I’d never held a video-game controller until last fall. Which is
a pretty sad admission, as if I’d said in 1966 that I’d never
watched “Bonanza” or heard a song by the Rolling Stones. My
sixteen-year-old son and his friends—his male friends, that is,
all of them polite, funny, good-hearted kids—play video games
just about every day. They don’t watch much TV; they don’t have
time. Most of the games they play are on the Xbox 360
console—not the Wii or the PlayStation 3—and most involve
killing and dying. The big one for the first half of last year
was Nazi Zombies, a mini-game included with the best-selling
Call of Duty: World at War. In it, you and your friends, linked
by audio headsets, hide out in a ruined building, and yellow-
eyeballed zombies in Nazi uniforms lurch toward you mumbling and
waving their arms and trying to eat your head. You have to shoot
them or stab them or set them on fire, and they never stop
coming. If they swarm you, you call out, “Dude, they’re on me!”
and a friend struggles over to sa