Gaming with Children: defcon 1

It’s Saturday night, but officially Sunday because it’s past midnight. Defcon 2. This is why you can’t stay up all hours of the night gaming. Abigail, the 17-month-old, has a fever. We’re out of children’s Tylenol. I’m going to the 24 hour pharmacy for medicine. While I’m there I get a call from the wife. Magdalene, the pukinator, is screaming about her ear. We place an emergency phone call to the pediatrician while I’m standing in the pharmacy. An hour later I’m home, the medicines have been applied, and everyone goes to sleep.

After the jump, we go to defcon 1

When we awake early in the morning, Magdalene’s crying about her ear again. She’s in pain. This is no earache. We’re off to the emergency room. She has an ear infection, bad. It all ends well, but it goes to show you that with kids, anything can happen at any time. You need to be well rested to handle it with patience and care.

So to recap, these are the recurring themes.

*You need a laptop to game. If you’re on a desktop your time is drastically reduced. On the laptop I can at least sit in the den with the family while they watch some crap show. If I had a desktop in a private room, I’d have the kids in there constantly, and the wife nagging that I don’t spend enough time with them.

*Fuck your always-on internet connection for single player games. I’m not around an internet connection to play your internet-connection-required single-player games. So I can’t play your single player game even though I want to. Sigh.

*Limited chunks of game time. You are never gonna get like four hours of uninterrupted game time. You’ll notice I get at most two hours, but average an hour at a time. And if you don’t have a save-anywhere system, you just borked me in the back alley. In this regard, indie games rule.

I love my wife. I love being married. I love my kids. I love spending time with my kids. Without them I wouldn’t be gaming. I’d be working on creating a family. But I also love myself, and enjoy spending time alone, doing my own thing. But you don’t get to be alone. In some ways, you lose yourself. Imagine spending year after year doing what others need/want, with little to no time for yourself. In many ways “running” a family is just as stressful as running a business. It wears you down. Sometimes you have to resort to unsavory methods just to make a little room for you.

Up next: it all begins again
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J.P. Lucas works, pays bills, eats, and sleeps. He changes diapers. Lots of diapers. And he does whatever his wife tells him to do. It’s safer that way.