Okay wait a second is this the same Jorge Garcia from "Lost"? given all the ways "Lost" is mentioned in quotes here I am wondering. The actor was born in 1973 though, which makes him 36 not 30. Besides this doesn't quite jibe from what little I've read.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jorge_Garcia
At any rate, my thoughts on reading this are more or less along the lines of "BS" to an extent. I will say that there are some addictive components to video games, and indeed I believe this is one of the problems with the gaiming industry and how it's turned out because it has been able to deal with gamers more like junkies on some levels than consumers. The bottom line being that it's very powerful escapism, irregardless of the nature of the game.
People seek escapism to get away from an existance they aren't happy with, and honestly that includes a massive amount of the population. Jorge is very much a fellow member of "The Lost Generation" (ie Gen X) and as such a member of the group being boned by society in general.
In general "Quake 2" did not cause him to fail in school. Rather he fell prey to a common occurance in college of people deciding they basically aren't happy with where things are going, feel it's all pointless despite the hype, and focus on other things at the expense of school. The collegiate "super slacker" is a stereotype that has been around forever, if it wasn't a video game (Gen X geek fodder) it could have been anything from goofing off to friends, to non-sanctioned sports, to drugs, to just partying life away. In the end if "Quake" wasn't there something else would have been, video games can't really "snare" you that way unless your looking for escapism, which increasing numbers of people are.
I would point out that "Gen X and education" has been an issue for a very long time, people complain about flagging scores and such (with mixed truth behind it) but in the end it occurs because most Gen-Xers eventually realized they are doomed. College degrees having long since become fairly meaningless since they don't even open doors at the moment. Simply put the jobs and oppertunities they "prepare you for" simply do not exist, and succeeding is as much about dumb luck and who you knowm, than any kind of education contrary to what you might hear. Heck in high school a lot of people realize pretty quick that if they aren't picked out as a genius or super-athlete they are pretty much doomed for a lifelong rut IF they can even find a rut to sit in. Things WILL change for Generation Y a bit as the Baby Boomers will finally be dead despite all the medical science keeping them going, but Generation X is pretty much "lost" and was known to be before it was even born. We're the 30 year old basement dweller generation due to people not listening to sociologists and embracing things like zero population growth when they had a chance.
To put things in another way, having a Bachelor's degree probably wouldn't have changed anything as far as your life went, despite what you might thing retroactively. I know people who have bloody masters degrees who are forced to work retail. Starting a job while in college "to help pay the bills while I finish my degree, then I'll be going places" and in the end that promising degree became a multi-hundred thousand dollar wall hanging.
When it came to Gen X it pretty much comes down to there being no really good reason why if your can (and your not on the street) you shouldn't sit there and dull the bloody pain of existance. There is a reason why we're all stereotypically goth, emo, and bloody depressed, with the music of our generation in most cases having the general theme of "life sucks, nothing matters" because in the end that's what it is for us. Heck even that same music is drowned out in a practice sense by stuff from the 1960s and 1970s because the Baby Boomers still have all the money and jobs and are the primary target for marketing... even now with Gen-Y slowly on it's way with a more optimistic outlook we're still pretty much choked with "oldies" channels for that reason.
Plus I'll be totally blunt, whether your the guy from Lost, or just had a change of fortune with the family you mentioned and such, the big deal is that you were lucky enough to get a chance to turn things around, and when your life became worth living you gave up the escapism. Basically you were lucky and got a chance that many people in this generation will not ever have, and you grabbed it. Chances are Quake 2 kept you alive and sane, and gave you something to grab onto until those oppertunities appeared.
But also understand, I'm a bitter disabled A$$ hole in addition to everything else, so what I think should be taken with a grain of salt (I'm at least fair enough to point that out in various messages). That's still what I think though, and honestly there are plenty of academics that would agree with me, and who saw this coming before it even happened.
I probably would have been scr@wed anyway for reasons I won't go into yet again, but the bottom line I did quite a bit of looking into why everything blows chips at one time, especially when a bit of it was mentioned when I was in school. Today I've pretty much
came to the conclusion that Gen X are basically the victims of a sociological holocaust caused by the stupidity of our grandparents who screamed "whew! baby boom, let's all go screw and hav kids!" despite being told it was idiotic, and those kids, our parents (the baby boomers) preferring to see the coming problems as someone else's job to deal with and seemingly doing everything they could to make the world as annoying as humanly possible when we got here.
