Peter McKay

Last Monday night, I sat on the couch watching a football game on TV until 11:45. Then I got up, grabbed my keys, and drove to the local video game store to be in line to snatch a copy of "Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2," which was being released at midnight.

For those who live under a rock, or have a life, "Call of Duty" is a video game in which players pretend to be soldiers and run through a (virtual) war-torn landscape, shooting everything in sight. It features photo-realistic depictions of American cities. Not that any of the players would know the difference, because most of the guys who play the game never actually go outside in real life. Or run, for that matter.

I haven't played a video game since Pac-Man in college, but I was there as an (actual) matter of survival. My 15-year-old son had preordered the game and had been obsessing about getting his copy. He'd been bugging me for the past week to let him stay up the night of the release date, get the game at midnight, play till dawn and then skip school the next day. I refused to let him do it, even when he told me that "all" his friends were planning to do the same thing. (As far as I know, only one lunkhead actually did that. He knows who he is.)

I wasn't going to let my son skip any educational time to sign up for a pretend tour in a virtual army, but I did desperately want him to stop talking about the game. I figured the best way to end this Chinese water torture was to get the game myself. That's how I found myself in a long line of nerds, a middle-aged, sleepy father in a sea of overgrown gamers. Right behind me was the only other real adult, another dad who clearly wanted to get through the line.

I looked up and down the line of eager slackers (an oxymoron if I ever heard one) and noticed that they all looked like they'd come off the same assembly line: Ninety percent of them were in their early 20s, wearing black T-shirts and sporting pot bellies and soul patches.

Just as disturbing, they all looked like they still lived at home in Mom and Dad's basement, eating Cheetos and drinking beer.

I struck up a conversation with the pot-bellied, soul patch-sporting dude in front of me and confirmed my hunch. He was obviously a legal, if not factual, adult. His parents were cool, he said, and didn't care how late he played, as long as he kept the volume down. In the basement.

I'm not sure when I crossed that magical line from exuberant youth into crabby adulthood, but it hit me: If you're old enough to grow a soul patch, or a pot belly for that matter, you're too old to still be living at home playing video games in Mom and Dad's basement. I had to resist the urge to smack him on the back of the head. As a matter of fact, I had an urge to run up and down the entire line, smacking all of them on the head.

My own father felt very strongly that when I reached the age of 18, it was the time to either join the Army, get a job or go to college. Options one and two were pretty scary, so I went to the first college that said yes. I'm pretty sure if I had hung around their house into my early 20s, Pop would have marched down the steps into the cellar with a real Army recruiter in tow.

As we stood in line counting down the minutes until midnight, one Peter Pan on a skateboard went back and forth across the parking lot, endlessly jumping over a concrete parking bumper. He didn't seem to be there to purchase a game. He just went back and forth, back and forth, showing off at midnight. I heard a voice behind me.

"Is it just me?" the other dad said under his breath. "I keep praying that he'll fall off that stupid thing."

I nodded. I sighed as I looked up and down the line of virtual warriors, waiting anxiously for a chance to run home and scurry into their parents' cellars — not to emerge until they'd either blown up the entire world … or ran out of Cheetos.

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