Fun for the whole family!

[PurrrjinKitteh]

OMG! How good it was to finally see a post worth responding to! I play with my entire household LOL. That includes my husband, my twins and our 14 year old. We have a lot of fun doing things together and it really brought us all closer, spending so much time together playing. It is a LOT more fun playing with people you know.

I have to say the FFXI was the game they broke me in on. Before that I never played video games much, much less an MMO. I pretty much stuck with Tetris or Jewels. And like most wives, gf's, etc.... I hated video games like MMO's because everyone spent so much time on them and not with me or together as a family. But out of boredom (I had major surgery and was laid up for 5 weeks) my two oldest started me on FFXI because I liked watching them play. Once I got the hang of it I was off! I even leveled ahead of them and was helping THEM out ingame LOL. I can honestly say that "If you can't beat them, join them" works. No fighting, bad feelings or forcing them not to play in order to have time together. Instead of board games or movie night, we just added in video game night.

Now we have all moved on to 14 and included our 14yr old and things are great! Sure we still have busy RL things to do... but instead of hundreds of dollars on movie night or grumblings over board games... we just gather together on the latest and greatest MMO's ^^.

[Rowyne]

OMG! How good it was to finally see a post worth responding to! I play with my entire household LOL. That includes my husband, my twins and our 14 year old. We have a lot of fun doing things together and it really brought us all closer, spending so much time together playing. It is a LOT more fun playing with people you know.

I have to say the FFXI was the game they broke me in on. Before that I never played video games much, much less an MMO. I pretty much stuck with Tetris or Jewels. And like most wives, gf's, etc.... I hated video games like MMO's because everyone spent so much time on them and not with me or together as a family. But out of boredom (I had major surgery and was laid up for 5 weeks) my two oldest started me on FFXI because I liked watching them play. Once I got the hang of it I was off! I even leveled ahead of them and was helping THEM out ingame LOL. I can honestly say that "If you can't beat them, join them" works. No fighting, bad feelings or forcing them not to play in order to have time together. Instead of board games or movie night, we just added in video game night.

Now we have all moved on to 14 and included our 14yr old and things are great! Sure we still have busy RL things to do... but instead of hundreds of dollars on movie night or grumblings over board games... we just gather together on the latest and greatest MMO's ^^.

LOL, kind of sounds like me. I was a gamer growing up, and played lots of console RPGs, but never had any interest in MMOs. My husband was hooked on EQOA back in the day, and it drove me nuts how addicted he was to it (always raiding Plane of Sky into the wee hours). So, when FFXI came out and most of his Hodstock friends were leaving to go play, he convinced me to try it with him so we could play together. I was a HUGE Final Fantasy fan and couldn't resist. I was instantly hooked!

We played FFXI for about a year together, until he got sucked into WoW. I refused to leave FFXI because of my friends and the memories I had made, despite how many times he tried to get me to come to Azeroth. But after a couple years of us sitting in the same room yet worlds apart, I just couldn't hold out any longer. And ever since, we play all our MMOs together, designating one character each that we only play with each other (he's an alt junkie and he's always got 3-4 characters he's playing at once, so it doesn't slow us down except in Final Fantasy MMOs where you play all classes on one character). We duo all the way to level cap, do all our quests, all our dungeons, all our firsts together. It's MUCH more fun that way!

Just like you said, we could be doing other things like watching TV, playing cards, going to the movies. Instead, we adventure together.

It really is true, the family that plays together stays together.