PAX 2011: The Gaming Family

Saturday, August 27, 2011

PAX! Fun for the whole family! Who wouldn’t want to share with a young one the beauty and joy of… this thing:

But it was as I walked away from this drill-handed submarine monster (please don’t kill me in the comments if this is some easily recognizable figure from game culture) that I saw what appeared to be a mother, father, and daughter walking eagerly from exhibit to exhibit. And they were hardly the first family outing I saw at PAX. Call me close-minded, but I found this odd…

Certainly it didn’t resemble any family vacation I took with my parents as a child. The closest thing was when I was twelve and my dad brought me to a computer fair in Poughkeepsie, New York, where I purchased a copy of Blake Stone: Aliens of Gold or, as it is better known, Wolfenstein Lite. But a full blown gaming convention? No way. My parents weren’t into that.

So then you can imagine my surprise when, during the panel “Getting Past Forums: The Future of Community,” James Stevenson, Senior Community Manager of Insomniac Games, mentioned that one of his company’s games had resulted in at least 4 or 5 marriages! Marrying someone you met through/on a video game? That’s like online dating where the date itself is online and involves killing orcs! That’s crazy!

All of this made me wonder, what will the family dynamic be like in these gamer-founded households? How will it be when mom, dad, and junior are all rushing to finish dinner to get back to the game they have paused in another room? What will junior think when his teacher tells him to put away his PSP during recess considering that, at home, gaming is seen as a magical, lovely thing that draws people together? Or, will video game families be a natural occurrence in the future? Will we look at certain people and say, “oh, they’re just gamers” as naturally as we might say about another family, “oh they’re just athletes”?

What do you think about the video game family: a beautiful thing that you’d like to see more of or another sign of society’s demise?

Hide your kids, hide your wife. There’s more PAX 2011 coverage on our blog this weekend.

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