This is part of an essay I just wrote about children and video games :) Do you agree or disagree with the following statement? Playing computer games is a waste of time. Children should not be allowed to play them. Use specific reasons and examples to support your answer. Presently, technology offers a lot of different options for children to spend their free time. Computer games and video games in general are, perhaps, the most popular option of entertainment among the majority of kids and teenagers. While some people are totally against the idea of letting children play video games because it can create addictive behavior and also some games might contain high levels of violence, I strongly believe that gaming in computers is not a waste of time at all. On the contrary, they can be a good source for learning and developing important intellectual skills. I also consider that computer games can encourage children to be more curious about computers and the way computers work. I would elaborate on these two points in the following essay. First of all, almost all video games can stimulate children’s intelligence in one way or another. In order to complete certain games, kids may need to put into practice a broad range of intellectual and social skills such as critical thinking and persistence. If the game has some sort of multiplayer mode, kids would also need to make use of teamwork and communication abilities. Moreover, since lots of popular games are in English, players that speak another language could eventually need to learn new words in order to figure out what to do in the game. All these positive traits, reinforced in video games, can have a meaningful impact in other parts of children’s lives such as in School and in interacting with other kids. My own experience is a compelling example of this. When I was a kid, I remember that I used to spend a couple of hours a day playing Nintendo 64’s Zelda. At first, there were too many words I did not understand because English is not my native language. Therefore, I had to look for these words in the Spanish-English dictionary by myself to fully understand what I needed to do to pass all the missions. As a result, I acquired more knowledge in a second language, and the best part is that I was also having fun. That behavior taught me that I could figure things out by myself, and also helped me later in my English class in School since I could associate some terms in my textbook with those I had discovered playing Zelda.