Do you have any idea of all the fascinating and influential world events that happened over winter break, the things historians will be talking about millennia from now? Me neither because I got a Nintendo Wii.

Everybody starts break with the greatest of aspirations. “I’m going to apply for summer jobs,” you tell yourself, “and clean my room and read all those books I’ve purchased and lose 75 pounds and write my memoirs and make enough money shoveling snow to buy myself a seat in the U.S. Senate.” (Roland Burris did 475,000 driveways.)

But ultimately, during all that time off from school, your greatest achievement was having the self-restraint to make that family size bag of Cheetos last two whole days.

So it was with my new Wii and me, which I have played nonstop since the end of December. This was not my intention. I bought the system with my girlfriend as a mutual Hanukkah present to ourselves, and to prove that I really meant it to be for both of us, I told her we would keep it in her apartment.

And we did, for a few hours, until I disassembled it and brought it home for pretty much the rest of break.

For those of you who have never played the Wii, it is very different from other systems in that its controller is motion sensitive and can be aimed at the screen like a pointer. Pointing and moving is way easier to figure out than the controls of the other major video game systems on the market.

My friend Jason has an Xbox 360, and I’ve tried to use the controller, but there are hundreds of buttons, maybe thousands, each identified by a different color. “No, you idiot!” Jason will tell me. “You hit beige, but you were supposed to hit taupe!”

Most Wii games only use the motion-sensitive controller and two buttons, called “A” and “B.” I can handle this. In my day, two buttons was all we needed. My old Nintendo Entertainment System, which I received for my seventh birthday in 1934, had only two buttons, and we were grateful to have that many. The even older Atari 5200 had a joystick with a single button, and the system that predated that one, the Sega Going Outside And Actually Getting Some Exercise, had no buttons at all.

So we can see that video gaming technology has come a long way in the past few decades, which is why I’ve spent most of my Wii time playing a game that was available for the NES as far back as 1990: Dr. Mario. It is a very complicated game related to health care and requires technical medical know-how. What you do is align red, yellow and blue pills in such a way as to kill red, yellow and blue viruses, who look like little cartoon blobs and dance in a circle under a magnifying glass on the bottom of the screen.

I don’t expect you non-science types to understand. This is very similar to how Dr. Jonas Salk discovered the polio vaccine, though of course in those days there were fewer buttons.

The other game I’ve been playing is Mario Kart, in which you race around in go-karts as Nintendo characters such as Mario the Plumber, Toadstool the Toadstool, Donkey the Kong, and Koopa the Licensed Trademark.

The object of the game is to drive your character around a track three times, and to race the fastest you have to shoot shells and bombs at the other racers and activate squids who ink the other drivers’ field of vision, and if you become the bullet, it drives through the level for you. It’s very complicated and a lot of fun, although you can’t describe it to someone who’s never played without sounding like a three year old.

But I don’t want to make it seem like I didn’t get anything done over break. I beat level 26 of Dr. Mario, for example.

Also I made some money playing poker. Rahm Emanuel’s House seat is opening up, and I think it’s in my price range.

Scott is a third-year law student. He has a belly button.