Have you ever tried to have your parents play a game they don't know how to play?

I'm just curious if anyone has any good stories and what game it was. The only time I got close to it was my dad taking an interest in the first Halo game, but he nor my mom could ever grasp the controls, so when we played co-op he would just go in circles. We only made it to the point of the waterfall on the first Halo. Oh, and my dad also played some of GTA 4 which was random as he was doing it on his own volition and he was the one that bought Ratchet & Clank: Tools of Destruction and played a little of it. My mom is into zombies, and I tried to have her play The Last of Us, but she didn't try it, unfortunately, because she says she just doesn't know how to control it. They know how to play (albeit not all that well mind you) games like Super Mario, Star Fox, Pilot Wings and Mario Kart or many of the Nintendo or race car N64/SNES games, otherwise, it's a no go. Does anyone have any good stories about trying to have your parents play games? The thought just came up watching the Elders Play on YouTube.

The xmas my cousin brought Rock Band beatles over was the last time my parents played a game, there was about 10 of my family playing, and as a the only gamer I looked like a GOD for playing on hard haha. I tried recently with jackbox but they were not interested at all!

I had my parents watch the Last of Us intro, and they were totally enthralled by it and interested in seeing more (though they ultimately never played it or watched me play it).

I also had my parents and in-laws play some VR which is always a funny experiment.

My Dad on a whim just started playing Burnout Paradise. He put it down after 30 minutes because he didn't like you were in an open world and had to drive to the next race.

I recently convinced my mom to play Animal Crossing New Leaf! She never thought to give video games a shot before b/c she figured all games were about winning. It's really interesting to watch someone who's never, ever played a video game figure out controls for the first time! Instructions I take for granted - like walking with the circle pad or tapping A to advance text - aren't intuitive if you're experiencing it for the first time. We'll see if she sticks to it. I hope so! :^)

I found an old picture of my dad opening a brand-new NES from the 80s this past Christmas, which makes me want to try to introduce him to some modern games! Unfortunately, I have no idea where to start. He's got a pretty short attention span when it comes to trying new things, so I'm having trouble thinking of what games might hook him very quickly. (His hilarious views on video game violence also make this quite tricky!)

EDIT: I just remembered! My dad's actually interested in playing Cuphead for a pretty cool reason. His grandfather was a semi-famous animator during the golden age, and my dad was shocked that there's a video game out there that looks like something my family has a lot of pride about :^)

One time I convinced my dad to play Smash Bros. with me and my friends, I think it was Brawl. He was the one who got me into gaming, and was an early adopter of stuff like Pong and Atari. Mostly we played racing or old arcade games together, but the one time we played Smash was pretty funny. He just picked Link and kept doing the Up + B sword spinning thing, which worked surprisingly well. Think he might've gotten a few kills but obviously didn't do so well, it was still a lot of fun though and he was laughing the whole time. Good memories :)

I always wished he would be more open to playing video games, but it got to be harder to get him to play as time went on. Lost him to cancer a few years ago, but I cherish memories of having fun together playing Ms Pac-man and Gran Turismo. If it weren't for him I never would've gotten into gaming so much!

I have a pretty good lifetime record against my mom in Mortal Kombat 2 and Mortal Kombat Trilogy. I also used her as a test subject for Halo 3 maps I was making some to screw over my friends. I used my step-dad as a punching bag for Mortal Kombat 2 too. When my biological father and I reconnected after my first year of college, i remember showing him AC: Brotherhood and some other 360 games. He later borrowed my OG Xbox but I don’t think he ever used it.

My dad and I play guitar so I tried to teach him Guitar Hero 2 (back when it launched) since I thought he'd be interested. He thought it was funny but he really couldn't get past any easy songs.

When I jumped back on the console train with the PS3 my dad asked to check it out one day. I had him try out Uncharted, as I thought the cinematic structure would be appealing, but having no experience he struggled quite badly with dual stick movement and camera control. He did sorta enjoy it, but not enough to want to stick with it. He got pretty startled the first time the controller rumbled though.

Other than that I had the Wii on my wishlist for Xmas the year it came out, but they couldn't find one. A few years later though they bought one for themselves, and they quite enjoy playing bowling with their grandkids.

My father has never touched a game, and my mother has only ever played Mario Kart 64 (the best one) and some Bejeweled style games, but i did run an experiment on her once. I was playing a first person shooter on the PC one day when she was nearby and i must have recently listened to a bombcast talking about the difficulty of video game controls, because i introduced her to the concept of moving a character in first person using WASD, i challenged her to learn how to run in smooth perfect circles using those 4 keys :P, the results were very entertaining.

I once got my 70 year old father to try dark souls as a bit of a joke but he ended up actually taking a liking to it. Since then he has cleared the entire souls series, Ocarina of Time, Wind Waker and is about to finish Metroid Prime. In the case of souls series it takes him hundreds of hours, but he finally gets through them with sheer tenacity. This probably sounds really harsh, but it is really fascinating, and really amusing watching someone so lacking in the skills needed to clear these games, and the lack of ability to develop them struggle through them anyway. He's a good sport about it though, and is happy to poke fun at himself. I could not stop laughing at the 80+ tries it took him to get through the lost woods in Ocarina.

@violentsquirrel: Holy shit, your dad sounds awesome.

My mom sadly never had the patience or energy for anything like that. Not IRL, so let alone 'for fun'.

Btw:about playing guitar hero for the first time with someone who plays real guitar: DONT start on easy/normal. I play real guitar too and I can only play on hard without praticing lol, normal and easy have so little notes Im constantly confused and perform like shit, and extreme often did require practice. Hard is still not anything like playing real guitar but its the only difficulty that felt immediately natural to me.

I never tried to get my mom to play games but she took it on herself to play a bit through Suikoden on her own time, I never appreciated it until later in life and I regret not being more supportive of that. When I was going through my divorce and stayed at my mom for a while we did have fun playing Tricky Towers against each other though. My dad always liked playing racing or rally games (being a car guy). But I once handed him a controller when I was playing through GTA IV. I left for the bathroom and when I came back my dad was laughing his ass off as he was running around beating people up on the street and getting killed by the cops in the process.

My mom used to play games on Sega Megadrive back in the day. In fact, she’d play it more than me at times and finish up some games before I did. After that slowed down, she would still play some platformers on pc, but that also came to a halt around the early 2000, iirc.

These days my mom and dad both just play mobile games, if anything. Not much of a change for my dad, since he played Tetris and Solitaire on pc as well. I’ve been thinking about bringing along a PS4 during christmas, but we’d probably all lose our nerves with trying to teach them to use modern controllers.

Mom always had an interest in collectathon platformers. She's beat pretty much every Spyro game, Ratchet and Clank, Jak series (I'm surprised she made it through Jak 2 tbh). And a few otheres along those lines.

So obviously I figured once we got a Wii, that she should probably try a Mario game for the first time. Those games are basically the essence of the genre right? So we picked up Galaxy 1 and she was mostly enjoying it, but watching that really showed me how much more mechanics focus 3D Mario is compared to some of the other games. That platforming ended up being waaaay too challenging and she got really frustrated and eventually quit. Though I think part of it was also that she hadn't played games in years at that point so some of the old experience was degraded. She kinda stopped taking an interest midway through PS2 era.

Much funnier was actually when one of my cousins wanted to connect a little bit more with me and suggested we play Halo co-op since he had heard of it. He's usually more of a hiker/sports outdoorsy guy and don't really play games. But yeah when he picked up the controller and for the first time tried to comprehend dual analogue control and first person perspective.... Shit was mind-blowing to me. Just spinning in circles and not being able to move in any capacity that he intended. Something that feels so natural after all these years of playing games to me, being so miserably failed at was really neat. The contrast was so stark It pretty much instantly put everything into perspective. He was a good sport about it though, mostly thought it was funny too. Really nice guy.