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Asking my coworkers whether their parents were strict about how much time they spent playing videogames has revealed that you should definitely limit your kids’ game time, unless you want them to grow up to be videogame critics.
Or maybe it’s just about age. The parents of young children I know today are much more likely to restrict their kids’ screen time. At the same time, they’re also much more likely to play games with their kids, even if that means suffering Minecraft or even Roblox. Come on, son. Wouldn’t you rather play Borderlands 2 with your old man?
How did your parents limit your game time? And if you have kids, do you limit theirs?
Morgan Park, Staff Writer: Not at all. They wouldn’t let me spend all night on the PS2 if I had homework, of course, but they largely let me do my thing. I go back and forth on how I’d handle screen time with a theoretical child. Games are a lot more habit-forming and demanding of time than they were when I was young, so maybe moderation makes sense?
Ted Litchfield, Associate Editor: I was a youngest child, so my parents let me just go nuts too—at least until my grades got so bad early in high school that I was put on a strict “no gaming on weeknights, two hours per day Friday–Sunday” regimen. This was before smartphones too, so I really shaped up. I know as game journalists our default position is “actually games are good for you,” but it really is so easy to overindulge, and screen time controls for kids are absolutely the move. Given how early tykes are getting their mitts on tablets these days, that might just be an impossible battle for parents.
My own story has a little epilogue too, imagine it like a Fallout ending slideshow type-deal. When my older brother had similar problems a few years before me, my folks just took away his PC entirely, cutting off a burgeoning Counter-Strike: Source esports career. He’s a lawyer now, so I think the moral of the story is to burn the fields and salt the earth unless you want your kid working in games media.
Shaun Prescott, AU Editor: I limit my kids’ game time to an hour or so every Saturday and Sunday, though this changes during holidays. I haven’t let my kids have tablets and if they’re going to play a game it has to be a “good” one (they love Stardew Valley and Minecraft), and not some mindless app-store trash. I obviously love gaming but I don’t think too much screen time is healthy for young minds. Even I feel tense and depressed if I sit at a screen for more than a couple of hours without taking a walk or something.
My parents limited my screen time when I was very young, but as a teenager I could use the computer whenever. Not that there was much incentive to do so: my ’90s Pentium didn’t have an internet connection and I only had a small handful of shareware games, so it was no embarrassment of riches like a lot of kids have today.
Chris Livingston, Senior Editor: If the weather was nice and it was daytime, I had to go outside, so there wasn’t much gaming at home for most of my childhood. Luckily, I could just ride my bike through the beautiful day to my friends’ house where we stayed inside and played games constantly. Once we had our first PC in the house (this was the late ’80s), I could get away with more gaming at home. I think my parents equated console gaming with watching television, which was bad, but equated PC gaming with using a computer, which was good.
Lauren Morton, Associate Editor: My parents were the same way, Chris. Computer games = educational; console games = toys. Joke was on them when I started waking up before elementary school to play The Sims before getting on the bus. As an oldest child checking in, I was the one with rules unlike some of you lot. The biggest restriction was that the Game Boy was not allowed in the house and was only for car trips. How I ever finished Pokémon Yellow purely during rides to the grocery and sports practice I’ll never know.
Tyler Wilde, US Editor-in-Chief: I don’t think I’ve ever fully appreciated how few gaming rules and regulations I had to submit to as a kid, despite my poor grades and general troublemaking. I’m glad I’m not the only one here, lest I feel self-conscious about being so spoiled.
I really don’t recall ever being reprimanded for staying up all night playing Quake 2 or dedicating an entire teenage summer to EverQuest. Even when I was younger, I played a lot of early home computer games like Arkanoid, Prince of Persia, and SimCity, although there being one computer in the house must have put a natural limit on that.
As Chris and Lauren say, there was a sense in the ’80s and ’90s that you were learning technical skills by using a computer—and to some degree I really was—but it was harder to get away with excessive console gaming. I recall crossing the line one day when I stayed home sick from school (probably “sick,” really), and asked if I could get a little Super Metroid in since, well, I was home anyway and it was right there. My mom countered that if I was well enough to explore the planet Zebes, I was well enough to go to school. Didn’t make much sense to me.
Andy Chalk, News Editor: Pretty much echoing Chris’s experience here: My parents flat-out refused to have a teevee game machine thing in the house, but computers were educational so I got one of those instead. There were games (and that’s why I wanted one) but “gaming” in those pre-internet, small-town days wasn’t nearly the thing it is now, and most of my free time was spent outside causing trouble. So limiting game time wasn’t really seen as an issue: My parents were more worried about me going blind from sitting too close to the television, and going deaf from all the loud rock and roll. It was a simpler time. (And they were right about the loud rock and roll, too.)
Mollie Taylor, Features Producer: Honestly, it’s a miracle I made it through school with good grades because my parents were not particularly strict on my game time, like at all. My Mum largely left me to things with my wee PlayStation 2 in my bedroom, and never really gave me any grief for playing it. I do have memories of my dad turning off the wi-fi router in his bedroom so that I couldn’t stay up late on my laptop, playing whatever social MMO I was privy to at that moment… along with memories of me trying to sneak in while he was sleeping to turn it back on.
I was that kid with the DS under the covers, whispering to my Nintendogs and quickly putting it face-down when my dad would poke his head around my bedroom door. But apart from making sure I wasn’t engaging in too many late-night shenanigans, I was largely left to my own devices. The one exception was when I was sick, of course. I feel like the phrase “if you’re too ill to go to school, you’re too ill to play videogames” is a universal experience for gamers, and I remember one specific incident where I was off school (genuinely poorly!) and wanting to play Final Fantasy 13 on my arcade Xbox 360, only to discover the hard drive, usually slotted into the top of the console, had been lifted and hidden somewhere. Thanks for that one, Pops.
Nick Evanson, Hardware Writer: As a child in the ’70s, only one household in my circle of friends had a console (Atari VCS) and we all spent so much time around his house, fighting over who would get to play Pong next, that they eventually got rid of it. It wasn’t until the early 1980s that I had my own computer (ZX81, then ZX Spectrum), but since decent games weren’t exactly cheap, we’d perhaps buy a new game once or twice a year but then share them amongst friends (to the point we’d all have mix tapes of 10 games or so).
Most evenings and weekends were spent playing games (or D&D), but as long as homework was done, none of us were restricted in any way—in part because parents just didn’t understand them very well at that time or just saw them as a passing fad, but also because we got out of the house to play with friends, taking it in turns to raid another parent’s kitchen. Although eventually we just took over the Harrisons’ household because Mrs Harrison baked the best cakes ever.
Scott Tanner, Senior Video Producer: Similar to some of the previous responses, my mum in particular thought a games console would be too much of a distraction from homework so I was never allowed one. I wasn’t even allowed a Gameboy and, to this day, I have never played Pokémon other than the trading card game.
We always had a PC, though. Dad was an electronic design engineer who had once programmed a crossword game for the BBC B. He isn’t much of a gamer though; Tomb Raider may be the only game he’s ever completed and it took him a year. I meanwhile had access to the PC for about an hour every night, my earliest memories of using a PC being typing random words into DOS and colouring in Sooty Paint.
Once I discovered PCs could play actual games, I quickly moved on to Age of Empires, Quake 2, and Flight Sim (95), but still only for an hour a night. Only when I got to secondary school and a computer was essential for homework was I able to negotiate more time on the PC. But I was very good; homework first, gaming after. Formative years indeed: I still have never owned a games console and consequently am awful at using a controller. And since 2005 I’ve dabbled at making games, like my father before me.
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Kurt Indovina
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