My older son was five when I first let him play an adventure-quest RPG on the computer. It was a pretty early version of Moria with virtually nothing in the way of graphics, just white words on a black screen and single ASCII characters for critters and environmental features. He was getting the hang of reading, and his reading skills took a huge leap up as he played this game. For a while it was all he could talk about.
A year later he read the entire 14-book Oz series and 7-book Narnia series, and I think he was as much motivated by his newfound love of fantasy adventures as by pleasure in using his reading muscles.
Even when it comes to computer games I am capable of being stubbornly retro: I think the games with minimal graphics are a much more exciting exercise for the imagination than those in which everything is detailed out visually so that the player is no longer a participant in the creative process.
I never did allow either of my sons to have a Nintendo, GameBoy, or any other dedicated game-playing device. Once they understood that I was firm in my position that we would not have one in the house, they quit asking. I don’t think either of them was scarred for life. Of course, once they were in their teens and had their own computers, I no longer controlled what games they had access to.