Parenting · Gaming · Philosophy

One Game at a Time

I remember waiting an hour by the radio for one song.

Not scrolling for it. Not streaming it on demand. Just sitting there, waiting for MTV or the radio to play it, because that was the only way to hear it again.

If I saved up enough, I'd buy the CD.

And that CD was freedom.

It meant I could finally listen to the same song as many times as I wanted.

Games worked the same way.

If I saved up for one, I played everything it had. I found the hidden levels. I tried every mode, every mechanic, every way of playing it. I even attempted speedruns, back when that word barely meant anything outside a small crowd.

Scarcity made me thorough.

My son doesn't have that problem.

He has the opposite one.

Free, paid, pirated — the options are endless. When there's always another game waiting, it's easy to pick something up, play it for a while, get bored, and move on.

Nothing forces you to finish anything.

So I decided something would.

My game library isn't small; I can afford more games. It's small for him on purpose.

Giving him access to everything I own would be easy. But that's not the point.

The point isn't giving him a world of options.

It's asking him to pick one game from the world I've already narrowed down, finish it, and only then pick again.

The whole library. Not that much bigger than it looks.

He doesn't get a new game until the last one is done.

Whether he finishes it well, finishes it fast, or finishes it reluctantly — that's his choice.

But there is no next game until this one is closed.

And it's already paid off.

He finished Hollow Knight.

Then Silksong.

Dante's desktop — Hollow Knight: Silksong still on wallpaper duty.

He went back and fought bosses more than once, not because he had to, but because he wanted to get better at them. He started setting himself challenges nobody asked him to attempt.

That's the part I wanted.

Not that he finished two games.

That he invested enough time in something to become genuinely good at it.

That kind of time investment leaves something behind. Video games can teach this in a simple, contained way that real life usually teaches the hard way:

What you actually invest your time in gives something back.

Sometimes immediately.

Sometimes much later.

But something remains.

That's why my son plays one game at a time.

We don't always get to choose what entertains us in life. More often than we'd like, we have to do things we don't enjoy simply because they need finishing.

I want my son to learn that lesson early, somewhere the stakes are low.

A video game.

Not a job. Not a responsibility he can't walk away from. Not something where failure carries consequences that matter.

Just a game.

If he decides to finish what he starts, and whether he finishes it well or badly, that's his decision to make.

But he won't get to start something new until he does.

And that's also why freemium games aren't part of his library.

Not because they're free.

Because many of them are designed around a completely different relationship with your time. They don't simply ask you to play. They are built to monetize attention — sometimes in ways that resemble the mechanics of a casino more than those of a traditional game.

That's a different kind of hook.

And it's not one I want anywhere near him.

I don't want to teach him that the next thing is always better.

I want to teach him that sometimes, the thing you're already doing is worth staying with.

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