What’s up with video games?

When I was growing up, until I got to high school and discovered the internet, sci-fi television, and advanced placement classes, I read an average of 6 books a week. That was pretty much all I did with my life. I wasn’t social. I also wasn’t very physically active; the only sport I played for any extended length of time was bowling. Frequent knee injuries and extended asthma problems, as well as time constraints, have discouraged me from being active in recent years. I am “overweight.”

My younger brother plays video games for several hours a day. He also plays sports for most of the year and frequently works out at the gym. He is “obese.”

The trap is, of course, “if you didn’t sit around playing video games all day, you wouldn’t be obese,” and I have even found myself falling into it. But what is the difference between me being sedentary and reading for most of my childhood, and him being sedentary playing video games for part of his time, and being a lot more active than I ever was for the rest of it? I’ve never experienced it personally, so I don’t know if there’s a stigma against fat people who sit around reading (“obviously that’s what makes them fat”) like there is against fat people who dare to spend some time in front of the television or Xbox. But it seems more like an intellectual prejudice than anything.