I've been fighting on how to tell this story.
From an early age my son had issues with screens, a tv, computer monitor, phone, it would always immediately draw his attention to the exclusion of all else. Initially, we'd considered it normal, fast movement on the screen draws a babies eyes. As he grew older, the behavior did not change, a screen would always get his attention. As a curiosity, I sat him down in my lap, at three years old, and set him into the City of Heroes character creation screen. He'd used the computer mouse before, letting him draw with paint. I thought to give him something more to do than just squiggly lines on a screen. It took awhile, but after about three hours of him playing with the editor, he'd created himself his own character. I'd figured that would be enough, but he wanted to actually play the rather garishly colored egyptian god with john lennon glasses. For him, he could move around using the arrow keys, while I controlled the powers, but it was a start.
For those unaware, a child with Attention Deficit/Hyperactivity Disorder have a problem of dopamine fall-off in the brain. The longer an activity takes to feed a reward, the more this drops off. The brain, needing this chemical to function, seeks something to fulfill this reward, hence the difficulty in paying attention. A tv or computer screen gives rapid, almost immediate rewards, keeping these levels at their proper levels. Without any of us realizing it, my son was self-medicating himself through the computer.
By the time my son was diagnosed, it led us to a new realization. By the age of 5, his playing City of Heroes, and his asking me to read him every mission text, every plaque, had helped him to learn how to read above his age level. His working on enhancements and min-maxing gave him immediate rewards for math comprehension. His memory improved when he dived into Inventions and later Architect Entertainment as he sought to make his characters better. We bought him packs when he did his chores without issue. City of Heroes gave us a tool to help a child who otherwise would have struggled to stay at grade level, to instead surpass it. He even worked for and earned his own computer, a little netbook which we made sure would run CoH for him.
He is now 10, and reading at an adults level. He is in his school districts advanced learning program, at a special gifted student school. This year they begin orchestra, which of course has us figuring out where to purchase the right student Cello for him. We tried other games for him, but none gave him the outlet and immediate rewards which City of Heroes did, so all became objects of boredom over time. Not the WoW, not the EQ, not DR, not CO, not SWG, none of them kept his focus and attention to the extent which City of Heroes did.
