The 'Halo' effect returns. Xbox 360s are in overdrive.

Call it the Return of the Halo Effect. It's that short period – now in full throttle – after the release of "Halo 3," the most successful debut of a video game in history.

It's been a few years, but parents, teachers, and bystanding friends have seen this phenomenon before. "Halo" fanatics, with a $60 receipt and new game in hand, drop everything – homework, jobs, food, sleep – to sit for hours in the glow of the Xbox 360 to play, and maybe beat, the alien race.

At $170 million in sales in its first day in stores, "Halo 3" is a cultural behemoth that overshadows (in terms of dollars spent) the bestselling movie of all time ("Spider-Man 3," at $151 million over three days) and probably the last Harry Potter book (an estimated $166 million in the first day).

It's a staggering figure that reinforces a growing recognition, including among the Atari generation and researchers, of video games as a social experience rather than as a peculiar hobby or a distraction.

That may explain why parents would trek to the strip mall after midnight on Tuesday or after work on Wednesday to help their children be among the first to own "Halo 3."

Still, many offered some interesting rationales, with just a hint of defensiveness.

"This is like chess for the 21st century," argued Jeremiah Pick, a father in Berkeley, Calif. "Maybe there is a future for him in this," he said of his son.

One mother said indoor games are safer than roaming the neighborhood.

And a slightly balding father, standing next to his mop-haired son, exclaimed: "Oh, this isn't for him. This is for me!"

For Mary Phillips of Castro Valley, Calif., it's a window into her son's world. She scans the 50 youths lined up late Monday – some for seven hours or more, others scribbling out homework – waiting to be among the first to get the game. "I thought we'd make a family event of it, so that way I could see what it was all about," she says. "I see that it's an older group, [but] it looks like a good group of people."

Another mother sees video games as, in essence, today's neighborhood hangout.

"Thirty years ago you could run around a neighborhood at night. These days you can't let them out like that," says Connie Young of Oakland. "The neighborhood is no longer what is used to be as a source for friends."

Ms. Young likes the way games such as "Halo" allow for team play over the Internet or together in a room.

Her son Kevin says he has made friends he would never have made otherwise. He has traveled as far as the Czech Republic to play in professional "Halo 2" competitions. "You practice with your team on the weekends," he says, likening it to playing sports. "You go to dinner together, you party together, you get so accustomed to each other that you think in a unified way."

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