Hi all, thanks for reading my non-gamer-parent gaming guide (and thanks so much to Emily for hosting it!) When I write guest articles I like to hang around in the comments and answer any questions people might have. There's a lot of stuff around gaming I just couldn't fit into an article that was already really long, so let me know if I can be any help. I've just had my Covid and flu booster so I'm feeling a bit foggy, but I'll do my best to be coherent :)
Thanks so much Josh. Truly appreciate it! Also because it’s SUCCESSION a FINALE NIGHT !!!!!!!!!!!!! The tension between me and Neon and me refreshing the app every two seconds I swear!!
What I have found challenging is it was really easy to set boundaries with my kids when they were younger but now my eldest has just turned 18 and I’m like - I need to let him adult now! Both my husband and I have a couple of games we like to have a hoon on, and I think it’s heaps easier to have conversations about boundaries when it’s from a place of “oh, that’s annoying! I hate it when I have to stop playing to do real life” rather than acting like it’s all a waste of time. We have the privilege of space, so we have a room for all the gaming stuff and it’s all set up so that when I say “no gaming in bedrooms” it’s not punitive, it’s like “you have a place to play”. We loved the Wii and now we love the Switch, our Xbox mostly gathers dust!
Yes, my husband and 8 year old play Zelda together, though husband gets frustrated when the 8yo wants to go and do his own thing, and not continue with the main quest, lol, have to keep reminding Husband that kid is 8.
When Animal Corssing came out, even my then 4yo wanted to play with me. He still has his own house, and I'm meant to be helping him pay off his loan so he can get more rooms...
This is all so cute. I played adopt me with the kids and I just had to carry Ham around and take him to get food and take him to the park - felt like double parenting 😂
That’s so cute about Zelda and animal crossing! I don’t play Zelda with the 6 year old much, she is obsessed with cooking and keeps filling up all my meals 😂! She also loves animal crossing but is kind of ambivalent about the quests, throws the fish back and displays them all over the island, chops my trees etc etc!!
Oh, Definitely had issues when we were both actively playing Animal Crossing, so I feel your pain.
Cut bits, oh, he was actually 3, almost 4 😅, but yea, 3yo tried to make his character have a bath, and got equally frustrated with his character still in clothes (don't get into the bath with your undies on!) and not actually being able to get into the bath
Great piece! I’m always horrified by the ads that come up on free mobile games - even “good” games like sudoku have ads for horrendous misogynistic or porny looking games popping up every 5 minutes. I’d be inclined to play something myself for a bit to screen it before allowing it into kids’ hands!
The only thing worse than mobile games is ads for mobile games - they're so spammy. I have really comprehensive adblockers installed on my laptop browser so don't often encounter them, but as soon as I use the YouTube app I'm spammed with the latest terrible mobile gaming thing.
I think I have to get an adblocker my youngest got obsessed with Worldle and kept trying to find other types of worldle - there was statele and countryle (a stretch I thought) and Tradele which was like shipping lanes or something 😅 I do love watching him play though because he gets it the first time every time. He seems to not even notice the ads and luckily no porn yet but I worry about that a lot!
Safe Surfer is a great app, we use it on my son's tablet and no ads or pop ups. It also gives you updates about what's been blocked which is quite satisfying! It's a few dollars a month, very worth it.
One more game to add. Slime rancher and it’s sequel. My now 6yo started playing this during our eternal Auckland lockdown and it was his first real game. Awesome world, simple concepts and lots to explore and do. Highly recommend. He now plays Fallout 76 and Fortnite with my gamer husband and some restrictions (eg. no chat); and Ben10, Bugsnax, teenage mutant ninja turtles etc. when not being so supervised. We have a game pass which gives access to lots of games for a monthly fee and can be worthwhile instead of having to buy each game.
Really enjoyed this article thank you. I worry about the addictiveness of games and the design that goes into keeping you playing. But on the other side, some of the best conversations I’ve had with my son about disappointment, luck, persistence etc have been while playing Pokémon go together. Also conversations around game design and the urge to collect and balancing that with constant releases of new stuff. So overall it was a really positive experience playing alongside him (I wasn’t into it before he was, picked it up so I knew what was going on). I feel much more balanced about the idea of moving to a console and the pro/cons after reading this, thank you!! The couch co-op stuff was particularly helpful.
Thanks so much for this article. There's so much bad press around gaming/screens so it's nice to see some positives talked about! My ND boy loves Among Us so good to hear it's ok! He played Grand Theft Auto at his cousins a couple of times, loved just driving the cars around and stuck to all the road rules. Told us about how he picked up his bosses "friend" (a prostitute)! Not allowed anymore 😂
When kids play GTA they do often try to follow the road rules - which is very challenging! I'd always try to steer kids away from that series but they really are excellent games for adults. I'm not thrilled by the storylines or humour of the two most recent GTA games, I reckon they're trying too hard to be edgy, but the open-world gameplay sandbox does allow you a lot of freedom. We used to play GTA V as wind-down after work, and one of the minigames we invented was enabling a cheat that lets a character fall from the sky and trying to skydive them into the back of a ute on the motorway. We only ever pulled it off once but we had fun trying.
If you're after a car game that replicates some of the enjoyable chaos of GTA without the wildly inappropriate language, setting, and violence, Burnout Paradise Remastered is a good get. It's probably still best for older kids but it's awesome fun.
Thanks Josh! That was a quick turn around Emily, from offer to publication, so well done for that.
Seems like as a gamer parent it covered everything, and even some stuff I would have forgotten to say, but nodded my head along to.
Games list: As soon as you said Crash Bandicoot I was all "He should include Spyro too, I'll mention in the comments..." and then didn't need to. My husband and I game together (Destiny 2 for parents playing at home) which means that we run two consoles. My console runs to the TV, and is also our main source for streaming services. My husband bought a monitor quite a few years ago now (before covid was a thing) so he pulls out a small table in the living room with me, and hooks everything up that way. When playing with other people online we either have to apologise for the echo (with our voices going through 2 mics) or turn one of them off... which also confuses people, as (in our games case) one persons username comes up regardless which one of us speaks...
But this duel set up means that our kids can play *some* games in couch co-op (one screen) and others they can play together on the two screens. If they are playing on the two consoles it's either a free-to-play game, or the game my husband and I play. This one is still too complex for them at this stage, heck, sometimes it feels to complex for me, and I defer to my husband.
I did have an upset 6yo the other week when I told him that I was not going to let him put The Sims on his tablet... I just know first, how annoyed and frustrated I got with the game, and he doesn't quite have the coping skills there yet, but also, I remembered what we did with those games. Apparently the offer of other "Sim" games was not useful, like SimCity etc
Anyway, this is massive, so I might leave this here for now. Oh, one rule that we have enforced so far is no online chat at all, not until we are more comfortable with their own abilities to manage people being dickheads. But also extra warning for keeping an eye on the misogyny out there, it can be pretty rife, or bubbling just under the surface, especially with streamers.
This is so fascinating! Sims is the one game I actually played as a teen and all I did was make the sims have sex with each other. When the boys asked for it I said yes because I wanted to play and I was fascinated! They have non binary sims now! They have CGMs and insulin pumps for sims! Anyway my eldest refuses to play it because he can’t cope with the idea that they can kiss and my youngest adores it. He excitedly told me his sim is pregnant and I asked how that happened and he said “my husband and wife went to dinner until they had enough love points” so I don’t know if they fuck anymore 😂😅
Yes, all the sex! But I wasn't worried about that... Yet... It was more that I could never keep my Sims satisfied and/or at work on time, as well as develop friendships etc, it was exhausting, and it wasn't even my life! And while he is getting better at regulating, it can still be a big task, so if we can not have to deal with that in relation to a game when we deal with it elsewhere...
Thank you for this awesome article - this makes me more confident. Especially grateful for the comment about minecraft, my soon to be 6 year old is very keen on it, but had no idea it was educational.
I really like Minecraft. I was pretty against it until I went in and saw my youngest son’s world. He’d spelled his name using buildings and that was before he could hold a pencil - I really started to understand how it can unlock a world for kids they might not have in the so-called ‘real world’. He told me he could run really fast in Minecraft “and I don’t even need Pat to do it” (Pat is his occupational therapist).
Great piece Josh! It’s a fascinating area that deserves more coverage.
My son is quite the PlayStation kid though we do have a Switch lite. We tend towards 3D platformers but we do run into sections that require “daddy help!”
His favourite at the moment is local multiplayer in Gang Beasts, where we kinda just goof around, breaking stuff.
Been wanting to get him to try Minecraft but first-person is a bit of a struggle on a controller. He can’t quite manage two analog sticks at the same time! And inventory management will probably pose a problem. Maybe another year from now!
For parents with Apple devices I would strongly recommend Apple Arcade which has a curated selection of games without ads. I have found some of the games are repurposed that originally had gacha mechanics so they still have virtual currencies (without the in-app purchases).
For folks wanting more on this, games reporter, Patrick Klepek is launching a newsletter on parenting and gaming, supposedly this week:
My son was really into Donut County on the iPad for a while. Really approachable, you control a hole in the ground swallowing up everything on screen (we just skipped past the dialog bubbles)
The kids love playing crash bandicoot and I got Songbird Symphony (for me) which is calming, visually beautiful and adorable, basically you are a little birb and you move around an interactive world doing little challenges and having the occasional song battle
On the iPad: Bad Piggies. It’s from the angry birds world but a game of physics and can be quite hard!
On the XboX: Totally Reliable Delivery Service. Wobbly guys like the fall guys guys. Working as a team is super important in this game and my two super bickery kids will go totally silent trying to get the packages delivered. Plus there’s a bit of fart humour that the kids enjoy.
And oh man my husband and son have been playing Zelda constantly and I reckon they haven’t scratched the surface.
Oh crumbs I forgot about some great games I could have listed as amazing for couch co-op! Totally Reliable Delivery Service and Overcooked are both fantastic games in the "chaotic co-op" genre. Love them both.
For older teens, and adults, Broforce is one of the funniest and most enjoyable games we've ever played. Clocked it with my wife and another couple and we spent the entire game in hysterics.
This is great! My brother bought my kids a Switch for Christmas (gamer uncle). I wasn’t sure how it would go but have been pleasantly surprised. It has been good family fun playing the sports games and Mario cart together. They love it when Mum or Dad join in. Our five year old has clocked the Pokemon game and it drastically improved his motivation to read.
I forgot to mention - games can help kids read! I have not dipped into the research on this yet so take it with a grain of salt, but many games (particularly role-playing games like Pokémon) have a huge reading requirement to get through them. I bet if the kids saw all the game text they’ve seen put into a book they’d be shocked by how much reading they’ve done.
Hi all, thanks for reading my non-gamer-parent gaming guide (and thanks so much to Emily for hosting it!) When I write guest articles I like to hang around in the comments and answer any questions people might have. There's a lot of stuff around gaming I just couldn't fit into an article that was already really long, so let me know if I can be any help. I've just had my Covid and flu booster so I'm feeling a bit foggy, but I'll do my best to be coherent :)
Thanks so much Josh. Truly appreciate it! Also because it’s SUCCESSION a FINALE NIGHT !!!!!!!!!!!!! The tension between me and Neon and me refreshing the app every two seconds I swear!!
What I have found challenging is it was really easy to set boundaries with my kids when they were younger but now my eldest has just turned 18 and I’m like - I need to let him adult now! Both my husband and I have a couple of games we like to have a hoon on, and I think it’s heaps easier to have conversations about boundaries when it’s from a place of “oh, that’s annoying! I hate it when I have to stop playing to do real life” rather than acting like it’s all a waste of time. We have the privilege of space, so we have a room for all the gaming stuff and it’s all set up so that when I say “no gaming in bedrooms” it’s not punitive, it’s like “you have a place to play”. We loved the Wii and now we love the Switch, our Xbox mostly gathers dust!
I adore gaming. But no time so am super selective about what I play.
I have the new Zelda Tears of the Kingdom and it is magnificent.
Great game for kids who are younger is Animal Crossing and Ring Fit Adventure is so much fun together
Obviously I have a switch!
Yes, my husband and 8 year old play Zelda together, though husband gets frustrated when the 8yo wants to go and do his own thing, and not continue with the main quest, lol, have to keep reminding Husband that kid is 8.
When Animal Corssing came out, even my then 4yo wanted to play with me. He still has his own house, and I'm meant to be helping him pay off his loan so he can get more rooms...
This is all so cute. I played adopt me with the kids and I just had to carry Ham around and take him to get food and take him to the park - felt like double parenting 😂
That’s so cute about Zelda and animal crossing! I don’t play Zelda with the 6 year old much, she is obsessed with cooking and keeps filling up all my meals 😂! She also loves animal crossing but is kind of ambivalent about the quests, throws the fish back and displays them all over the island, chops my trees etc etc!!
Ring fit adventure is very very fun
Oh, Definitely had issues when we were both actively playing Animal Crossing, so I feel your pain.
Cut bits, oh, he was actually 3, almost 4 😅, but yea, 3yo tried to make his character have a bath, and got equally frustrated with his character still in clothes (don't get into the bath with your undies on!) and not actually being able to get into the bath
Haaa!!
Great piece! I’m always horrified by the ads that come up on free mobile games - even “good” games like sudoku have ads for horrendous misogynistic or porny looking games popping up every 5 minutes. I’d be inclined to play something myself for a bit to screen it before allowing it into kids’ hands!
The only thing worse than mobile games is ads for mobile games - they're so spammy. I have really comprehensive adblockers installed on my laptop browser so don't often encounter them, but as soon as I use the YouTube app I'm spammed with the latest terrible mobile gaming thing.
I think I have to get an adblocker my youngest got obsessed with Worldle and kept trying to find other types of worldle - there was statele and countryle (a stretch I thought) and Tradele which was like shipping lanes or something 😅 I do love watching him play though because he gets it the first time every time. He seems to not even notice the ads and luckily no porn yet but I worry about that a lot!
Safe Surfer is a great app, we use it on my son's tablet and no ads or pop ups. It also gives you updates about what's been blocked which is quite satisfying! It's a few dollars a month, very worth it.
Oh thank you so much!
I literally delete games if the ads are too frequent, or must be played to get past a certain point, and that repeats over and over.
This is an excellent guide! And it’s arrived at a really timely point in our lives. Thank you.
Same for us! We just started talking about getting a console last week. Thanks Emily and Josh!
Great time for me too!
One more game to add. Slime rancher and it’s sequel. My now 6yo started playing this during our eternal Auckland lockdown and it was his first real game. Awesome world, simple concepts and lots to explore and do. Highly recommend. He now plays Fallout 76 and Fortnite with my gamer husband and some restrictions (eg. no chat); and Ben10, Bugsnax, teenage mutant ninja turtles etc. when not being so supervised. We have a game pass which gives access to lots of games for a monthly fee and can be worthwhile instead of having to buy each game.
Really enjoyed this article thank you. I worry about the addictiveness of games and the design that goes into keeping you playing. But on the other side, some of the best conversations I’ve had with my son about disappointment, luck, persistence etc have been while playing Pokémon go together. Also conversations around game design and the urge to collect and balancing that with constant releases of new stuff. So overall it was a really positive experience playing alongside him (I wasn’t into it before he was, picked it up so I knew what was going on). I feel much more balanced about the idea of moving to a console and the pro/cons after reading this, thank you!! The couch co-op stuff was particularly helpful.
This is bloody great! Thank you!
Thanks so much for this article. There's so much bad press around gaming/screens so it's nice to see some positives talked about! My ND boy loves Among Us so good to hear it's ok! He played Grand Theft Auto at his cousins a couple of times, loved just driving the cars around and stuck to all the road rules. Told us about how he picked up his bosses "friend" (a prostitute)! Not allowed anymore 😂
When kids play GTA they do often try to follow the road rules - which is very challenging! I'd always try to steer kids away from that series but they really are excellent games for adults. I'm not thrilled by the storylines or humour of the two most recent GTA games, I reckon they're trying too hard to be edgy, but the open-world gameplay sandbox does allow you a lot of freedom. We used to play GTA V as wind-down after work, and one of the minigames we invented was enabling a cheat that lets a character fall from the sky and trying to skydive them into the back of a ute on the motorway. We only ever pulled it off once but we had fun trying.
If you're after a car game that replicates some of the enjoyable chaos of GTA without the wildly inappropriate language, setting, and violence, Burnout Paradise Remastered is a good get. It's probably still best for older kids but it's awesome fun.
Reminds me of the Bo Burnham lyric - “Reading Pornhub's terms of service, going for a drive
And obeying all the traffic laws in Grand Theft Auto V”
Thanks Josh! That was a quick turn around Emily, from offer to publication, so well done for that.
Seems like as a gamer parent it covered everything, and even some stuff I would have forgotten to say, but nodded my head along to.
Games list: As soon as you said Crash Bandicoot I was all "He should include Spyro too, I'll mention in the comments..." and then didn't need to. My husband and I game together (Destiny 2 for parents playing at home) which means that we run two consoles. My console runs to the TV, and is also our main source for streaming services. My husband bought a monitor quite a few years ago now (before covid was a thing) so he pulls out a small table in the living room with me, and hooks everything up that way. When playing with other people online we either have to apologise for the echo (with our voices going through 2 mics) or turn one of them off... which also confuses people, as (in our games case) one persons username comes up regardless which one of us speaks...
But this duel set up means that our kids can play *some* games in couch co-op (one screen) and others they can play together on the two screens. If they are playing on the two consoles it's either a free-to-play game, or the game my husband and I play. This one is still too complex for them at this stage, heck, sometimes it feels to complex for me, and I defer to my husband.
I did have an upset 6yo the other week when I told him that I was not going to let him put The Sims on his tablet... I just know first, how annoyed and frustrated I got with the game, and he doesn't quite have the coping skills there yet, but also, I remembered what we did with those games. Apparently the offer of other "Sim" games was not useful, like SimCity etc
Anyway, this is massive, so I might leave this here for now. Oh, one rule that we have enforced so far is no online chat at all, not until we are more comfortable with their own abilities to manage people being dickheads. But also extra warning for keeping an eye on the misogyny out there, it can be pretty rife, or bubbling just under the surface, especially with streamers.
This is so fascinating! Sims is the one game I actually played as a teen and all I did was make the sims have sex with each other. When the boys asked for it I said yes because I wanted to play and I was fascinated! They have non binary sims now! They have CGMs and insulin pumps for sims! Anyway my eldest refuses to play it because he can’t cope with the idea that they can kiss and my youngest adores it. He excitedly told me his sim is pregnant and I asked how that happened and he said “my husband and wife went to dinner until they had enough love points” so I don’t know if they fuck anymore 😂😅
Yes, all the sex! But I wasn't worried about that... Yet... It was more that I could never keep my Sims satisfied and/or at work on time, as well as develop friendships etc, it was exhausting, and it wasn't even my life! And while he is getting better at regulating, it can still be a big task, so if we can not have to deal with that in relation to a game when we deal with it elsewhere...
Oh that makes sense haha I did not really care about my Sims wellbeing which is probably not great 😅
Thank you for this awesome article - this makes me more confident. Especially grateful for the comment about minecraft, my soon to be 6 year old is very keen on it, but had no idea it was educational.
Thanks for reading! Minecraft can be amazingly educational if you take the right approach. People have recreated museums and real-world landscapes in Minecraft, and a lot of educational worlds can be downloaded for free in Minecraft itself. There are some resources here: https://education.minecraft.net/en-us/get-started/parents and here: https://www.minecraft.net/en-us/article/free-educational-content-minecraft-marketplace-
I really like Minecraft. I was pretty against it until I went in and saw my youngest son’s world. He’d spelled his name using buildings and that was before he could hold a pencil - I really started to understand how it can unlock a world for kids they might not have in the so-called ‘real world’. He told me he could run really fast in Minecraft “and I don’t even need Pat to do it” (Pat is his occupational therapist).
Legend! Thanks heaps Josh
Great piece Josh! It’s a fascinating area that deserves more coverage.
My son is quite the PlayStation kid though we do have a Switch lite. We tend towards 3D platformers but we do run into sections that require “daddy help!”
His favourite at the moment is local multiplayer in Gang Beasts, where we kinda just goof around, breaking stuff.
Been wanting to get him to try Minecraft but first-person is a bit of a struggle on a controller. He can’t quite manage two analog sticks at the same time! And inventory management will probably pose a problem. Maybe another year from now!
For parents with Apple devices I would strongly recommend Apple Arcade which has a curated selection of games without ads. I have found some of the games are repurposed that originally had gacha mechanics so they still have virtual currencies (without the in-app purchases).
For folks wanting more on this, games reporter, Patrick Klepek is launching a newsletter on parenting and gaming, supposedly this week:
https://patrickklepek.substack.com/
My son was really into Donut County on the iPad for a while. Really approachable, you control a hole in the ground swallowing up everything on screen (we just skipped past the dialog bubbles)
Great piece, really informative - thank you!
The kids love playing crash bandicoot and I got Songbird Symphony (for me) which is calming, visually beautiful and adorable, basically you are a little birb and you move around an interactive world doing little challenges and having the occasional song battle
Songbird symphony sounds lovely! What do you play it on?
Did I mention the birb found out he was adopted and is on a quest to find his origins?? 🥹
PS4! The same whodanga thingy that you got 😁
Just a couple games to add to this list.
On the iPad: Bad Piggies. It’s from the angry birds world but a game of physics and can be quite hard!
On the XboX: Totally Reliable Delivery Service. Wobbly guys like the fall guys guys. Working as a team is super important in this game and my two super bickery kids will go totally silent trying to get the packages delivered. Plus there’s a bit of fart humour that the kids enjoy.
And oh man my husband and son have been playing Zelda constantly and I reckon they haven’t scratched the surface.
Looks like Totally Reliable Delivery Service is also on PlayStation. Gonna give it a whirl with my son!
Get yourself caught in a tornado to see what happens! ;)
Oh crumbs I forgot about some great games I could have listed as amazing for couch co-op! Totally Reliable Delivery Service and Overcooked are both fantastic games in the "chaotic co-op" genre. Love them both.
For older teens, and adults, Broforce is one of the funniest and most enjoyable games we've ever played. Clocked it with my wife and another couple and we spent the entire game in hysterics.
Great article. We have a switch that the five year old plays sports and Mario on. He gets so angry when he loses though!
This is great! My brother bought my kids a Switch for Christmas (gamer uncle). I wasn’t sure how it would go but have been pleasantly surprised. It has been good family fun playing the sports games and Mario cart together. They love it when Mum or Dad join in. Our five year old has clocked the Pokemon game and it drastically improved his motivation to read.
I forgot to mention - games can help kids read! I have not dipped into the research on this yet so take it with a grain of salt, but many games (particularly role-playing games like Pokémon) have a huge reading requirement to get through them. I bet if the kids saw all the game text they’ve seen put into a book they’d be shocked by how much reading they’ve done.
That’s so great Vicki. My kids are begging me for a switch!
I initially had really tight parental control time limits but loosened them up when I saw so many positives