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These things didn't come up in the old days of gaming. There weren't a bunch of complicated conversations with my parents when I played my Magnavox Odyssey with "Shooting Gallery" in the late 1970s. Even if it did come with a gun that looked like you could totally kill a dude with it.

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Those were simple games, and even right up through the SNES days you didn't find many games intent on exploring themes about death and loss and morality and dildos and dead babies.

And my parents and I didn't play them together much. It was, after all, just a toy. My parents maybe would play it every once in a while, and even enjoy it, like a parent jumping on a trampoline with their kid. But the grown-up who would go out to the yard, alone, and jump on the trampoline for eight straight hours would wind up in a straightjacket. But fast forward to today, to my household, and you see both my children and I spend far more time playing games than watching television.

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The same games.

That's me on the right

This is a good thing.

Gaming, I've now realized, gives my children and I something a lot of us didn't have with our parents -- common ground. In generations past you'd have a kid sneaking rock and roll music behind the back of his fundamentalist parents, and waiting until they went to bed to read gory horror comics under the blanket with a flashlight. It's not like that for us. Because we're both gamers, we speak the same language. It can open up a whole new channel of communication, and bring you closer... if you're willing to do it.

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That shared experience became a chance to talk about subjects and situations that otherwise wouldn't have come up. That's what I've learned from my Fable II debacle. We can use it as a chance to talk about, for instance, why things you do in a game would get you locked up in the real world, and how zombies aren't real, but Nazis are. We can talk about how to handle the douchebag insulting him in WoW. And we can talk about why he's not allowed to play some of the games Dad plays.

As far as I see it, it's my duty as a parent. But make no mistake, if my son rolls a tank and can't hold aggro, I'm calling him an incompetent cockhole, right to his goddamn face. It's my duty as a gamer.