For decades now parents in India have been talking about video games like it's some exotic foreign disease that inflicts untold misery by attacking their kids.
"My little one got that video game today... Whole day god knows what thuchuk- thuchuk he does pressing those buttons..."
Of course many of these educated parents hand their 10year olds a copy of Grand Theft Auto 4 and then regard video games as the creation of satan, full of vice, gambling and prostitution.The point being, people just don't get it. Video games are no longer an idle past-time. Most require time, patience and an intelligent skill-set that most parents would be pleasantly surprised to find in their kids. Nobody stopped me solving crossword puzzles for hours on end... Why is playing through Tomb Raider any different? (Of course the crossword puzzles don't have a figure like Lara Croft unless you are into narrow, empty boxes...17 across... 12 down... Oooh yeah baby, that's the spot!)

I remember this one time an unsuspecting aunt graced us with her presence at a random time. I happened to be playing Prince of Persia: Two Thrones at that very moment. Unlike most people who play in some dark corner of the house on a spare TV, I love playing on the biggest TV available with full dolby surround sound. This left me playing Prince of Persia in the hall with the aunty in question forced to watch the screen in disgust. Now you must understand that Prince of Persia is no simple button masher. It's one of the toughest platformers out there that involves complex button sequences and impeccable timing. So there I was with my prince precariously perched 200 feet off the ground on a narrow pillar. Not the best of times to have a disapproving aunt staring at you as if you were something the cat might have brought in. She continued gawking at me in much the same way they must have gawked at Mahatma Gandhi when he randomly started milking goats in the British parliament (true story right?). She seemed hideously appalled by my unholy act of killing imaginary enemies and I have a suspicion she wouldn't have felt quite so scalded had I been pole dancing in the middle of the room. So eventually she managed to croak a sentence together.
"Is this all you do the whole day...?", she croaked.
It was college vacation time and essentially that WAS all I did the whole day. I told her so.
She leaned back with a triumphant I-know-where-this-is-going face and eventually started making a curious tut-tut-tut sound which caused me to mis-time my jump and fall 250 feet. I'm sure that added to her joy. A couple of years later when she found out that I did manage to graduate college she was very disappointed and has stopped visiting us since. Nobody mourned.

Another common video game peeve people have is with adults playing them. They believe video games should be played by snotty nosed kids only, no matter how many bikini clad homicidal maniacs the game might feature. It's astounding the number of parents who let their kids play mature rated games, it's almost as if they don't realize why that nice man and that nice woman are making the car shake so much. And then they cry blasphemy when they finally figure it out.

Video games, apparently also desensitize society and promote violence. If that were true, people should become terrorizing lunatics ready to burn down the world simply by watching the evening news.
As an adult serious gamer, I have to regularly listen to a lot of people trying to reform me. Sometimes they make me feel that I should stop gaming and take to smoking pot regularly since that would be a preferable vice to gaming.

On a final note, I'm damn lucky to have parents who are very cool with my gaming addiction. Or so they say.
Good enough for me.