Family Friday: The Family That Plays Together Stays Together

This is our wall of Guitar Hero/Rock Band controllers. As it turns out, this is much safer (and better looking) than sitting them on the floor leaning against the wall. My favorite thing about these music-themed games is that, since you can pick your difficulty level individually, we can all play together as a family regardless of how many hours we have logged on. Derrick plays a lot, while I only pick up a guitar controller when we play as a family or when company comes over. Also, this is one of the few games we can get Shawn to play that is creative rather than destructive. And that ROCKS!

The Gamer In Me

As I have mentioned before, I am not a hardcore gamer, even though most of my friends are. I just have so many other things to do, the business I am trying to build (including new product experiments), books I want to read, painting, and organizing my life and my stuff, that I don't have the time or the energy to spend cultivating gamer skills. This is most noticeable in shooters or platform games. People who have played video games since childhood find these pretty easy, but I never even touched a controller until I was well into college life so it would take months of practice to bring myself to the level of my peers. But even with these disadvantages, there are games that I enjoy.

My favorite kinds of games are fighting games and puzzle games. Puzzle games require mental skills that I already have, and I like fighting games because I can get away with button-mashing. I don't win much against more skilled people (practice, remember?), but as long as I can give a good fight and I don't go down too easy I don't care. I guess the point is that being a casual gamer can be fun as long as you have a good grasp of sportsmanship.

Family Friday: The Things We Do...

This post is dedicated to the crazy things that parents do to look cool for their kids. I think that, even more than showing off for a romantic interest, parents are driven to jump through hoops in the hope of gaining their children's approval/pride. The words, "That's my mom/dad. He/she is the coolest," rank right up there with, "I love you." How do I know? Experience.

I was talking with one of Derrick's roommates about a video game he was playing, one that takes more time and skill than I possess. I'm mostly a casual game-player. I enjoy puzzle games, fighting games, as well as some other games that don't require skills above button-mashing. More on that in a different post. So I say to the roommate, "I haven't played that game. I'm not really much of a career gamer," and Shawn pipes right up with, "You're not much of a gamer at all."

 Shawn was born with a controller in his hand. Me... not so much.

I don't know what came over me. I had a sudden, intense, and overwhelming desire to take a game and play it until I was good enough to impress Shawn, despite the fact that I don't have the time for that kind of practice and I never had any previous inclinations toward marathon gaming.

The point of this example is to highlight one of the less common ways we show love for our children, because we definitely wouldn't behave so irrationally if we didn't love them so much.