Even a cursory glance at the droves of youngsters playing at the computers for sale at large department stores indicates that children and adolescents are attracted to computer games and other electronic media products. Surveys confirm this impression and add that the use of computers and computer games has rapidly increased over the last few years. We have evidence for the unprecedented historical trend that computer ownership-in a representative sample of German households with school-age children-doubled between 1990 and 1999 (Feierabend & Klingler, 1999) and increased in the 2 years between 2000 and 2002 by another 10% . By now 81% of the households with 12-and 13-year-olds own a computer in Germany, and 23% of these youngsters are able to work and play on a computer of their own (Feierabend & Klingler 2003). Figures from a representative sample of 8-to-13-year-olds from the United States are about the same and are related to community income (Roberts, Foehr, Rideout, & Brodie 1999; Subrahmanyam, Kraut, Greenfield, & Gross 2001). Computers are mostly used for playing computer games, in Germany as well as in the United States.1 By middle childhood, playing computer and video games has become one of the favorite leisure-time activities for boys and (less so) for girls in Western industrialized countries (Feierabend & Klingler 2003; Subrahmanyam et al., 2001).