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The Family That Games Together Online
GamerDad has a piece talking about families gaming together online. The article profiles some gamer families. Brian Reynolds, CEO of Big Huge Games, is cited as an example; He games together with his sons. The article also touches on the more serious issues of addiction and quality time. From the article: "Another hidden benefit to online games is that families spread over several states can keep in touch and play online together. Thompson agrees, 'I never foresaw how important the games online would become, but I did actually get a line added into my divorce decree that guaranteed me three days a week that I could get on the computer with my kids, via web cam. So I could communicate and see them. At the time, I wasn't a huge MMORPG player, so I didn't envision the role it would play.'"
Ahh quality family time. ;)
We used to WoW together: Him a 60 priest, me a 60 warrior. Then that rat bastard rolled on my Brainhacker, and I squelched his ass!
I'll form my OWN solar system! With blackjack! And hookers!
It's sad that mmorpg gaming counts as "quality time" with their family for some people.
but I did actually get a line added into my divorce decree that guaranteed me three days a week that I could get on the computer with my kids, via web cam.
I think we're going to be seeing a lot more of this in divorce papers. Especially if the parent with the kids moves across the country, such that personal visits are not practical.
On a related note, restraining orders are probably going to start having sections on internet contact, if they don't already. "I never came within 1000 yards of her, officer." "but you harassed her 4 hrs a day on AIM, off to jail"
No unauthorized use. Trespassers will be shot. Survivors will be shot again.
I know I'm pointing out the obvious, but perhaps he had spent more time with the family and less time gaming he wouldn't be divorcing and could be more than a face on the webcam or a guild member.
Yeah, so I'm judgemental. At least you'll get over it. His kids probably won't.
Until he signed up for WoW, we rarely ever spoke, even though we both miss each other very much.
Now that I've added him to my guild, he won't leave me the hell alone. I've learned to hate my family now, they're all ninka looters. FuXin n00b.
- Just my $0.02, take with a grain of salt, your mileage may vary.
My son and I have played been playing online games together since EQ1 came out.
:)
He is now 16 and we are playing EQ2 together. There have been a couple of other MMORPGs in between.
Before that though, we gamed on consoles and I introduced him to PC games at an early age.
Gaming together, and play in general, is something all parents should do with their children. My son and I are much closer than we might have been, and definitely gotten some deeper insight into each other.
Playing an RPG like EQ or WoW, gives a young person a chance to exercise their personal skills in a variety of settings, being their with him/her gives a parent a chance to mentor, observce and assist.
As for the insight part, my son and I play totally differently in some areas. Grouping up, we learn how the other thinks about things, like fair play, how to treat others, and prioritizing.
That sad, game play is no substitute for good parenting. So, if you're excuse for not spending any other time with yoiur family is that you play EQ together....well, you read the article.
Laters,
Tojosan
I don't know about you all, but there were moments during many an NES battle between my sisters and I that ended with a chunky controller being flung toward a skull. If you threw MMO drama into the mix, a family like mine may well end up pressing charges.
Those NES pads had some corners, I tellya what..
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My girlfriend (who's at uni) and I play together, along with her mum.
Talk about awkward.
On the plus side, her mum likes me without having met me. Boy is she in for a surprise.
On a side note, one of my guildmates started playing together with his son. The son's moved on, the father hasn't.
This is a sig. There are many others like it, but this one is mine.
Her favorite configuration is Protoss (her) & Protoss (me) vs. Zerg (computer.)
I wrote about how she used to play the Terrans on my blog a while back.
If I'm lost in online stuff, I hear: "C'mon daddy, it's time to play StarCraft."
...Maims Together.
My wife and I play Jeopardy on the computer from time to time. It is one of the few games we both really like to play.
My friend and her husband do WoW online as a family. That's kinda wierd, but they enjoy it.
Another buddy and his son make a big deal of playing Star Wars Galactic Battlegrounds (if he's been good) or Heroes of Might and Magic IV.
My son is not quite 2 yet, but I plan on playing with Legos and on the computer with him. What's the real difference? Family games are family games, no?
I cried real tears when Li Mu Bai died.
One flight in an airplane w/a squalling infant who takes a dump 3 minutes into takeoff will have you reading Swift's Modest Proposal as a How-To guide.
You better watch out, there may be dogs about . .
Having been cyber-stalked in the past, I can tell you that it's not a fun experience. Sometimes you can ignore or ban people, but they can always open another account and keep harassing you. With a determined cyberstalker it's an arms race of producing new, unknown email and AIM accounts ahead of the stalker. I've had to change my email address and contact details more than once in the past and it's a pita each time because you've got to make sure that all the people on your list know the new address without it leaking out.
Australian law has a repeated contact-harrassment clause in its stalking laws, but I've never bothered with a restraining order. It's hard to enforce that sort of thing when you can't tell where a harasser is located physically.
-Kell
I love my wife and my kids, but if I ever get a divorce, I'll take whatever time I can get with them, even if it's online game. I may only get them 30-50% of the time, but I can be with them all of their free time that they're willing to play online that way.
Saving the World: One Drink at a Time
Modern divorces almost always end with the courts siding with the wife. Play the sexist card (women are better parents, its was the mean ol' drunken dad's fault, the woman would NEVER hurt the kids, etc) and its very hard to win modern day divorces if your the husband. Throw in the fact that 'dad' is generally the 'breadwinner', thus generally not home 9-5, and its extremely hard to make a good case for the husband to keep the kids, let alone not pay child support for several decades when you know the wife had squandered most of the savings away.
I'm a married father with two pre-teen children. I gave a WoW subscription to one of them as a gift to go along with a new computer and within a few weeks everyone but my wife became addicted to the game. Pretty soon the three of us would take turns playing our characters, doing quests, etc and for a while WoW entirely displaced time we had previously spent together playing other games and watching television.
Things got more interesting after a month or two when all of us made online friends and started discussing all manner of things related to the game. Since we often shared each others characters we often had to explain to our buddies which of us was playing at any given time and sharing stories of our friends exploits became a regular topic of conversation. Sending notes to each other's characters via the in-game email system also created an interesting communications channel as well.
Unfortunately my wife (who is entirely uninterested in the game) and I have had to also deal with the negative aspects of the game which include:
Looking back now I think WoW has in some ways forced our family to come to terms with family issues I otherwise would not have expected to have to deal with until my kids were a few years older. This has caused some new kinds of stress for us but overall I think we're better off learning how to cope with this kind of thing than ignoring it and so I would say it has been a good experience for us so far.
Myself, my dad and my brother have all played several online games together; the latest being WoW. Usually it's me who finds a game then they follow me to it.
The whole thing about mentoring reminds me of, "Always two there are, no more, no less: a master and an apprentice." So, eh, let's hope the "graduation" doesn't go like in the Sith tradition ;)
But seriously, it makes me wonder if one-on-one mentoring wouldn't go better in a more controlled two-player way than in an MMO. There are so many bad influences, and they're so contagious. Ranging from "let's go over the mountain and gank alliance newbies in Northshire" or "let's roll undead chars and camp the zones with newbie warlock quests" (I hope sincerely hope that's not the kind of insecurity and way to boost one's fragile ego you're trying to get your son to learn) to "r u a grl??? wanna cyber???" to... well, I know at least one middle aged manager who writes l33t in online games. Made me wonder how contagious that really is. To God knows what else.
Basically I'm probably gonna get flamed for it, but I _am_ saying that games and the people in those games _do_ influence people. Not in the way of turning someone into a crazed serial killer because they've played GTA, of course, but people do learn from each other and learn to imitate the ones they admire. Often meaning the biggest flaming retards. So same as your son can learn to smoke just to be like Tom down the street who is sooo cool and popular, he can also learn to try to be an even bigger asshole than LordNoobKillah in the online guild. Just a thought.
Basically if you would pay any attention to what friends your kid has IRL, or who's he hanging around with, I'd pay the same attention to the online entourage. Just because someone's character isn't "real" doesn't mean he can't give real advice or that someone can't follow it. And certain games and certain servers attract entirely too many assholes for me to be comfortable with the idea of letting a kid loose in there. At least until he's old enough and I'm positive that he's already been taught what's right and wrong and can make a sane judgment as to whose advice to follow.
For that matter, while games are good and fine, I hope mentoring includes time together outside games. Looking at the things I've learned from my father, even if they did involve a computer -- e.g., he encouraged me to learn assembly at the age of 14, and BASIC before that -- I can't help notice that none of that would have happened if we just fired up a MMO/MUD/BBS-game/whatever and went merrily killing NPCs. What he taught me was how to _make_ a game like those, which given the limitations of a ZX-81 with 1K RAM admittedly wasn't much, but still served to hammer in some notions of logic and analytical thinking, rather than just how to play them.
Just saying, you know... Gaming skills are good and fine, and I'll be the first to sing praises to them, but there are some other skills that ensure I'm overpaid as an EJB consultant at the moment.
Other skills and attitudes I've got from my mom and grandma, especially mom's sorta paladin-like lawful-good philosophy that, if nothing else, kept me well out of trouble so far. I can't help thinking that it's been far more useful teaching me that, than it would have been to teach me how to keep aggro while tanking Onyxia, or how to respec to Holy and chain-cast Flash Heal as a priest in an MC raid.
Just some random musings, you know.
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
I would really like to have some sort of "web community" for me and my family, not a forum, not a chat, but a game.
But the members of my family have really no time for playing a MMORPG. So could someone suggest a funny and interesting browser game which brings a group of people (family, collegues, etc.) together and requires not much time? Additionaly it should have a very easy interface in order to let the less computerized family members also enjoy it.
In most of the games, you are alone against everyone or can just join a "guild", but it's more or less still very "lonely". Except for games like World of Dungeons (medieval browser rpg). But not everyone is interested in RPGs...
I would imagine something like running a little company together against others.. or conquering other countries.. I don't know!
Our family doesn't need computer games. We perform in a traveling stage show. It never fails to bring us closer together. We call ourselves "The Aristocrats."
Ceci n'est pas une sig.
I think you missed a line:
Especially if the parent with the kids moves across the country
In other words, it's better than nothing. There's nothing to indicate that the man didn't spend time with his family, but rather perhaps he and his family are now some distance away, which means at times he would be otherwise unable to see/talk to them in person.
I chat with my GF on MSN and webcam almost daily. On weekends when I can I drive 4h to see her. Neither one is exclusive of the other, but as she lives 4h away from me and goes to school, whereas I work here, weekday visits in-person don't really work out. No reason the grandparent poster couldn't be in a similar situation.
http://www.penny-arcade.com/comic/2004/12/31
I've played games on various platforms with my wife since the day we met (WoW, Mario Kart, Quake, etc). She wasn't really into games before we met, but now she comes to LAN parties with me.
However, I have a job, and she stays at home with the kids. She can play when they nap. All I can say is that there's some serious truth to that comic.
Online Starcraft RPG? At
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Our family has 5 WoW accounts in the house, plus my brother-n-law and his wife each have accounts, and another son outside the house has an account. We created a family guild and often are online at the same time. its been kind of an addiction but at least its one where we're all together.
Sometimes its weird like going to your teenage kid and saying, "Yo, get your butt onto WoW so your Pally can tank for us in Scarlet Monastary." "But dad, I was talking to my girlfriend on the phone......" "C'mon, hurry up, your mom and I are waiting for you in Trisfal Glades"
Ira