I grew up an avid gamer. But now, among my 50-hour work week, helping my kids with their math homework, grocery shopping, and house chores, I’m no longer able to find enough free time to really dive into a game. I mostly play casual games that I can drop in and out of but forget about the 40hr+ games requiring commitment. Despite not having the free time to game like I used to, I do enjoy watching my kids play while I’m doing other things around the house and then listen to them telling me about their accomplishments afterwards. I would like to hear from community members with similar circumstance about how you manage your time.
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at night when everyone is sleeping.
Basically I get 30 minutes to an hour after they’re in bed and that’s about it :-(
I think I found for me that it was more the adult game content than anything else that kept me from playing a lot. My kids are 9 now, but when they were 3 or 4 Imy solution was to buy a psvita off ebay and use the remote play a lot. I think they have the same thing for phones and you can buy some pretty cool controller attachments. Although it’s not perfect, it allowed me to play some more intense PS games from anywhere in the house, without having to worry about the little ones seeing them.
- Sneak the time when you can
- Play games with them
- Wait until they are 12 (-ish) and they decide you are uncool
Otherwise, you’re doing what I ended up doing. There was a long span that, I just… never played games because I was too busy. I regret that a bit because it’s a thing that makes me happy and even if I’m “Dad”, I’m still a person that deserves some time for “me”.
This more or less. My wife games too. We went through periods where we probably gamed too much and had to correct that behavior (house was becoming a mess and kids ignored school too much)
For us it put a decent amount of pressure on our marriage for a while until we admitted that gaming needed to take a backseat to life in general. Its hard. I grew up with gaming and both my wife and I were 8+ hours a day of MMO before kids. But life demanded we become adults for a while and be responsible.
My kids are finally on the older side where their demands on my time is lower. I still don’t game much before dinner and most house chores are done. I try to game with them a bit after dinner and then I get about 1.5 to 2 hours to play a few League of Legends games (yes, I know i hate myself) if I don’t want to ruin my sleep.
Steam Deck and Nintendo Switch. Instant pause/resume is invaluable.
I wrote a piece of software that does this for any Windows game as well after my first kid was born. Obviously doesn’t work for multiplayer, but it allowed me to play games when he was still waking up 5 times each night.
Cheat engine has a speed multiplier that can be set to 0, which worked in several (offline) games for me.
My thing is a global key bind on the pause button. So I hit one button (or Fn+P on my laptop) and I don’t have to think about anything else. And it works for every game, regardless of cheat engine support.
Nice! I haven’t run across any offline games that won’t let me use CheatEngine’s speed multiplier, including flash games, but I would be interested to know if you’ve run across any!
