Teenage boys would rather play sports video games than watch the real thing on television, The New York Times reports.

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"When you watch on TV, it's just boring," 12-year-old Dennis Rodriguez told the newspaper as he played "NBA Live" last week with friends. "I like the games better because you can do what you want to do. Like, I can make the player pass it or shoot it. But when you see it on TV, you're just watching."

The result has been a decline in television ratings for all sports in the last five years among males aged 12-34. During the same period, sales of sports video games have gone up 34 percent.

NBA Commissioner David Stern said that his biggest fear is a video game so realistic that actually watching live games would be superfluous. But he said there is an upside.

"The competition for eyeballs is so intense now that if our consumers are not consuming us on television, we would rather have them consuming us on a video game than doing something else."