An app appears to teach me about life and much more

The laptop was three generations behind the times. It was clunky, the operating system froze up twice a day like clockwork and there was no Internet connection - thanks to the broken modem.

Basically, all it was good for was word processing or in other words, the perfect computer for a teenage boy. Or should I say, the parents of a teenage boy.

Until we finally gave in when he turned 17, our home was video game free. After that, he camped down in the basement where the X-Box was plugged in, its sweet siren call of blasting zombies, slam dunking on Kobe and canoodling with fleshy fuchsia skinned elves on the planet Azeroth sung out to him 24/7.

As a well meaning and caring mother, I envisioned bonding moments, with the two of us in hand-to-hand combat against the Nazi blitzkrieg in Call of Duty. Unfortunately, after 10 minutes of all-too realistic motion graphics, my body was fighting a battle of its own - to keep my lunch down.

My experience with video games pretty much ended there. I'm from the generation of ball point pens, snail mail and face-to-face conversations, where we use our lips not thumbs to communicate. Flinging angry birds and slicing watermelons onscreen doesn't interest me; I'd almost rather watch paint dry - that is until I came across the online app Draw Something.

It's a simple game where one player draws a word and the other tries to guess it. The only thing that separates it from a party game is that the other player is online, anonymous and in another part of the country or even the world. Its wily developers have captured me in its time-sucking vortex of finger paint.

For latent artists, wannabe code breakers, and right brain applicators, it's close to nirvana, an endless supply of doodleography. After multiple all-night benders, I went from eking out primitive stick figures in primary reds, blues and yellows to a multi-color palette of dabs and swooshes worthy of a drugstore paint-by-numbers set.

When I was a kid, I had a pen pal in North Carolina, United States. The letters were polite summaries of what we did, which sibling was the most pain that week and what candy was worth spending my allowance on.

Most of the time questions asked went unanswered with the interval of letters going from two weeks to two months. Still, there was a unique connection with someone out there you knew only by the written word.

Draw Something provides players the option of complimenting, lamenting or in the case of trolls - insulting your game skills. Although the game is far from cerebral, within a few turns, players' characteristics are exposed quicker than a game of five-card stud.

Impatient? A few slashes of black. Artistic? A drawing worthy of the refrigerator. Unimaginative? The hardest drawings to guess right.

Surprisingly, something that shows up in the online community that you rarely confront head-on in the physical world is blatant cheating.

Maybe it's similar to the transformation that takes place when you slide inside the driver's seat.

While most of us would never flip the finger to the little granny standing in line next to us, it's an automatic response when she cuts us off at the stoplight. Under the cloak of anonymity, bad behavior needs no apologies.

As an observer of human behavior, Draw Something reveals complex layers of the individual thought process, reasoning, knowledge and execution. At least that's what I rationalize to myself after playing through the sixth hour. Until my husband told me to draw a word he was thinking of - INTERVENTION.