When Lara Wechsler was a teenager, she used to spend hours gabbing with her friends on the phone. Now, she sees her 14-year-old son Shane doing the same thing—only instead of a phone, he is chatting through a videogame machine.
“I like that he’s always talking to someone rather than playing on his own,” said Ms. Wechsler, a 50-year-old court reporter in Brooklyn, N.Y., whose ninth-grader uses a headset to chat with gamers about school and sports while racking up kills.
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