Video games are among the media children and teenagers use often today (Behrens & Kutteroff, 2008a, 2008b) and thus are an important application of ICT in every day life. Unfortunately, most of the research is focused on violence from a cause-and-effect-chain perspective. This research does not consider the complexity of the relations between persons, society and media. But the relations have to be taken into account to understand the meaning of video games for children and teenagers as well as the impact of video games on ICT in education and training. Broader and more appropiate perspectives have been taken by research that is identifided as "game studies". In games studies, approaches like the ludological, the narratological, the philosophical, and the cultural approach as well as an understanding of video games as art have been developed. Most of these studies focus on understanding and analysing the game itself or the impact of video games on children and teenagers, but hardly consider the socio-ecological context. The paper at hand suggests to broaden these perspectives. Not only the prospect from the medium to persons, but also the prospect from persons to media is relevant. Therefore, the media-ecology theory is applied here. In media-ecology theory, two approaches have to be distinguished. The first approach draws back to the Toronto School and focuses the determination of society by media (Strate, 1999). The second approach draws back to Bronfenbrenner (1981) and considers the interdependency between people's every day life and media (Zacharias, 2000). Seen from our media theory, that defines media as the relations between persons, signs and material substance (Swertz, 2007), the later one is a more appropiate approach to analyse the role video games play in the life of children and teenagers. Based on these theories the thesis of this paper is, that video games do not just influence youth culture, but are chosen and used by children and teenagers according to the media-ecological culture they live in. While doing so, children and teenagers integrate video games into their media ecological context, that is: their every day life. According to this thesis it's not just the fascination of video games that ties children and teenagers to the screen, but their daily life with their families and their friends influences the way they choose and use video games. Thus, the perspective here is changed from the game to the user.

From this perspective we investigated the media ecological center zone (family, home) and the media ecological proximity zone (friends, peers) in two pilot studies. In a first study 840 teenagers between 11 and 18 (representative quota sample) have been interviewed. In a second study 1050 parents of children (5-10 years old) from 6 primary schools have been interviewed. Results show, that for children the center zone is most important. The correlation between parent's media habits and children's video game usage in our sample was quite high (r=0,55, ***). For teenagers, the center zone is not as important and correlations are not relevant. Here, the influence of the proximity zone is higher. We found relevant correlations between video game preferences and youth cultures (r=0,35, **).

This results show that our approach might contribute to the understanding of the media habits of children and teenagers. With the restraints, that apply to pilot studies, it can be conluded, that children and teenagers use video games according to their everyday life. Our results show, that not only video games shape the life of children and teenagers, but that the every day life of children and teenagers shape their use of video games.