class during American History, and I thank DoT for interesting me in it before hand (As well as the book, but nobody cares about the book. I don't even remember what the book was named.)
Along came Discworld 2, the next year. I picked it up with the same fervor as the first, the results were largely similar, although less dramatic - Just an expansion of my vocabulary.
then, I discovered some Encyclopedia or another on CD (A set of 4 discs), that conveniently enough, had links inside articles to other articles in the encyclopedia. You know how you've spent many, many hours on Wikipedia, going to an article, then going to another article through a link in that article and so on? Don't lie - I know you do it, everyone does it, and I was doing it on CD, back in 97 or so, when I was 11 and 12 (And continue doing it today, Damn Wikipedia). A few years later, everyone's then-favorite Internet Addiction came out: EverQuest.
8 years old, playing Everquest. You might shudder at the thought (I do too, I can only imagine how awful I was at playing the game since it took me quite awhile to get my head around the number-crunching in the game for stats, DPS, etc, as well as the game economy), but it was key to the continuing advance of my English (Although if somebody tried that nowadays in WoW, they'd just turn into retards, I bet). Thanks to being exposed to constant talking in relatively proper English (Save for 'Ding!' and 'PHAT LOOT!'), as well as the sheer walls of text that every quest NPC had to throw at you, my English abilities continued to march on forward (And in time, my grades began to trickle downward. Damn EverCrack.)
I'll make no claims that something like this would work today, judging by how stupid most games have become, and how online gaming has been mostly taken over by l33t d00ds wh0 t@|k l31k th1s (wtf dood haxor), or idiots who simply don't know English (GET IN TANK TURRENT OR WE LOOSE GAME!), but I was largely raised by my computer, and I like to think that my English isn't all that bad, considering it's my second language, and I thank Computer-based sources and games for a very large part of my knowledge.
>>5 Truth.