How my son made me a casual gamer. And I am better for it.

For most of my gaming life I was not the kind of person that never saw the credits of games. With a few exceptions like Sonic The Hedgehog 2 and Crash Team Racing, it rarely happened. I would always get distracted by some other thing I wanted to play. In early 2018 – after a bad breakup the fall prior and an entire rebuild of my life – I got a Nintendo Switch. But the bad habit continued…. Worse, actually. I had adult money now so I bought way more games, which meant a backlog. 

In early 2021 my son was born. That year I basically played one game: Dragon Quest XI. At the time I worked overnight and took care of my son during the day. With my and my wife’s schedules being what they were, I only got 4 hours of sleep a day, tops. I was exhausted to say the least. The only time I played games was during downtime at work (overnight jobs have a fair amount of time). 

I chipped away at DQ XI, finally finishing it over the course of a year. There was a lesson here that I didn’t learn right away: You can get just as much joy from 1 game a year as you can 20. Parenting took most of my time and while I got more time, I didn’t have the frame of mind to tackle another game as big as DQ XI. (That game was something truly special for me, so I think that helped.)

Enter… the session game.

In 2020 we got THPS 1+2, and this is a perfect example of a session game. I eventually realized that as my kid got older and wasn’t just a potato, I needed to play the kinds of games that not only could be picked up and put down easily, but left unplayed for long periods of time. 

This was how I played for year 2 of parenthood. The problem: I was still buying games at a faster pace compared to play time, and I still hadn't finished many of them. So I created an actual list of every game I owned, which ones I’d beaten, which ones I was currently playing, and which ones I’d fallen off of. This really helped because I had an actual representation of when I was playing too many things at once, or ignoring the “main game” I was supposed to be playing. The idea was one big “story” game – for me that is usually a JRPG – and one “pick up and play” game. At the time of writing, those games are “Like a Dragon: Infinite Wealth” and “Sonic Racing Cross Worlds. Also on the list (now that my kid is old enough to play games) is one game I am playing with him, currently “Yoshi’s Crafted World”. 

This system works for me, but I noticed one problem. I was thinking too much about completing games, and trying to play as many per year as possible so I could chip away at the backlog, and I was not spending time with the game in a meaningful way.

In 2025 the Switch 2 is released and I just happen to have a few extra bucks. My wife and I agreed to buy it for the family as a holiday gift. This was going to be our kid’s first console, the first thing that he will think of as “his.” So that felt like a good time to reevaluate my approach to games, and to create the framework that he would be experiencing games within. 

You hear it all the time: “Gaming just isn’t the same” or “gaming feels different now”. Or see videos about how gaming once you reach a certain age is different or worse. So I found myself wondering why. While this was happening, I was also reevaluating my relationship with technology at large, the internet, and the attention economy. I don’t have any social media accounts, but once I became a parent I found myself very aware of the people around me and how that world interacted with smartphones. The short version… I got rid of my smartphone, got some magazine subscriptions, and moved all of my internet use to an actual computer, at a desk. The first time I noticed a family of four out at a restaurant, each with their own device and not once did they even speak to one another, something broke in my brain. 

It was with all of this in mind that I considered my approach. Physical games, brick and mortar stores, and simply buying less. Gone were the days of constantly checking the digital storefront for sales and having hundreds of games all available to me with the click of a button. My kid was going to have as close to an experience with games as I did in the 90’s/2000’s, at least as close as was reasonably possible. 

This to me meant rooting it in intention, even in the smallest of ways. Wanna change the game? Get up and do it. Wanna buy a game? Well, we need to carve out time to go to the store and get it. And with the price of games going up and Nintendo games rarely going on sale compared to other companies, that meant fewer games and more thought out purchases.

We only get so much time with our kids before they have to find their own way in the world. I don’t know exactly when that will be for my son, but I do know I have an obligation. I have to impart on him the wisdom he will need to survive this world of “content” and AI. And I think the best thing I can do for him is teach him to focus, slow down and appreciate what he has in a world of blink and you forget you even missed it.