The subject of this profile is Max, an 11-year-old who plays hours of video games each day. Leland calls him “Game Boy.” It’s a compassionate but discerning look at contemporary childhood. The playfulness of the lead reminds us of Susan Orlean’s wonderful piece “The American Man at Age 10.” But the tone of Leland’s piece is a bit more serious than Orlean’s.
“Gaming to the Max” seeks to cover a complicated issue: the effect of video gaming on children. Leland weaves useful background on this topic into the piece. We appreciated especially the description of the effect of gaming on the brain. She returns to the brain in her lovely ending and rounds out one of the themes of the piece, the contrast between the aggressive content of video games and Max’s essentially innocent nature.
Throughout, Leland moves us effectively from scene to scene, over the span of a couple months. She says she visited Max on weekends, five times for a couple of hours each. Following him for longer than a day or two allowed for coverage of small but significant developments in the ongoing drama of his life.
To a greater degree than many newspaper pieces, Leland gets into Max’s world, uncovers his inner life. We would have liked even more of this, including more words from Max about what he likes so much about video games. Still, this is an engaging and useful piece.
