It used to be my kids couldn’t beat the video games I like to play: they didn’t have the perseverance or downright sneakiness. But today, for the first time, my nine-year-old beat a boss I’d completely given up on. When I was playing this game, a year or so ago, I’d once fought this boss for about twenty minutes straight and probably could have gone on fighting it indefinitely. It was a stalemate. The boss couldn’t kill me and I was simply not quite fast enough to kill it.

Youthful speed has dethroned mature sneakiness. Sigh.

I’m reminded of something my four-year-old said to me the other day. “Let’s play a game. The person who goes first wins. I go first.”