Crossplay Mailbag: Making Peace With Your Never-ending Backlog of Unfinished Video Games
What to do with a year of extremely long video games, kids getting exposed to supposedly “inappropriate” material, and more.
Welcome back to another Crossplay mailbag!
Hey, I’m going to be at PAX this weekend. I’m co-hosting a panel with Ash Brandin, a teacher, librarian, and creator of The Gamer Educator. The panel, titled Branched Narratives: Navigating Parenting and Gaming, plans to cover the following topics:
Between laptops and tablets in school and the mainstreaming of gaming, kids are surrounded by screens—and so are we. How much screen time is too much? Which games are beneficial and which are potentially harmful? What age should my kids start playing games? Am I powerless to stop all this? In this session, we’ll address all this and more. Led by panelists who navigate the intersection of journalism, parenting, teaching, and gaming, you’ll learn how to find a balance that works for your family without losing the inherent joy of games in the process.
I’m really excited to be in Seattle again, and so proud to be there as part of Crossplay. If anyone who reads this newsletter will be in attendance, either at the panel or when I’m wandering around Seattle, please don’t hesitate to say hi. I’d love to say hello.
And, yes, I will be with my kids. They don’t bite. Well…the youngest sometimes does.
We’ve been opening up the mailbag to everyone, so if you’ve got a question you’d like answered, do not hesitate to send it to mailbag@crossplay.news. It’s been a month and change since we’ve published a mailbag, so we could use some more questions!
As the digital land grab for account names continues, how did you decide when to create common accounts for your kids? Email most immediately comes to mind. And separately, when will they get access to those accounts?
Patrick: It’s funny. My wife registered an email for my oldest daughter not long after she was born. She’d read this about this sweet idea for parents, where you send an email to your child at milestones in their early life, long before they need access to email, and so what awaits them when it’s eventually handed over are these delightful notes and photos across space and time. Again, it’s a sweet idea, but, uh, we never did it. I forgot she’d registered an email address, so years later, when I needed her to have an email for different account authorizations, I registered a new one. I can’t remember how we resolved picking one over the other, but later we settled on a single email.
I don’t even know how important email is going to be when it’s truly relevant in, I don’t know, high school? Email has largely replaced physical mail, so it’s not hard to imagine that something will replace the status quo of email, too. In any case, registering an email when they’re born isn’t a terrible idea, and you’ll be absolutely forced to figure it out when they want their own Minecraft account, which itself requires its own Microsoft account, which itself requires an email address. Voila!
As for handing it over, that feels like an active conversation over time. I also don’t know that they’ll exactly be scrambling for access. My child regularly asks about buying a phone, but she has not asked about gaining access to her email address. (To be fair, one is cooler than the other, and I really doubt she knows what email even is.)
When thinking about keeping kids away from age-inappropriate material, I reflect upon my own experiences with games and media that was beyond my grasp or appropriateness at the time.
Whether it's feeling edgy playing Diablo II at 11 or being inevitably exposed to sexual or otherwise disturbing early memes in the forum culture at the time, these things shaped me, and I don't think in only bad ways.
What did you (or other readers) experience "too early", and how do you think it affected you? As a parent, do you have a goal (however futile) of minimizing those experiences?
Not asking anyone to share or relive capital-T traumatic childhood experiences, though. I think we all agree in not replicating those and creating safety.
Feel free to rephrase or take this question however you like, obviously.
- Ross
Patrick: Every kid is different, but I agree experiencing age “inappropriate” material is not without upside. I have a blog related to this topic dropping tomorrow alongside the Starfield embargo, of all things. I can’t say much, but know that it’s relevant to this.
Maybe this is an oversimplified way of viewing the topic, but I think it’s important for kids to feel “cool” and “important” and “older.” You can swap in whatever other words feel right for their individual temperament, but part of the appeal of such material is explicitly because it’s not allowed. It’s why I like, within reason, allowing my kid to experience something that feels a step beyond their age in conversation with them. It means they’re granting consent to the experience and also taking ownership of it.
It’s good to feel confused and scared as a kid. Unexpected material can do that.
It’s also true that me and you are probably giving this more thought than most parents did before their kids stumbled into what you’re talking about. It’s parents not understanding the content in a video game or movie. A version of that these days is not understanding how, say, Roblox works, or manipulating YouTube age restrictions.
My kid keeps talking about watching the Five Nights at Freddy’s movie this fall. I think it’d be fun to watch it with her. The trailer alone tells me it’s beyond her, but if she says she wants to watch it, even five minutes at a time or with her eyes closed, we’ll do that together. If she wants to turn it off, we’ll turn it off. But whether it’s jumping off the high dive at the pool for the first time or taking in a scary movie, helping your kid push their own boundaries sounds as healthy as anything I can think of. You can help model a response, too, because they’re going to need that when they have a similar experience in the real world and, inevitably, you’re not there to help through it.
Gaming is now relegated to (maybe) nap time and an hour or two after my partner has gone to bed. It’s all god though, still enjoy my time, just keep adding to a backlog I’ll never get through and have to either play on easy ( god I have zero time for not enjoying the time I have!) or have some thing that is kinda defined, like a round of multiplayer in some thing like Call of Duty, etc.
Patrick: I feel all of this so hard. This impacts me, too, and it’s my job to keep up with these things! Most of my video game playing happens at night between the hours of 10:00 PM and whenever I start to nod off. We start bedtime with the kids around 8:00 PM, and we usually have both of them down by 9:00 PM. At that point I check in with my wife to see if she’s up for a TV show, and then we figure out if she’s up for a show that’s either 30 minutes or 60 minutes. (So much dang TV is 60 minutes these days!)
And thus, my game time begins, often with a sports game on my iPad. I’m usually playing around two hours per night, across three or four nights, which means I’m playing video games about six to eight hours per week. The weekends are mostly shot with kids stuff in the day, and evenings are dedicated to movies with my wife. But I’ve made it work, and still managed to hold a job down for years where people are, in theory, supporting my work because they care what I have to say about video games.
But it does mean you have to just give up on certain games, like Baldur’s Gate 3. I’m never going to play a game that, I’m sure, would be one an all-time favorite. Sucks.
Have a story idea? Want to share a tip? Got a funny parenting story? Drop Patrick an email.
Also:
I really need to report about the popularity of young adult horror, because we take it for granted, but I don’t think we’ve seen much work on why it’s connected.
At Remap, I have a feature (Daddy’s Day Off), where I play long games, but even trying Baldur’s Gate 3 for that seems like it would be a step too far. Ah well.
How do you manage your own game time with long games? Do you just make peace with the fact that you’ll only be playing one or two games per year?
I love that you’re going to show your kids Five Nights.
While on vacation recently, I took my 3.5 y/o to the store to get groceries and a toy for her. She fell in love with a Coraline doll and demanded to watch the movie even after I explained that it was scary. We really emphasized it and she was adamant.
So that night (after the 1 y/o went to sleep), trusting her to tell us if it was too scary, we watched it as a family. She has to hide her face once or twice but otherwise enjoyed it a lot. Based on the her questions during and after, I think she missed both the subtext AND the actual text lol, but she claimed to love it.
It was our first encounter with something explicitly spooky and not merely “halloween kids books” spooky. I’m proud of her for handling it and of us for trusting her.
Yeah, one thing I have made peace with is that playing just a few hours of a long game is fine if it's not clicking with me or if there is something else I want to play more. Max mentioned Death Stranding and that is one where I barely made it out of the first act, but I feel like that is all I really needed to experience.