Send the Barbarian in First

I recall Mario Party, Rabbids, and Carnival games being popular games for my kids because the mini games were usually pretty simple and easy to understand. The games themselves develop coordination, timing, and problem solving skills that are helpful for kids.

The Animal Crossing games are perhaps a little beyond a 6 year old but they're definitely worth while. The require reading comprehension, resource management, and a bunch of other skills that require a child to think.

I think the deepest bonding happens over conversations. I won't try to pit video games against that.

But this thread was about activities one could do with kids. Like D&D, or sports, or trips, or nights out. Against that competition, video games are just as strong a contender (with respect to the potential for bonding), and the devil is in the details of how much you care about the other people involved.

(I'm a bit older than you, btw.)

We're the same age. I have fond memories through out my life playing games with family and friends. It's been a bonding experience for me with many people who are close in my life and has helped many of us through difficult times.

I remember huddling around a friend's PC with his brother and mine as we each took turns playing Prince of Persia, King's Quest, and Legend of Kyrandia.

We setup a BNC network in our house and my brother and I would sit in our rooms, across the hall from one another, with our doors open and play games like Doom, Wing Commander Armada, Civilization, and many other for hours on end yelling back and forth at each other.

My friend use to have LAN parties at his house and a dozen of us would all cram our PCs into his Den and do marathon 15+ hour gaming sessions. He'd have something like MST3K playing on the TV and we'd sit around talking about various nerdy things. Everyone brought food, beer and snacks to share. We'd play everything we could think of like KOTOR, Urban Terror, Terraria, BFBC2, Civilization, Hoard and Borderlands.

I remember when DayZ first came out and my friend and I sat in his den until 5am trying to figure out where the hell we were in relation to each other on the island. Occasionally one of us would scream out because we were being chased by Zombies and only had a flashlight. Or the time we were rushed by a squad of heavily armed guys in a car who had us get down on the ground, then threw guns and ammo at us before jumping back in the car and speeding of into the night yelling "Merry Christmas fuckers!"

My brother lives out of state now and several years back he was down on his luck so when a friend and I upgraded our PCs we sent him the old parts which were enough to upgrade his rig to play Battlefield 3 and 4. We'd spend evenings online chatting over VOIP as we played. It was a bonding experience that helped us both overcome a difficult time in our lives.

Recently my father-in-law, wife, daughter, and I played Overcooked for the first time and ended up doing a 4 hour marthon of it. My father-in-law is in his late 70s and never really played video games but was eager to try. The game is easy enough to pickup but devilishly hard but we all had a riot trying to figure out the best strategy for making burgers or soup in the crazy kitchens.

The Jackbox Games are great party games and when we have the extended family together we'll sit around and play them.

My daughter and I probably spent an hour one evening just designing our characters for Gang Beasts. The entire time we were joking and ripping on each other for our choices while bouncing ideas and suggestions off each other.

XP = experience points determining individual character abilities.

I disagree with this, because if this would be true, you would have no idea who Coco Chanel was.

> Anything creative will never be seen as cool outside of the niche it lives in.

In my experience the exact opposite is true. The cool kids back in my school were the ones who were into music and art. It was mainly the lifestyle surrounding the "creative, don't care" type.

Even now that is still the case in my culture. People whose main profession is writing/painting/producing music are "cool". But maybe that is different in your culture.

On top of that, the way they rebalanced skill checks and AC ("bounded accuracy") makes the game feel a lot better. This [1] is a fantastic article specifically addressing those changes, if you're interested.

1: http://www.dandwiki.com/wiki/Understanding_Bounded_Accuracy_...

Examples:

FantasyCraft: D20 based, but drops the automatic success/failure rules, so at heroic levels you can have guaranteed success.

Shadowrun 3E: The maximum skill rank a starting character can have in any skill is 6, which translates to over 99.99% chance of success on "easy" difficulty checks and over 98% chance of success on "average" difficulty checks.

Earthdawn: Every 5 or 6 steps of a skill adds one more difficulty level that you can succeed automatically (starting at step 3, where you auto succeed at difficulty 1)

unless you live alone in a cave, what other people think of you is important. it is exceedingly difficult to succeed in the modern world without cooperation, and people will not help you out as much or at all if they don't like you. this means you really do need to care what others think.

that said, it is common to conflate this sense of "caring" with the deep seated need for external validation that many humans have. most people enjoy being appreciated by their community, and this is fine, but I think it is very important not to be overly dependent on this. ideally, one's self worth would come primarily from within.