It’s a quick win, a quick escape from boring reality. In gaming, you can travel to faraway star systems, under the oceans, back in time, or some fantasy world. We can be heroes saving the world or galaxy; or a villain and destroy them. Games have re-spawns and extra lives, and a clear-cut mission. We can live vicariously through our avatars and not have to worry about jumping off buildings, running up to tanks, or fighting zombies. We are invincible in the game world. Games can bring a family together or tear them apart. Addiction to video games is a real condition in places like South Korea, where they actually have rehab centers for it. Now video games have a bad rap on this but what about board games? The fastest way to break up a family is to play Monopoly or Uno or Risk.
What can we learn from games? In her TED talk Gaming can make the world better, Jane McGonigal talked about this way more articulately than I ever can. I, however, can learn to solve problems and control my frustration (I know the other players are using cheats) well mostly control myself. Well…..I am working on it. And the reason I have to work on it is that my son has the same issue, and I have to become a video game role model.
Many of you are wondering why I am putting SO much thought into the metaphysical aspect of video games. Well, I am an “Elder Millennial” which means that I know how it was before computers and the internet, but I also know what is it like to get on to AOL, MySpace, and 4 player N64 (stop screen peeping, cheater). The average gamer is around 35, and it is getting older every year because I am (LOL).
We have to raise our children the best way we can. How do we do this? The way that our parents did will not work. Not that they did anything wrong, but it wasn’t the same world and they did not have the same technology that we currently have. We were able to get away with so much not because we were smarter, but because we didn’t have camera phones, Facebook, Instagram, etc. So being a Gamer or a Nerd if you will, allows me to have a different perspective from what our parents had. You see articles about how much screen time you should allow children to have, two hours for the whole day. Don’t be a hypocrite.
What is the first thing you do when you wake up? How long do you stare at a screen all day? Phone, tablet, computer, and TV, how long? Now I am not saying this as a bad thing. I am an IT Professional that looks at three monitors at work, come home, and has 3 monitors on my home computer, plus a work phone and a personal phone, plus the TV.
Gaming Setup Updated
So what can video games teach us? Well, that we can persevere through adversity even if it is simulated. That screen time is not that dangerous, and in the workforce of the future, the more screen time you get, the better you will survive. If my son can type 120 words per min. because he played Roblox and had to type fast in the game to chat, or if my daughter knew how to fix her computer and program because she set up a gaming server for Minecraft; they both would have a leg up on the kids that only had two hours a day and didn’t have a Gaming parent (Mary plays on the phone and we all know that’s not gaming). “MOBILE GAMES DOES NOT MAKE YOU A GAMER” – Everyone
I haven’t even started talking about how you can make money on playing games like Tyler “Ninja” Blevins who made $500,000 per month. Maybe that will be in the next post.
In the end, YOU are the parent. YOU make the rules. It’s a new world where the rules have evolved from our parent’s era. This will continue to evolve as the days pass and technology grows to meet our new needs. If there is one thing that gaming has taught ALL OF US, it is that you MUST learn to quickly evolve and adapt to new situations, and overcome any obstacles. As parents, we won’t truly find out if we did a good job until our young gamers have long moved out of the house, and have a family of their own. When that time comes, we can teach Jr. not to mess with Grandpa on 007 Goldeneye, any of the Battlefields, Tekken, Mario Karts, Maddens or etc.
What do you think? Let us know in the comments. If you like this please like and share.
What Games Actually Teach: A Serious Look
The reflexive dismissal of gaming as a waste of time reflects a misunderstanding of what games actually require and develop in the people who play them seriously. Strategy games require players to manage resources, plan multiple moves ahead, adapt to changing conditions, and recover from setbacks — all cognitive skills that have direct real-world application. Multiplayer games require communication, coordination, role specialization, and leadership under pressure. First-person shooters train spatial awareness and rapid decision-making at a speed that most other activities cannot match. The specific skills vary by genre, but the claim that gaming teaches nothing is simply not supported by the evidence of what players have to do to succeed.
Gabe learning to type quickly because of Roblox chat is not a trivial example. Lily setting up a Minecraft server because she wanted to play with friends is a real technical achievement that required problem-solving, research, and persistence. These are not outcomes that happened despite gaming; they happened because gaming provided the motivation and the context for the skill development to occur. That is exactly how effective learning works in any domain.
Family Gaming: When It Brings People Together
The best gaming sessions in this family have been shared ones. Mario Kart arguments. Co-op missions in games where everyone has a role. The moment when a parent and child are on the same team and both care about the outcome. These are legitimate bonding experiences that the previous generation of parenting advice did not have a framework for, because the technology did not exist yet. Gaming is now a shared cultural vocabulary across generations in the same way that sports have always been — a common reference point, a competitive context, and a reason to be in the same room caring about the same thing.
Board games deserve equal acknowledgment here. The fastest way to expose the true competitive nature of any family member is to break out Uno or Monopoly. The family dynamics that emerge from a competitive board game — alliances, betrayals, strategic patience, and the management of winning and losing gracefully — are more socially educational than most structured activities. The fact that they also end in arguments approximately 40 percent of the time is a feature, not a bug. Learning to handle conflict within a safe family context is preparation for handling conflict in every other context.
Gaming as a Career: The Reality in 2025
The career paths that gaming opens in 2025 are significantly broader than most parents in the previous generation imagined. Professional esports is the obvious one — the Tyler Blevins tier of gaming celebrity that David referenced — but it represents the very tip of an enormous industry. Game development, game testing, game streaming and content creation, esports coaching, community management, game journalism, and game design are all legitimate career paths that did not exist as formal industries twenty years ago. The programming and technical skills that translate from gaming into software development and IT are among the most in-demand in the entire labor market.
For children who are deeply engaged in gaming, the question is not whether to allow gaming but how to connect that engagement to skill development and possible career pathways. A child who loves Minecraft can be pointed toward game design courses. A child who loves strategy games can be introduced to programming through game-oriented coding platforms. A child who creates gaming content can learn video editing, thumbnail design, and basic marketing through the feedback loop of posting and seeing what an audience responds to. The interest is already there. The job of a gaming-aware parent is to build the bridge between the passion and the practical application.
Balance Is Still the Point
None of the above is an argument for unlimited gaming without structure. Balance is still the point. Gaming that displaces sleep, physical activity, academic performance, or face-to-face social development is gaming out of balance, and the responsibility for maintaining that balance falls on parents who understand what is happening rather than parents who have ceded the territory to avoidance or hysteria. The parent who plays games, understands the appeal, and can have a real conversation about what their child is playing and why is in a far better position to set appropriate limits than the parent who treats gaming as an alien threat to be contained. Know the game. Know your kid. Set the balance accordingly.
The Setup: What a Gaming Environment Looks Like in Our House
David has a multi-monitor setup that serves double duty for trading and gaming. Three monitors, a high-refresh-rate display for the primary screen, a mechanical keyboard, and a gaming chair that has logged more hours of work than play, honestly. The setup is not about luxury. It is about performance and focus — the same logic that goes into any professional workstation. For an IT professional who also trades and games, the equipment investment pays dividends across all three activities.
The kids each have their own gaming setups scaled to their needs and age. Lily gravitated toward creative and builder games early — Minecraft, Roblox, games where she controls the environment. Gabe gravitates toward competitive and action games where skill progression is visible and measurable. The gaming profiles of your children reveal something real about how they process challenge and reward, and a gaming-literate parent can use those profiles as data about how to approach motivation and learning in other domains.
Managing Gaming Time Without Destroying the Peace
The most effective screen time management tool we have found is not a timer or a parental control app. It is an agreed-upon framework that the kids helped design. When children have input into the rules, they have ownership of the rules. Ownership changes enforcement from a power struggle into a commitment check. The framework in our house: homework and chores first, no gaming during meals or family time, and a weekend schedule that leaves room for long gaming sessions without cutting into everything else.
The specific hours matter less than the consistency of the framework and the quality of the non-gaming time. A child who gets two focused, connected hours with parents before gaming for two hours is in a better position than a child who has gaming restricted to thirty minutes but whose non-gaming time is fragmented and unengaged. Time quality is the variable that most screen time conversations miss entirely.
Gaming as Bonding: The Underrated Dimension
Some of the best conversations David has had with the kids have happened during or immediately after gaming sessions. The emotional state that competitive gaming produces — high engagement, recent shared experience, natural debrief energy — is a conversation opener that few other family activities replicate. Post-game conversations in our family have covered sportsmanship, frustration management, strategy thinking, and the psychology of competition in ways that a formal conversation about those topics never would have. The game creates the context; the conversation happens naturally inside it.
In the end, the gaming household that communicates openly about what is being played and why, that games together, and that treats screen time as one ingredient in a full life rather than the enemy of one, is raising children far better prepared for the world they are actually entering than the household that treats a controller as a threat to be eliminated.
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