For the past few years, it has been fashionable to blame some of society’s problems on video games. First, it was teenage violence, now it’s un-creativity. There are some, like Pat Walsh, an English teacher at T.C. Williams High School for over 30 years, who see video games draining our generation of its creative talent. The topic disturbed him enough to write a piece for The Washington Post on it. The question is, do they? I’ll admit I’m a pretty hardcore gamer. I’ve spent countless hours burning my eyes on a CRT screen, gaming until my hands no longer function. But I’d hardly say my gaming has sucked my creativity dry.

I write, make films, mix CDs, and read voraciously as much as I game. Previously, video games have sometimes interfered with my studies, but there are always days where you’d rather nail your hand to a desk than go to school. I’ve skipped a few classes to beat people down in Halo, and have spent many sleepless nights gaming with my friends.

Playing video games isn’t about the violence, or the myth that gamers enjoy being alone. And it’s not like only geeks play them, 90% of boys and 40% of girls these days plays video games, according to PBS. We play games because they bring us closer, they teach us about things in ourselves we didn’t know, they drop us into a world so vivid and so alive we fall in love.

I have a friend in Canada studying Classics, who plays more video games than anyone I know. Yet he also is in the middle of writing a fourteen book series based on ideas he got while playing video games. So far he’s done with one, and is working on the second. I also find ideas for stories while playing games.

Also, many critics argue that because video games provide no “real life skills,” there is no point to them. The same argument could be applied to books. Some books do enhance “real life skills”, but most are fiction, or merely intellectually enriching. Yet the written word has become a sacred institution, founded on the stories and worlds created in books.

We’re not losing our creativity to video games. We’re just as creative, but sometimes we’d rather play games than read. Books use words to tell a narrative, while games use images. Some of the best games draw from literature, history and anthropology, to create vivid, new stories for the next generation. And although a part of the entertainment business, the video game industry is also striving to make video games into works of art, much in the way that film evolved from a business into an art.

We need to see video games, not only as a form of entertainment, but also as a new form of media and art, and even as a profession. Recently, there have been a few professional video gaming leagues established, the Association of Gaming Professionals (AGP, www.theagp.com) being one such league. With more and more attention going to video games, the future looks bright. Not to mention creative.