Updated December 28, 2017 16:08:25

Photo: Paul Verhoeven says computer games helped bring he and his dad closer together. (Supplied)

When I was 10, my dad threw our TV out.

I'm not being figurative. He waltzed in one Saturday morning, mid-Ren and Stimpy binge, yanked it out of the wall and sold it.

Middle of a half-arsed garage sale and he was approached by some creep who, unhappy with the selection strewn out on the lawn, pointed up at our window where myself and my sister and brother sat, entranced, and said "how much for the TV?"

And rather than telling him that pointing at things and offering to buy them was something an unbalanced Saudi prince might do, dad came over suddenly monastic, nodded sagely, walked in and took it.

When I was 11, my year of pop-cultural starvation and peer pressure, along with relentless pestering, saw me getting a Game Boy for Christmas. They'd only been out a year at this point, and I was ecstatic all morning.

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So ecstatic I didn't notice my dad watching me like a hawk to see if my new toy was absorbing too much of my time.

After three hours of uninterrupted Super Mario Land … he walked in and took it. Returned it to the store, got their money back. Son of a bitch.

When I was 17, I'd somehow co-opted the family computer for gaming. I'd spend entire weekends playing hours and hours and hours of Diablo 2, Dark Forces II: Jedi Knight and Interstate '76.

Dad would routinely enter the poorly lit room and yell at me to get outside, insisting I was wasting my time. He didn't take the computer away, but I could see that look in his eye.

Dad worried I was socially awkward

Was dad right all those times? Was I addicted to the screen? And was I spending too much time gaming?

Gaming addiction isn't technically a psychological disorder, but I challenge anyone to enter the gaming warren of a proper non-stop gamer and not compare it to a 19th-century opium den.

Strange smells. Creepy music drifting through the background. A promising young person slumped in the corner, pupils fully dilated, hands twitching spasmodically.

See, Dad's concern was that because I was socially awkward, I was engaging with fictional worlds rather than real ones. He regularly claimed proof of this was the time when, asked by a girl I liked to dance, I began jumping up and down on the spot and yelling "HOW'S THIS".

He said I did stuff like that because rather than interact with people I retreated, like Sherlock Holmes between cases, into my own version of an opium malaise.

So that was that. Dad hated my hobbies, and I hated that dad hated my hobbies.

Games became my ticket to the world

But then, something neither of us expected: I ended up turning video games into something of a career.

I spent years talking gaming and nerd culture on Triple J Breakfast, and have talked games on TV, in print and online. Much to my dad's chagrin, the thing he claimed was a waste of time was actually paying my rent.

On top of that, my nerves about travelling overseas were dissipated against my will when, at age 30, a gaming press junket had me flying to Las Vegas and San Francisco.

Games, responsible for shutting me indoors all those years, were literally zipping me across the world for the first time!

The hysteria over kids being too absorbed by escapist hobbies isn't new, though. It's always been an issue! Some people are just more susceptible, and in need of, an escape! If I'd been born 100 years ago, my father would have disembarked from his penny farthing and yanked my malnourished body away from a steaming pile of Dickens!

So two years ago, I sat down with dad and had a talk. I walked him through his repeated incursions into my hobbies, and to my surprise, he sat there for a moment, thinking. Then he did something truly shocking.

He asked if I'd show him some games.

So that's what I did.

Dad's more indie than action

Dad now has what every gamer has: a very specific taste in games. He prefers indies; if you have parents who dig weird narrative stuff but aren't fans of action, they might like what my dad likes.

The three titles he's started replaying every few months are Jazzpunk, Machinarium and Kentucky Route Zero.

He also used to be a fireman, and was bummed out that Firewatch didn't involve putting out any fires, but otherwise, he loved it.

I host a video game podcast called 28 Plays Later; we've been going for three years now and we do annual live shows onstage at PAX, in Seattle and in Melbourne.

And after a year of immersion in video games, going off and playing them unprompted, and a litany of text messages asking for help with various puzzles late at night, dad agreed to be on our live show. A show about video games, of all things.

So if anyone tells you gaming can't bring kids and their parents together, show them this:

Topics: games, parenting, internet-culture, information-and-communication, computers-and-technology, australia

First posted December 28, 2017 08:01:16