Gaming parents with gaming children?

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Lagrangian
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Found this article on Cracked about a guy who is a gamer and has children that game as well. It created an interesting situation (and I'm sure it continues to).
I was just wondering if anyone else around here is in that sort of situation, and have you had the same sort of experiences that he has, or were yours markedly different?

I am not in this category.
 

atombaby

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Being that my children are too young to be playing video games right now, I can't really say. But I am looking forward to watching them play my old Final Fantasy games once they are old enough! I think this "video gaming" family concept is a relatively new phenomenon. Arcades and all that have been around for a while, but imagine playing these new online games ... with your parents?? Whatever brings the family closer is fine by me, as long as it's not overdone and real life is neglected.
 

Goldenleaves

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Right ... there. No, there. No, wait -
Umm - no, but my daughter and son in law are gamers and expecting a child soon.

I await the gaming future with interest (never took to games myself - of any kind).

I see no reason to keep things from children though. Ignorance and innocence are two entirely different things. Sexual activity, crime and killing does happen. You're safer if you're aware of it.

I've never even understood why everyone insists on lying to children by claiming there's such a thing as Santa.

Sweet lie - or way to make sure your child has no reason to trust your word for things?

The gamers think it's a sweet lie.

They'll have to keep the child well away from me.
 
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Jakman217

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I remember hearing a funny thing. A friend of mine plays games, what exactly I'm not sure, but oddly enough her mom is a massive WOW fan. I think she has a level forty or fifty wizard, or whatever their called. While they don't play together as far as I know they still game.
 

Jessianodel

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My parents game more than me so we're definitely a gaming family. My mom used to be a WoW junkie but has switched to Rift. My dad still plays WoW when he has the time. I think my mom's gotten him on Rift too. My mom loves the 3DS mainly because she can play Zelda on it. She likes final fantasy and fable too I think. My older brother plays a helluva lot of Xbox games from CoD to Assassin's Creed. My little brother plays Halo and most of the games my older bro plays on Xbox but also plays WoW, Roblox and random RPGs he finds online. I'm the abnormal one in the family because I only play WoW sometimes. Although I love Assassin's Creed and L.A. Noir, I just really suck at controls so I'd fail miserably.
 

Jessianodel

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I remember hearing a funny thing. A friend of mine plays games, what exactly I'm not sure, but oddly enough her mom is a massive WOW fan. I think she has a level forty or fifty wizard, or whatever their called. While they don't play together as far as I know they still game.

Only fifty? lol noob ;)
 

Bracken

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I game, my son games, but we don't play the same games.
My son and my husband (his stepdad) play some of the same games.
 

jennontheisland

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I remember my mom and uncle sending my brother and I to bed early so they could have the Atari to play PacMan, so I guess that makes me the kid of a gamer?

I'm very much a casual gamer (yup, deal with it, I am) and I play with my kid. But we don't play FPSs yet. He's more into the worldbuilding games and abstract ones. We've done Portal, and bits of King's Quest, a few of the free kid-friendly games on Steam. I have Myst for him, but not sure he wouldn't get bored of it.

He loved Adventure Quest, and the various spinoffs but seems to gravitate to the fantasy ones, so I found him Wizards 101. He figured out the PvP mode and has come to realize that it's a lot easier to fight the bots than the other kids.

I do keep certain restrictions though. He's only allowed to use canned chat on kid games, and no chat at all on grown up games. I explained why to him without actually saying I don't think he needs to hear about people being "raped in the face".

He loves aspects of gamer culture. Thinks the Leeroy Jenkins video is freaking hilarous, and loves screaming Trogdor at the top of his lungs...reminds me, he wrote a letter to StrongBad and I have to figure out how to concoct a reply. I'm currently debating TF2 since it's free, but that would be me playing and him watching since at 8, he doesn't quite have the twitch abilities required for it. He loves the characters and the ideas though, so that's what I focus on: Games as art and entertainment, and things that have plots and storylines, rather than just a means to blow shit up.
 
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Polenth

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My parents play games, and did when I was a child. None of the ones in the house were adult rated when I was a child, so that issue didn't come up. And the graphics wouldn't have been very graphic in the 80s. But I watched adult TV programmes and read adult books from an early age, so a game really wouldn't be any different.

We all have our own game tastes though. Sometimes there's an overlap and sometimes there isn't.
 

serabeara

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Well it was my dad that introduced me to Resident Evil, and I think I'm okay (we'll just ignore my avatar...)
 

BlackHatBlueScarf

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My father was a gamer. He played in the arcades in the 70's. He had all the systems during the video game rush up until the crash of '83.

Then he had me in '86. I was playing Mario when I was 4. He played a lot back when we had an NES. He hated to lose though, goodness. Absolutely. Destroyed systems, controllers, you name it. Dad was tough.

Got a SNES after that. He stopped playing after that, as I eventually got a lot better at it. He preferred to watch. Never would allow us to use a cheating device, though. Nor codes. You can't use those.

"That's for pussies! Play it right or don't play it at all!" If I chose the latter he would call me a quitter. Oh, how I hated being called that.

So I stayed in front of that TV, I beat games like R-Type and Gradius III... Not on Easy. Not even on Normal. No, I beat them on Hard, and the hidden difficulties that were harder than that. And I beat them when I was ten years old. Even U.N. Squadron, which is ungodly hard. Beat that too. I would be crying, tears running down my eyes, as he cussed me out for getting my ass beat and not wanting to put myself through another round of Plok anymore. No kidding. He was hard. But I wasn't gonna be a quitter, and he sure as hell wasn't going to let me be one either.

We had a lot of games back then. We would rent them out. Our selling point was that we had all the save files completed, so if you wanted all the powered up characters or all the levels you could see them right away, get your money's worth, decide for yourself if it'll be a good game.

I was a sick kid. Broke my leg because of my bone cancer. Got to sit inside and play games. No computer, no emulator. Just the system, my broken leg in a cast, and dad, watching me go.

Super Mario World - Beat all 96 levels? Half a day.
Legend of Zelda, Link to the Past - No deaths, All Items, No Saving, the fabled triple 000 score - One day.
Final Fantasy III (Or VI) - All characters, all level 99, all spells, all with highest stats possible, all at 9999 HP 999 MP... TWICE. I don't even know the hours I put into it. I don't want to know.
Contra III - Alien Wars. Hard Mode. 'Nuff said.
Super Ghouls and Ghosts - Got the "Real" ending.

I could go on for a while. Those games were HARD.

My dad stopped caring at some point, though. So long as I demolished every game I came across he would be happy. We had over sixty some SNES games, and I happily throttled them all.

My favorite was Star Fox. I loved Star Fox. I still love the series. The characters, the story, the bad voice acting. (Sorry to jet, but I'm in a hurry!)

Eventually in high school I would, for five dollars, unlock everything for people by playing through it and doing it the hard way. No cheating mechanisms, just doing it. Upgraded to a 64.

Goldeneye? Unlock everything, even the bastardly Invincibility cheat - Two days.
Super Mario 64? ALL 120 STARS - 8 hours. The people who gave me the five dollars were utterly shocked when I came back the same day at their door.

Strategy Guides? Never. Didn't need 'em.

Eventually I came across Perfect Dark.

He found that to be wonderful. We would play for hours, running down halls to get weapons and shoot the crap out of Perfect and DarkSims with their stupid fast reloading and fast respawning and all knowing radar and everything...

And we would win, dangit. Sometimes. Dad wasn't good at games anymore, but we tried. We played that game so much.

Then the PS2 came out. We waited in line for it. He got there 6 hours before the release date, and we sat in line. We were first, and Dad was called 1, with myself being 1 and a half and my brother being 1 and three quarters. The others behind us were given numbers as names, and my Dad happily talked about it to these strangers that were all named after numerals. The employees waited on us and gave us popcorn...

It was an eerie feeling.

Eventually it came out with SOCOM. And he finally found the magic of online gaming. And headsets. And communication to the outside world. He hated interacting directly with people, but this was different. He was just a voice, a voice connecting to another voice, and all those voices were playing as a bunch of dudes that would, on their own team, line up and jump off to their deaths like synchronized swimmers, all in a glorious tribute to hilarity. And then they'd giggle like school-girls as the other team wondered what the heck they were doing.

We laughed and laughed. He had so much fun with it, that it eventually burned "You WERE KILLED BY" in his 52" screen. He died a lot, but he didn't care. He just went again.

Eventually I went to college. Got away from the systems. I still would play SOCOM on the weekends (I only played on the weekends, but was ranked in the top 100 overall on the boards, I was a monster.)

I then found myself in MUDs. Didn't care too much for the fantasy, but the complexity was incredible. WoW has nothing against MuDs. Not even close.

Came home and ran it one day. Dad hated it.

His solution? Get EverQuest. That didn't help. I hated EverQuest. He played it though, and he loved it. He liked the difficulty. I hated the monotony.

Eventually he discovered Planetside.

Only one of it's kind (And still none have come close to challenging it), Planetside promised huge battles of hundred vs. hundred vs. hundreds, in a First Person Shooter war. And it did just that. And he played it and played it. I would play it with him too, but at this time I was tired of stomping games. I never was in it for the competition; I preferred cooperatives over competitives. I just wanted to play for fun. I let myself slack instead of giving it my all. But to him it didn't matter. If we got particularly pissed we would hold our own, griping the hell out of how underpowered the VS was. (Hey Lasher, whatcha doin'?)

Eventually Planetside got worse and worse. And my mom finally got into games. We played EQ2 for a bit, but we got word that a new hardcore MMO was coming out - Vanguard. Endearingly given the moniker "Vanslop" we set out to play that instead. He found a class he liked, we gave one to mom, and I found one I liked as well, and we would spend hours throwing buckets of water on the NPC's as we crafted all our equipment. Eventually Vanslop was bought by SONY and became "Easy Mode" so it went out of favor, and I moved out of the house to start my career.

About a year and a half ago, he got sicker and sicker, and eventually went to the doctor to find that he was dying of lung cancer. His smoking habit was getting to him, but he still kept wanting to play. He eventually got us all to go back to Vanslop.

I tried my best to play it up like nothing was happening. I would only talk to him about what we needed to make, like there we were going to hit the new tier pretty soon, just needed to whack more deer and harvest their hides. But he wouldn't talk to me about games anymore. He was just going to miss me when he was gone. No more yelling. No more telling me I was a quitter and a pussy. None of that.

Sometimes the pain was too much for him that he couldn't do it anymore, and eventually he stopped altogether. A half year after that, he died on January 6th, 2011.

I eventually came and took the SNES. And I play those games I did when I was seven to this day, twenty years ago.

They are incredibly easy. I beat Super Castlevania IV in thirty-two minutes.

But even then, as I play them, I find that they're still incredibly hard.

I'm sorry for making it personal... It just came out that way.
 

GeorgeK

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I game with my son. I can't do the new games with controllers or mice due to nerve damage, but we play D&D type table top games and there's a few computer games that we play either LAN or on line.

He used to sit in my lap and play DOOM when he was about 18 months. It had a setting where there were no monsters and he could run around shooting barrels of toxic sludge and just explore the environment. It was good for hand eye coordination.
 
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Chumala

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In all honesty this is not an uncommon practice. I've seen this many times on WoW.

There are times I've grouped with dad and son or a just the dad who says his kids are currently leveling.

I once did a pug run with a guild and they were all family, cousins, aunts, uncles. It was pretty cool.
 

fireluxlou

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I played a lot of questionable games when I was little on the playstation and the Sega, which weren't really kid friendly. But tbh all the adult content flew over my head. I fond memories of the games. My dad bought the playstation for himself and I inherited from him.
 

Feral_Sophisticate

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I'm a long-time, first generation gamer. I started with hex-and-counter wargames like Squad Leader (and still play them). I "evolved" to fantasy RPGs in 1982 with the "Red Box" basic D&D set. I switched to AD&D when Dragonlance came out, and have evolved into newer systems since then (AFMBE, Pathfinder, AD&D 2nd Edition, and a few others).

My kids tried it out, with mixed results. My daughter liked it at first, but she's a teen now, and it's just not "cool" for her to play them anymore. My older son, though, likes them as much as I do. It also gives us something that we can share when we're together (as their Mom and I are no longer together).

RPGs (and gaming in general) helped me cope with the angst of teenage life. They're also becoming a great bridge between my son and I.
 

Alessandra Kelley

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I think of myself as a latecomer to tabletop roleplaying games because D&D had been around for five or six years before I started. It wasn't very welcoming to girls at the time, but there were a few of us. Eventually I went to college and met my future husband at the roleplaying gamers' club. We still play regularly with some friends, and when our children got old enough we let them in on sessions of specially-run, simpler games. We're actually playing D&D again, for the first time in years. I'm getting silly enjoyment out of playing the old fossil, telling my kids of the Old Days, with THAC0 and AD&D. While our kids are into cool, they're into geeky cool, steampunk and Doctor Who and math and the like, and are enthusiastic gamers.
 

Feral_Sophisticate

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While our kids are into cool, they're into geeky cool, steampunk and Doctor Who and math and the like, and are enthusiastic gamers.

That sounds like my son. He's into the "geek chic" too. He wants to be an architect (he loves castles, cathedrals, and the like). He's a huge fan of "The Dresden Files" (both the books and the RPG), the Supernatural RPG (based on the TV series), CP2020, All Flesh Must Be Eaten, AD&D and the Pathfinder RPG. I'm sure he'll find others as he continues to evolve in his gaming. :)
 
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