Hi. I'm 14 years old.

It's embarrassing to admit, but like most pimply faced teens, I've gotten sucked in by the Grand Theft Auto video game. Yes, it's incredibly violent. No, I don't have the recent version where you can see boobs during a scene. And yes, I wouldn't let kids under the age of say, 15, play it. But it's a genius game. You actually feel like you're driving around the dark corners of a real city. You commit crimes because you play the role of a criminal --- morality is not an option in this game. And the game is pure cynicism --- you can change radio stations in the car you drive and all the stations that are not too far off cartoons of real radio stations complete with the phony mass marketing scripts and mass produced music. It even has a stupid talk radio station.

I've played this game for about three nights now. And I don't have any urges to commit a carjacking, beat a thug with a baseball bat or run from the police. But oddly enough, driving around in this fake video game is not far off from tooling around some of the less savory streets of East Dallas, complete with liquor stores, street people and the occasional random gunshot.