We play games together and his interests are often sparked by mine. But the dark side to gaming in the 21st century is they can easily become all-encompassing at the expense of a lot of things that I mentioned above (outside interests, etc.) Much of the modern gaming stack is engineered for total immersion and focus stealing, and leaves little room for outside interests.
I played games as a boy and young man as well. But I also wrote BASIC and 6502 assembly, or built forts in the woods, looked at neat plants, soldered projects for my VIC-20 or Atari ST, read ElfQuest graphic novels and acted them out with my friends, explored the local RadioShack, rode my bike, etc. The nature of my son's gaming obsessions has actually made it hard to get him to diversify.
Parenting is not easy. Defining limits is hard, but if you don't things can go
sideways really badly and we have learned this the hard way.
