long-distance-gaming
Latest
MMO Family: Long-distance gaming with Grandma and Grandpa
MMO Family is your resource for leveling a gaming-specced family, from tips on balancing gaming with family life to finding age-appropriate online games for everyone in the family. Back in my day (eons before even that prehistoric era when we trudged five miles uphill through the lava to kill Lord Nagafen, after sitting in the server's text chat room so our buff timers wouldn't tick down while the rest of the group was getting prepped), kids wrote letters to keep in touch with long-distance grandparents. We struggled almost as hard to read our elders' spidery, old-fashioned cursive as we did to figure out something relevant to say to these relative strangers. Then once a month, we'd be herded into the kitchen or hall (where most people's phones were back then) for the Dreaded Phone Call of Doom, during which we'd self-consciously mumble responses to people who couldn't remember which grade we were in or which of us kids was the swimmer and which was the ballet dancer. Talk about awkward... Today, cell phones and email make it much easier to keep a family in touch when its members are separated by miles. Still, it's hard for kids to develop a relationship of any depth with people they meet infrequently at best and with whom they share nothing in common beyond a few genetic jots and tittles. Until gaming came along.
