Son: "Yu-gi and Kaiba were battling these two rare hunters called Lumis and Umbra, writes Breda O'Brien.
It was really cool because Lumis summoned Des Guardias but since Yu-gi wasn't allowed to sacrifice for powerful monsters, he had to fuse his Alpha, Beta and Gamma Magnet warriors to get a really powerful Magnet Knight monster. He attacked and destroyed Des Guardias, but there were three masks left behind which took control of Yu-gi's Magnet Knight Monster."
Mother, for whom a Kurdish dialect would be more intelligible: "That's nice, dear."
Conversations like these are taking place all over the country, anywhere there are children, or more accurately, boys, with calloused thumbs or square eyes. Even to mention Yu-gi-oh! is to cause some parents to grind their teeth in anger, because the card decks are so wildly overpriced and the pestering to buy them is so relentless.
Any adult who has, with heroic fortitude, sat through an episode of Yu-gi-oh!, or its milder distant cousin, Pokémon, emerges baffled. What is the charm of these oddly drawn characters, their endless battles and their impenetrable utterances? Well, Prof Henry Jenkins of MIT has a theory.
He believes that children are drawn instinctively to computer games and the accompanying paraphernalia because they offer entry to a world with complex rules that is satisfyingly complete, and yet mysterious.
Harry Potter or The Lord of the Rings functions in a similar way. It is a world that in many cases is impenetrable to adults, although there are more adults willing to enter the world of Harry Potter and Tolkien than there are who would willingly become Yu-gi-oh! fans. Jenkins's theory is that Yu-gi-oh! and the like are a form of story-telling, not with logical plot-lines, character development and predictable outcomes, but instead with multi-faceted universes which can be entered into in a variety of ways and explored at will. The Lord of the Rings and Harry Potter are part of a more recognisable story-telling tradition.
However, there is immense effort put into building up the taste and texture of the worlds inhabited by Frodo and Harry, especially in Tolkien's case. J.K. Rowling is writing with one eye on a screen adaptation, so her writing is flatter. But to our children, flat is not bad. Flat allows the child to fill in the missing dimensions, to become immersed.
When I read Jenkins, a lot of things made sense, such as why my intelligent nine-year-old is willing to spend hours playing a game called Spyro, which to these adult eyes involves pointless and ceaseless wandering from one level to the next. From Jenkins's perspective, such game-playing is not about traditional plot and narrative, but an opportunity to explore the texture of a different world. In his view, children are not so much addicted as absorbed in testing their skills against what in the gaming world are called bosses, and against challenges on different levels.
Jenkins makes stimulating connections between traditional children's play and what today's kids get from Yu-gi-oh! and computer games. These new, virtual worlds are almost adult-free, because most adults over 35 would not even know how to turn on a Gameboy.
Better still, in Jenkins's arresting phrase, they provide "complete freedom of movement", a world in which to explore the limits of one's ability. It may be scary at times but is ultimately safe because it can be turned off.
Jenkins compares it to the "wild spaces" of his youth, in urban Atlanta, where there were "vacant lots, construction sites, sloping streets and a neighbouring farm". He was free to roam there, far from adult supervision, and to create his own world. But then he declares that his son never had a backyard, having grown up in apartments all his life.
However, Jenkins says: "He did have video games which took him across lakes of fire, through cities in the clouds, along dark and gloomy back streets, and into dazzling neon-lit Asian marketplaces."
For his son, video games were a virtual "playing space" which took him beyond "the often drab, predictable and overly-familiar spaces" of his everyday life. As he points out, social reformers who say that children are playing these games instead of playing outside forget that for many children playing outside is not an option.
That is true of urban America, but it is becoming equally true of urban Ireland. In the solid, trouble-free working-class estate in which I live, I still panic if my daughter wanders up to the green at the top of our road.
God bless the local authorities that allocated long gardens which allow our children to escape from us into the rickety shed which has become their "base", but many kids are not so lucky. By the way, Jenkins is not sanguine about the worlds in which our children choose to immerse themselves.
The crucial difference between the "complete freedom of movement" which he experienced as a child, and what our children experience today, was that the landscape was his to shape imaginatively as he pleased.
The worlds that our children enter are shaped by commercial enterprises, whose aim is to part children and their parents from their money. Some of the worlds are benign, like the gentle world of Ash and Pikachu. Some of the worlds are violent and misogynistic.
If the makers of Yu-gi-oh! and Pokémon were not so greedy, I would almost be a fan myself. The accompanying card games are complex and develop skills and memory. In Ireland, we have been spared the excesses surrounding the trading of cards, and instead they help kids to negotiate, to master the skills of bargaining and even occasionally to be generous.
We adults need not worry when children escape into these worlds, as we all gratefully escaped from the world of adults, paradoxically doing so in order to learn how to negotiate the adult world through play. We need to worry when these and other darker worlds are the only ones our children want to live in, because the real world we have built for them is so confined and unsafe.