The Family That Games Together…

As Mother’s Day draws to a close and Father’s Day starts to poke its head over the horizon, one can’t help but to reflect on their upbringing.  In relation to video games, that means taking a look at the relationships parents have with video games and the children that play them.  The ideal role of parents these days has become that of the watchdog.  The watchdog moms and dads regulate what games their children play and how long they play them for, lest there brains rot and they turn to a violent life of crime.  The watchdog mentality is a noble approach to video games from the uninterested parent, looking out for their child’s best interests, but my parents took a very different approach: they played the games with me.

In the days prior to my brother and I being born, my parents were poor college students, doing the best they could to make ends meet.  Every now and then, they would go to the arcade and play Gorf, Zaxxon or Space Invaders; it was a cheap date, and the better they got at the games, the longer the dates could last.  Years later, after my brother and I were born, it was no surprise that video games became an integral part of our upbringing.  Some of my earliest memories were playing Bubble Bobble and Super Grover on our Apple IIe with my mom.  My parents scooped up an NES as soon as one became available in the Wurzburg PX, and we spent years sitting around the TV playing Rescue Rangers and Contra as a family.  I can still remember how proud I felt when my mom became the first person in the neighborhood to actually beat Super Mario Brothers.  For us, video games were never the divisive, isolating homewreckers that the Xbox’s of today have been made out to be, video games brought us closer together.

When Doom‘s controversy shook the world, my mother’s friend (as well as my best friend’s mother) told her that she should check it out, to see what the kids were playing.  My mom rushed to the PX and grabbed a shareware sampler that included, among other things, the first episode of Doom.  She was immediately hooked, and before we knew it, we owned a host of “Doom Clones”: Corridor 7, Duke Nukem 3D, and Shadow Warrior – we devoured them as fast as they could make them.  We sat around the computer and took turns, and when the last rocket pierced the CyberDemon at the end of Doom II, we celebrated together as a family.  When I played these games with my parents, it never really occurred to me that their surreal, hyper-violent nature could transcend into the real world.

As time marched on, and mouse-look became the norm, my parents’ interests in first person shooters started to wane.  My own skills in gaming were growing, and my parents were very supportive of my hobby.  One day, my parents came home with a copy of Rise of the Triad, because my father’s co-worker was stuck and needed help getting past a certain level. I booted it up and played though the level in an afternoon, and then walked my dad’s friend through the level over the phone.  After that, my mom set up a make-shift tip line for me, so that I could help a whole myriad of gamers, mostly from my dad’s office.  Every time I solved a problem, they were proud of my achievement, even if it was just in a game.