Slacker by Gordon Korman

Cameron Boxer is obsessed with computer games.  He gets so engrossed playing online one day that he almost allows his home to burn down.  In response, his parents challenge him to join some kind of extracurricular group unrelated to gaming.  Cameron and his friends decide to create a fake service club at their school with themselves as its only members.  Their plan backfires when other people in the school, including the school counselor, get involved.

Korman has done a lot of these humorous school stories, several of which were better than this one.  The problem with this one is that Cameron's inevitable transformation doesn't come until the very end.  It is like productions of A Christmas Carol.  Mediocre productions have Scrooge stay about the same until he meets the Ghost of Christmas Future, and is scared into repentance.  The good productions show how Scrooge's heart is gradually changed during the course of the story as  relives the painful and pleasant realities of his own past and present. In this book, Korman shows Cameron's friends' gradual transformation but Cameron only turns away from his video game addiction when his friends desert him and he can't play any more.

I am actually being overly harsh.  It wasn't a bad book and I have had kids tell me that they really liked it.  It just wasn't nearly as good as Restart or The Unteachables.  (2016, 230 pages)