I'm not a young man and as a gamer, the biggest thing on my plate right now - besides starting a video games media and critique site - has nothing to do with games, but with starting a family. 

 

Family is personal, and starting one is even more private, so I'm not going into any details other than to say that starting a family is a current goal for my wife and me. 

 

How does that relate to video games? Well, the problem is it doesn't. Before the notion of starting a family, some of my daily activities would be interrupted by me thinking about where I left off on a particular game I was playing. 

 

What should I do next to try and beat that boss? 

 

Should I replay the level to get the collectibles before I continue or go back to that section once I finish the game? 

 

I really should get into 4-X games, I bet I'd be good.

 

Now, my life is a constant distraction from video games which proves to be an interesting variable, considering my aspiration to be a resource of top-shelf video game critique. There are older people than me in the industry, and I know some of those folks have families. It's possible, but the crucial distinction is that I already have a full-time job that commands 50-60 hours per week. If I stack that against the time I need to put into ToggleQuest and, in turn, against the time I need to put into family creation, I'm already at diminishing returns. Something has got to give.

 

I'm still firmly in the camp that prefers long-form video games, but the truth is I don't have time to play those games the way I would like to. As a result, I've gravitated to shorter games that I can digest as bite-size narrative experiences. I still find majesty in most games I play and I don't intend to lose that feeling; I just need to mine for it in different ways. I've developed regular adulting skills over the course of becoming, um, an adult. Chief among those is time management; it's like a minigame. I have 24 hours in a day. Six of those hours are sleeping, eight of those are working, one of those is exercise, the remaining nine are split between wife time, video game time, and ToggleQuest. Until this site takes off to the extent that I can quit my job, spinning these daily plates will need to remain rewarding objectives to complete, though not always successfully. 

 

I think about objective differently now. I have this main goal right now to start a family. Nothing is more important than that. In the back of my mind, I also think about the different objectives in video games I've come across. Not all objectives in games are important nor are they created equally, but some of them are required to continue the story. I've felt strongly about various game objectives over the years, some of which proved so challenging that I've taken it out on different controllers - RIP to those controllers. It's strange to think about my current objective in video game parlance. Quite literally, my genetic story and that of my wife's, cannot continue unless this story mission is beaten. I chuckle when I think about it because changing tactics are just variations on a theme; it's what songs are written about.

 

As gamers my age start families of their own and continue to participate in the genre, there's a unique opportunity that presents itself when kids come along. How does a lifelong video game player introduce to their children - in a responsible way - the thing they've spent most of their life's free time doing? This is putting the cart in front of the horse a little, but I'm already coming up with a plan to introduce any future children I may have to video games. This, of course, will involve many conversations with my wife but will my future kids love games as much as I do? How will I show them what their old man grew up with, while simultaneously filling their lives with physical activities? These are fun things to think about and I look forward to teaching my kids the Konami Code and having them tell me, "that's dumb, dad." But, by then, I will have built a media empire so I should be good.