According to market research firm NPD Group, "U.S. sales of video game hardware, software and accessories rose 23 percent in the first quarter of 2005 to more than $2.2 billion."

..."The $10 billion U.S. video game industry is roughly on par with the domestic movie box office in terms of sales."

(Source:  "Video Game Sales Up 23 Percent," Reuters, April 25, 2005; http://www.reuters.com/newsArticle.jhtml?type=technologyNews&storyID=8284666&src=rss/technologyNews.)

"There are those who honor God by renouncing worldly things, and then there are those to whom the world itself, in all its aspects, is a battleground on which they are unwilling to cede any territory to God's opponents -- even the corrupt, disreputable, seemingly unsalvageable territory of the interactive-entertainment business. An evangelical Christian who talks about the demonization of video games is not necessarily employing a metaphor. In a scenario right out of a game itself, in a landscape where all hope of redemption seemed abandoned long ago, the soldiers of God are amassing.

...'It's amazing,' Bill Bean adds, 'that you can have anything to do with the occult or any type of witchcraft or whatever in games, and that's cool,' he told me. 'But if you bring a cross in it and you say, "Christian," then immediately it's no. It seems that there's a spiritual battle out there. The occult is part of Satan's network. And a lot of games today put all of the occult in an extremely positive light. It really seems that the area of games isn't Christ's territory. It's Satan's backyard. And we're trying to take some of that territory back."

(Source:  Jonathan Dee, "PlayStations of the Cross," The New York Times Magazine, May 1, 2005; http://www.nytimes.com/2005/05/01/magazine/01GAMES.html?th&emc=th.)

The teens who spend a lot of time with peers doing nothing in particular are the teens most likely to demand the attention of the police. When the relationship between "unstructured socializing" and juvenile delinquency recently came into scrutiny in a study published in Criminology, researchers gave public officials good reason to worry about teens who kill time by hanging out. But they also gave those officials reason to suspect that teens who congregate with no constructive aim in view can only grow more numerous when family life disintegrates.

Conducted by scholars at Pennsylvania State University and the University of Nebraska at Omaha, the new study of juvenile delinquency is based on data collected from 4358 eighth-grade students in ten cities. From those data, the researchers adduce "strong evidence" that "unstructured socializing" fosters teen criminality. Regardless of whether they are looking at individual behavior or at social context, regardless of which statistical model they employ, the researchers limn "a strong association between mean levels of unstructured socializing and delinquency" (p < 0.05 in all contexts and models).

And who are the teens who hang out with peers and get themselves into trouble?  The researchers' initial statistical analysis shows that "the amount of time spent in unstructured socializing with peers was higher among males, older students and students who did not live with two parents."  Gender and age ceased to predict unstructured socializing in a second and more sophisticated statistical model.  But living with a solo parent predicted unstructured socializing in both statistical models (p < 0.05 in both models). 

Apparently, it is the teens without fathers who are most likely to drift into aimless groups - and then to start looking for illicit excitement.