Help me out fellow Gamer Dads and Moms!

What a year 2015 turned out to be for me!

I went from living what I considered to be a busy life to leading an actually busy life. My wife and I of 5+ years welcomed our first child Zachary into the world in late June. I thought I had life figured out and I knew better than anyone what to expect. We waited to have our first child. I'm now 31, she's 30. We both have great jobs, own a house and two cars, are stable financially and have quick commutes to work. If anyone was ready, I figured, it was us!

After the first week we settled into parenthood and I thought, man this isn't so bad. You change a diaper, feed them, burp them and love them. I even still had time to play a game here and there! After the first week I was getting ready to head back to work and then a simple wellness doctors visit changed everything. Turns out there was a problem with my sons heart, it was beating way too fast. Two hospitals later and I'm looking at little Zachary on monitors in a children's hospital in the ICU. After a few days the doctors are telling us to prepare ourselves for the worst. It's a feeling that is hard to describe and I wouldn't wish on my worst enemy. I can honestly say that the despair I felt was the worst thing to go through in my life.

Remarkably, Zachary's heart started beating normally again after an iv change. He's on daily medication and doctors are confident about his long term prognosis. A healthy normal life appears to be in his future. Needless to say, this experience changed my life. I thought my priorities had changed before, now they really had. Every moment of my time was devoted to my family as it helped me see how precious life can be.

My wife finally encouraged me to spend some time on myself. I have hobbies. I'm an avid long distance runner (which helped me immensely during this whole process) and I love to hike and fish. Outdoor stuff is hard right now, (its cold!) it takes me out of the home. So I turned to my other hobby, gaming!

This generation, gaming had started to take a backseat for me. I still bought a bunch of redundant consoles and handhelds that I never use. I cleaned house somewhat. PC gaming isn't realistic for me anymore, as I don't want to confine myself to our office.(setting up a PC in our rec room just isn't realistic) We have an Xbox one, a Wii U, 3ds, Vita and Ipad mini2. The ps4 we sold for a wiiU when I realized I didn't need a ps4 and xbox.

So gaming for me now tends to be in short bursts. My wife bought be MGSV for my birthday in September. I just now finished it after Xmas. The wii U has gotten more use than I thought with the accessibility of the gamepad. Mario Maker is fantastic! Both my wife and I loved mario as kids, shes better at platforming then I, so I tend to create levels and watch her try to beat them! Its a great experience. Currently I'm playing Lara Croft Go on my ipad/iphone, and I also blew through Halo 5's campaign in about a week or so. (WTF is going on in Halo these days? I dunno? There are spartans everywhere!) I've also been creeping through Ori and the blind forest. I say creeping because I wasn't expecting the difficulty to be so high!

So my questions for my fellow gamer parents are this. How have your gaming habits changed? Do you find yourself gravitating towards shorter linear experiences? Do mobile games occupy more space for you? I don't want give up gaming, but once my son starts getting older I'm obviously not going to be playing mortal kombat while he watches! Do any of you change your gaming preferences, ala family friendly Nintendo?

These are just a few of my burning questions and I appreciate any feedback. Thanks for taking the time to read everyone!

Congrats on the baby , I'm sorry to hear about the health issues but am glad for the positive prognosis.

I'm a 33 year old father of 2 ( 5 year old boy, he's nuts- 2 year old girl, she is almost as nuts but cuter)

I'm in a very similar situation to you , but I can have a very long commute ( upwards of 2 hours + per day) but that's the construction industry for you.

And yes gaming habits did change, I'm not an outdoorsy person as I Spend most of my days outdoors year round. Now I have to try and make sure my children get fresh air and get their energy out, and also I try not to be one of those parents that's spends time looking at their phone instead of their kids.

Nintendo has been the system of choice for the times I want to play games when the kids are awake, or Lego games( I am done with Lego games now).

I played through MGSV when it came out in 2 hour chunks when the kids were in bed from 7-9.

But I returned witcher 3 since I just don't have the time to play it.

My iPad is now full of counting, letters, and reading games.

It was harder at the beginning, but I adjusted my habits to keep it in my life , giantbomb helps with their quick looks since I can keep up on games without playing everything now.

Congrats on parenthood!

I have two kids, one who will be graduating from high school this year and another who was born with life threatening health problems and a genetic anomaly but is doing well today. I could get into some of the life experiences I've had in that regards but since you asked about how parenthood affected gaming habits I'll delve into that.

First, unless you have a problem stepping away from a game to deal with things (which is a legitimate problem for some), there's no inherent reason you have to give up gaming, however, you're almost certainly going to have to adjust it in some manner at different points.

I remember when my son was particularly young I had to be really conscious about what I was playing around him. Some of this comes down to you and your wife's thoughts about certain content. It's pretty uncontroversial to stay away from really gratuitous gory violence but there all kinds of grey areas (like what to think of bloodless but violent problem solving which is actually pretty prevalent in a lot of games). The whole "hitting as a solution" mechanic starts to feel a bit different when you've spend a good deal of time during the week explaining to your kid how you should and shouldn't solve problems. That kind of led to me missing out on some games that had a lot of buzz at the time and that was a little but of a bummer but the same time it also gave me motivation to seek out and give some other games more of a chance than I may have otherwise been willing to do. Those games I passed up were obviously still there for me to try out later.

A non-content thing I had to adjust to was stepping away from games that either wouldn't let me pause or would suffer if I stepped away. That pretty much killed raiding in MMOs for me and something like DotA really wasn't viable when the kids were younger. I didn't want to be that guy interrupting everyone else's game. Ironically I think it led to me getting to enjoy Dark Souls because I was more willing to accept death as okay since I had to be willing to accept stepping away could happen at any moment even when it was a time I had agreed with my wife to set aside for relaxing. Also led to me rediscovering my love for turn based strategy games.

As the kids got older I started being able to roll certain types of games back into the fold. Content that was previously off-limits gradually become content that I could discuss with my kids. I also make it a big point to play games with them every chance I get and realizing that means I may end up playing a "bad" game occasionally in service of family fun. There're are actually a lot of days now where I'm watching them rather than them watching me play and it can be surprisingly fun.

I've also come to appreciate the insanity of device cost now that the kids are teenagers who want their own PCs. Putting together a mid-range PC for myself was already a budget concern but now having to balance things out in a way that's perceived as "fair" can be rather tricky. Obviously they're not entitled to anything but I still try my best.

Also just accept you're going to get it wrong sometimes but you probably won't break your kid and there are a lot of things that are out of your control.

Finally, none of this happens without talking to my wife about all of this stuff. When we're acting like a team it's manageable and great. When we don't it can get tough.

Happy to hear that your little guy is doing better. All the best wishes that he'll never have to worry about it again.

I'm a 31 year old father of a 9 year old and a 15 month old daughters. My wife is a nurse who works overnights 3 nights a week.

When my youngest was first born my vita was my go to device. Its really easy to jump into a small game (binding of Isaac, luftrausers, nuclear throne, ect) and feel like I got some enjoyment out of the experience. Especially with instant refresh of your game state when you need to put it down. I really didn't get to touch my ps4 until she was about 4 months old and even now its only a couple hours on a couple days a week I dedicate to going downstairs to the where I have it set up.

My oldest got bit with the minecraft bug. So her good report card reward was the ps4 version. She now gets to play my ps4 more than I ever will. She gets super excited to give me tours around her creations. Eventually, I caved and got the pocket edition on my ipad. I had to know what the hell was going on with that damn game. And now I can totally understand what the hook is. Plus my oldest now thinks its cool that her Dad knows stuff about her favorite game and we can talk about it.

Almost all my gaming is done after my youngest is off to bed and now I'm trying to lean toward games that my oldest can be interested in. She will very often want to watch me play Persona 4 Arena on the upstairs ps3. She doesn't really like to play them but she really gets a kick out watching me play anime fighting games. I'm now pretty damn good at BlazBlue as a result and that makes me feel... I'm not sure how that makes me feel really...

Anyway, all the best to you and yours.

Parenting as a dad is interesting, especially now that my second daughter is crawling. My oldest is 3 years, and she is super active and very fun and imaginative, and loves Skylanders. She doesn't like the playing part of it, but she adores being able to put the guys on the portal, and loves telling me when to switch out characters. Oh and we always need to "stop the bad guy Kaos!"

Gaming as a parent helps a lot when both parents are into games. My girlfriend loves games as well but more so likes watching me play stuff, so when the youngest is crawling around in our living room, the average evening when she gets home from work involves sitting on the ground letting the baby crawl all around us, and playing a lighter game. Right now we are working through FFX-HD on the PS4, and it's a good game with a pace that allows for setting it down for hours idling, if something needs doing.

It sucks that PC gaming is really out of the picture except at night when the kids are asleep, but that's how it is. I can't sit at a desk and have my back to everything going on, that will only spell trouble as the girls get into stuff. I have a decent gaming PC also, and my girlfriend even bought me a new video card and other parts to make it even snazzier for Christmas, but it won't get used for top of the line stuff. Most my new game experiences are on the PS4 so I can at least be involved in family time, but even then, gaming time takes a big dive, whether you want it to or not.

It's not too bad though. If I get one of those itches for a game and feel like I need to dive in it for 4-5 hours at a time, I just tough it up and stay up later after the kids go to bed. I'll be a bit tired in the morning, but kids are full of energy, so you can't help but recharge just being in their presence.

I have definitely picked up on more mobile games though. When my second was born I was deep into Marvel Puzzle Quest, but got tired of the horrid P2P restrictions of that game. Last 4 months or so I have been super deep into Final Fantasy Record Keeper, which I feel is 100% playable without spending money, and it's nice. Also a surprising benefit to "stamina" based mobile games as a parent is: wake up, burn all my stamina, set it down until the evening without hitting cap and wasting any. I can still be efficient, even in smaller style games.

I can't wait until my girls get a bit older and I can play stuff like Minecraft and other good, creative games with them (provided they want to of course, I won't be pushing any activities on them they don't want to do). But man it's scary how tech savvy kids are. My 3 year old has an Ipad (thanks Grandma), and there are some really good learning games on it, and she can use that damn tablet better then I can. It'll be great watching them grow up.

Also for bragging purposes, my 3 year old can clear 1-1 of the Mines on Spelunky 100% by herself. Making her daddy proud.

I'm glad everything is okay with your son! As for gaming habits as a parent, I actually started gaming more! I'm also a 28 year old single parent so it's a unique situation where I only have to divide my time between my son and myself. So when my son is awake I don't game too often, I hang out with him. My son just turned 3 and wanted to try a bit so we play WiiU if anything and not for too long. I've always been a Nintendo guy and their simpler games like Yoshi's Wooly World and their virtual console are great to start with simple mechanics to teach him a bit.

I also have a PS4 and PC. My son goes to sleep at around 7-8pm to keep his sleep schedule for school. I can't really go out with friends on a Friday or Saturday night with my son sleeping in his room, so I pretty much game a bit every day! It helps me keep in contact with my friends as a Dad and when friends are not on I opt for a single player experience.

I love deep exploratory games more as an adult like Fallout, MGSV, Xenoblade X, etc. I love a deep, subtle story that you can build or put together details yourself. I can't wait until my son gets a little older and he can get more into it, not that I want to push or rush it! It's really important to take the time to yourself with the stress of parenting in general and this is the best release for me. Good luck and hope everything stays well with the family!

Welcome to the wonderful world of parenthood, its been a fun ride for myself.

22 with a 6 month old daughter, shes just starting to get really interactive with everything me and my wife do at this point. When she was first born my gaming habits didn't change too much, with how much she was sleeping and my wife was resting with her, they both spent a lot of time in bed so I just occupied myself with chores around the house and helping her out when I could.

Even now, outside of no longer being unemployed but only working 4 ten hour days, I still spend a fair bit of my time gaming and reading. I mostly just focus on playing singleplayer games now or quick burst roguelikes vs playing much multiplayer. The only big change in my habits has been avoiding online games mostly. I still play some CS:GO almost nightly with some friends but beyond that I've stopped queuing by myself or playing anything like league of legends, and this is also always after getting consent from my wife that she won't need me for a potentially 40 minute long match of CS.

I took up a new habit of bringing my 3DS to bed with me and playing a bit of that before going to sleep some nights, it helps me get off the pc a bit earlier and spend some time with my wife chatting and gaming or playing something together. My daughter has also taken to sitting in my lap while i play some games, watching me play Ori and the Blind Forest earlier actually. Its a lot of fun having a little rascal around and I feel like I've had less of a hit to my gaming since my pc is also in the living room with the tv so if me and my wife just wanna do our own thing, we are still together talking and interacting the whole time when we can both just pause what we are doing and do whatever.

Man that is scary but I'm glad your son is doing ok. I have a 2 and 1/2 year old son and a 4 month old son and I basically only play games at night when they are both asleep. I will tell you it is easier when they are babies since they sleep a lot and can't really play. This year I was able to beat the Witcher 3, MGSV, Evil Within, Bloodborne, Dying Light, a lot of Binding of Isaac, Tell Tale's Borderlands and Game of Thrones games, and I'm pretty deep into Fallout 4. Every so often I'll play something when my wife is playing with him or something but that is usually very short lived, besides that I often feel guilty and would rather play with him rather than a game. So parenthood didn't really change what I played so much as when I play.

I can't wait until they're old enough that we can play games together (if they're into games that is). My 2 year old likes they PS4 Playroom and can already control it well enough to shoot the robots out of the controller and suck them up again, it's pretty funny.

Me and my wife are looking to have kids in a couple of years, so it's pretty interesting to read everyone's experiences.

I fell into a deep deep hole with this game that lasted longer than I'd care to admit...

Great food for thought! I know there will be plenty of game I'll miss out on or as others have said, will only be able to play after bedtime. Your points have brought up a couple other questions for me though. In general what has Multiplayer gaming turned into for everyone? For me, the days of playing COD etc are long past, and mp games are usually relegated to couch co-op at best. (You don't Know Jack is fantastic!)

The other question would be what about "screen time" Technology has advanced to a point now where some type of electronic screen in every room is ubiquitous. Friends, family's opinions on this seem to vary wildly. I know my sister limits 'screen time' to maybe an hour a day and instead focuses on physical interactivity with things like books, legos, etc. A friend of mine who has three young kids has given up the ghost so to speak, and all of his children have ipods, ipads etc.

Major props for being a single parent. I don't know how you do it! Its tough enough with two parents!

What?! How? Do you just mainline the stories and skip the side quest stuff? I'm envious!

Thanks everyone so far for the feedback! Interesting stuff!

Once the child starts sleeping through the night, you stop up whilst 1 am playing video games and then are extremely tired the next day when you're up at 5am for work. Least that's how it happened for me.

My multiplayer gaming is of a very particular type these days. Online voice chat in a lot of FPS games is pretty much dead to me (which is fine in my book) but since the kids are older these days it's fine in our house for me to hop into something like Destiny or Battlefront and play with with chat muted especially if I'm just doing some light PvP stuff (definitely refrained from even that type of thing when the kids were really young or saved it for after their bedtime). I do a lot of local coop and passing the controller back and forth (Mario Maker has been a big hit for us this year). We also play a fair number of DotA bot games as a family which is surprisingly fun especially when we do "theme teams".

BTW I said I don't raid or play MMOs anymore because of the kids but I do know people who seem to manage that successfully. Family focused guilds/groups (not necessarily the same as "casual" groups btw) can make a difference in that respect but it's something I never ended up diving too deeply into.

I will say there were moments when I definitely made mistakes. I remember once going with my son, my brother-in-law, and a friend to go and pick up some gear from the friend's house. BIL and friend had been playing Left For Dead quite a bit and they fired it up for a few moments while we were waiting on some things. I watched my very young son's eyes instaglue themselves to the screen and immediately thought to myself "I feel like this is going to bite me later." Sure enough a couple days later I'm sitting around with my wife and son and he out of nowhere starts telling her about that moment. I look at my wife, she looks at me, and I realize I've made an error. I appreciated at that moment how that content had immediately left an impression on my son and that it had probably been something he'd been thinking about for a couple days to the point he wanted to bring it up to his primary sources of knowledge (namely me and my wife). Interestingly now that he's a teenager and could play that without any sort of objection from me or my wife he really has no sort of affinity for something like LFD. His most violent titles tend to be things like Dark Souls and even then his focus is on the difficulty and challenge more so than any visceral elements.

In regards to screen time we definitely made it a point early on to have defined limits on device/screen time. That worked out fairly well when the kids were younger and we did a lot of outdoors stuff, book reading, and lego building together along with lots of things like soccer, music lessons, and such. We were also fairly cash limited at the time so the number of devices along with the need to share things was constrained in a way that actually ended up being a positive thing IMO. As work got busier, we made more money, and the kids got older I have to say our overall screen/device time individually has increased to a point within the past year or so where it makes me uneasy at times but it's kind of hard to put the genie back in the bottle at this point without being a bit of a tyrant. I also have to keep things in perspective - like my 18 year old daughter sometimes will sit there tapping on her phone a lot and while I may feel like she's choosing the phone over me the reality is I know she's often texting with her friends and boyfriend and setting up RL stuff to do later like going to a movie or setting up a D&D session or going to a dance and even without the phone I'm naturally going to be a bit more secondary in her life compared to when she was a lot younger and I just need to make a certain amount of peace with that. For us the trick has been to have the presence of mind to ask if anyone wants to do anything when it looks like people are drifting towards time wasters and not missing opportunities to do things together.

Yikes, I have 2 little monsters and can't even imagine what I'd do if one of them had a serious health problem. Super glad to hear that things are looking positive.

As far as gaming goes, I've definitely gravitated more towards a combination of shorter games and portable, bite-sized games. Basically, the day is spent picking away at phone games or handheld games like knocking off a turn or two of SteamWorld Heist or periodically checking in on some asynchronous multiplayer in something like SolForge. Also since the GotY discussions, I've fallen back into the clicker trap because I guess Time Clickers is on the phone and basically that's all I do now? It's really gross and troublesome.

Everything else is relegated to the "after everyone else is asleep" gaming time of an hour or two at night. This means that while I beat a lot of games like Life Is Strange and Soma and Cibele and Dr. Langeskov, I'm still plugging away at Fallout 4, am only maybe halfway through AC Syndicate at most, and have left Xenoblade more or less completely untouched.

Yea I'm certainly not 100%ing these games (except Isaac) but doing some interesting side quests here and there. It's crazy what you can get done between 9 PM and 1 or 2 AM. You will definitely figure out what works for you and your family situation, dynamics, sleep schedule, etc...

I forgot to mention it's always a big risk playing multiplayer games or something like Bloodborne or Dark Souls with kids in the house since there's no pause you get used to saying "fuck it" and letting your dude just get destroyed by some boss while you go get them back to sleep or whatever.

YUP! Exactly this. So many times I'll look at the clock after playing and let out a long sigh when I realize it's 1:30am. Have to be up by 6am to get my son ready for preschool! 1-2 nights a week I have the catch up night where I'll sleep for 11 hours after two days of 4-5 hours of sleep! Personal time vs sleep is the never ending battle of a parent...

Packed up the consoles (Wii, 360 and PS4) and play exclusively on handhelds just for convenience sake.

When my daughter gets older I'll bring out the Wii.

One thing I have noticed with kids is when I do get gaming time I rarely sit down and just game, usually there is a podcast or show running in the background, trying to make the most of the alone time that I do get I guess

Well, nowadays I can actually sit down and play games since she's a bit older. She watches me play, plays with me, or does her own thing. Of course if I'm needed I'm always able to drop what I'm doing. It makes From games a tricky thing but I deal.

When she was a defenseless baby that you had to keep tabs on and care for around the clock, I found my gaming times when she was sleeping on my chest on the couch. (The only way she'd sleep at the time...Like, it's cute, but was murder on my back!)

Glad to hear your son is doing better. I think the main thing to keep in mind is that the early period is different from the toddler times, which is then different from the time when they become a fully-interactive kid interested in games. I played very little when my kids were infants given the craziness of that time, but later on you'll find more time, even though I'll almost never play adult games when my kids are awake. A couple hours during naptime on the weekend when they're younger, nights after they go to bed, the random day where the wife gives you a day off to do what you want. I still likely get in around 5-10 hours a week at least.

I don't have day-long binges of big games anymore, and my backlog is larger than it ever has been, but I still get to play a fair amount of the games I want to play. It's all balancing some time for yourself and your interests, with time with your kids and time with your wife. My biggest piece of advice is not to neglect any of your family, your spouse, or yourself - when I hear people who sacrifice literally all of their interests and time to kids it never seems to work out well for them or their relationships. And then later on, whenever you decide to start introducing them to age-appropriate games, then you get to experience playing with them, which is its own joy in gaming that non-parents don't get to experience.

As far as types of games, it definitely is a lot harder to make it through the hundred hour epic games, and I never play anything that requires big groups to get together, but I'll admit as I became an adult with more responsibility and time spent with my wife / work / friends I already had started to drop off those. The primary thing I've realized as my time has dropped is that I treat my gaming time as much more valuable. I'm willing to play long games and I have games that I've put a ton of hours into, but I'm not willing to play games that don't respect my time or that waste my time with unnecessary padding.

I'm very willing to drop a game now instead of beating it because I feel I have to, and I'm more drawn to shorter games or newer experiences over just a stock-standard shooter or open world game. I've put hundreds of hours into Binding of Isaac, beaten Bloodborne and the other Souls games, and played through MGSV, while I stopped Witcher 3 when I felt like I wasted a week's worth of gametime with nothing good to show for it around the Dandelion period.

My son is about 7 1/2 months old, so I'm going through some of the same challenges as you (though without the medical issues, obviously). Clearly, there's not as much time for games as there used to be. My wife and I both have full-time jobs, so there are some nights where we barely have the energy to eat dinner, play with the kid for a while, then slouch off to bed. On other blessed nights (when the boy actually takes a nap), I tend to let my wife have the TV while I play the Wii U. I've been playing Mario Maker since Christmas, but before I stuck to Virtual Console games -- anything that was viewable on the smaller screen.

I do have the rare day off to myself, which is when I'll indulge in longer gaming sessions such as Fallout or Alien: Isolation. Really, though, most of my gaming these days is done in bits and pieces.

Glad to hear your son is doing better! Parenthood has been a game-changer, but I wouldn't trade it for anything.

@bfz:

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I'm a father of three (13, 9, and 4). Yes my gaming habits have changed over the last 14 years or so, but I think it has more to do with growing older than the growing family.

Change I attribute to to family: I am very frugal. My game budget has to be modest, it does't benefit the family the way a movie rental or Amazon Prime subscription does. Consoles are also out, but having a fast living room PC benifits everyone. That means PC games and Steam sales. The biggest victim is DLC, that stuff isn't never sufficiently discounted. Bioshock Infinite and Dragon Age Inquisition both have DLC epilogues that sound more like the real ending of the game, but I can't justify the purchase at the same price I paid for the base games.

Things that surprisingly didn't change: Playing long games. When the right game comes along, I will still sink 80+ hours into it. It takes a lot longer, but that helps with the frugality. This does surprise me, I have dry spells when highly recommended games don't keep my interest (Sleeping Dogs, Shadow of Mordoor) and I think I maybe done with big games. Then something like Dark Souls or Dragon Age Inquisition comes along and I'm playing that for a 1-2 months straight.

I play all my games in the family room, so I'm still (sort of) present. The biggest consequence this has in gaming is that I can't play any scary or overly vulgar games. Its more about tone than a specific list of banned content: Last of Us is fine, Dead Space is a no go (even though I've owned 1 and 2 for years); Saints Row is fine, but I'm hesitant to purchase GTA5 (I may never be able to play it).