Facebook CEO, Mark Zuckerberg held his sixth 'Town Hall' meeting last night - these are open Q&A session with an audience which are live-streamed.
Speaking on his 31st birthday, the man behind the world's biggest social network highlighted the importance of video games in his own development as a programmer.
These tend to be cosy/folksy affairs, and his comments on video games began with an anecdote from his childhood, and the snowy winters he went through in upstate New York.
Mark loved snowball fights, but his sisters were less keen on them and rarely played along, so he started building his own snowball video game.
"Then, everybody was happy. It was a terrible game, but I got to play a game, and my sisters got to not get hit by snowballs."
He went on to disagree with the idea that children playing video games is a bad thing, saying "I think this is how a lot of kids get into programming [...] I definitely would not have gotten into programming if I had not played games as a kid."
The Facebook boss added that video games could encourage diversity in the tech world - female, black, and Latin programmers are still underrepresented in the workplace.
He says that video games open up avenues to get young people from different backgrounds interested in technology, and inspire them to start teaching themselves how to program - adding that many of the best programmers that he encounters are self-taught.
An Oxford University study published in August of last year found that children who play a small amount of video games - less than an hour - every day were among the happiest and most sociable children. This is compared to children who don't play games, or those who play for more than three hours a day.
The study also found no major positive or negative effects for children who spent a moderate amount of time - up to three hours a day - playing games. The participants who spent more than half of their daily free time playing games were not as well adjusted, and could potentially miss out "on other enriching activities".
