Dan Magaha
Father to Logan, 24 months, and Senera, due anytime now
(Producer, NCSoft)

It's related to the "not working so many hours" theme, but I found that the birth of my son really transformed how I spend my time and what my desires are, without me really resenting it or feeling like I was "losing my personal time".

Everything on my internal priorities list was re-sorted for me, and a lot of things get put into perspective. As a result, the kind of games I find myself wanting to play are those that are a lot more instant gratification and/or those that can be played in bite-sized chunks. That's led my interests into things like casual gaming, handheld gaming, and somewhat counter-intuitively, MMO's (though not the classic grind-it-out model).

On the side of social responsibility, when I was at Firaxis, we always made "family-friendly" games. Sid's a devoted parent himself and has always taken the role of a responsible game developer very seriously, but I don't think I really appreciated that until I became a father. In a lot of respects, it's so much harder to take the high road and still be a big commercial success.

Currently Playing
Despite the fact that I was practically born with an Atari controller in my hand and was enthralled with games throughout my entire childhood, my first loves were tactile toys (Legos, action figures, trucks, etc) and in playing outside and being active. I'm really wary of my children getting *too* mesmerized by electronic and video games at the earliest age (although the TV's already got him under his spell), so we don't do a whole lot of video gaming as a family yet. In a couple of months, I think my son might be ready for Guitar Hero, though. He already loves music, jumping around, and showing off!

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Tom Henderson
Father to Willem, 4
(Game Designer, Between gigs)

It's definitely made me more sensitive to the moral values of a game and especially the game's protagonist. This was really brought home to me when making Ultimate Spider-Man when it was decided that it would be funny to have Venom eat the "balloon kid" from Spider-Man 2.

The balloon kid was a city event where a small child loses his balloons and Spider-Man catches them. It wasn't particularly popular, so part of the Venom tutorial was to have you suck this child into your body, and then spit him out onto the sidewalk where he lay curled up and quivering. I didn't find it particularly funny. I lobbied to have it removed, but it ended up in the shipped game, and I've never seen it mentioned for good or ill anywhere, so perhaps I overreacted.

I also look at the stability of possible jobs as a bigger factor than I used too. This is just the reality of having someone dependent on you. Garage startups are a lot scarier when you have a little fellow to keep supplied with action figures and dress-up costumes, (oh, and food and shelter, I guess).

Currently Playing
We played through Teen Titans mostly together. The best recent co-op game we played was Legos Star Wars. We also played Zelda Twilight Princess, taking turns until it got too hard for him.

Wolfgang Engel
Father to Anna, 5, Emma, 3, and a baby on the way
(Rockstar San Diego)

I understand what kids think is fun :-). It is sometimes not the game or the gameplay, just the time you spend with them. They love to have a reference to a movie. They play lots of movie related games like Shrek or others for themselves. They already know the characters.

I found a balanced way to work lots of hours with my wife and family. During the week, I do not spend much time with the kids, but on the weekend, I usually spend several hours. I work currently more than I did 10 years ago, but with a better balance. Usually, I work a bit at home in the morning (up to one hour), kiss the kids goodbye or prepare their lunch, and then I go to work from 9:30 am to 8:15 pm, arriving at home at 8:30 pm. I work like this permanently, and it is much better than having crunch times for me. I do not work so often in the company on Saturdays anymore but it happens occasionally and I can feel it the week after.

Currently Playing
I started to play simple games a lot with my kids. Last Sunday, I played 3D Minigolf and the new free, side-scrolling shooter on Xbox Arcade :-). Before that, I played Super Mario DS, Mario Kart DS and Finding Nemo. We quite often play Marble Blast.

I love it to see my daughter playing with me and laughing with her. My younger daughter now also starts to pick up this stuff. I just bought 2 additional controllers for the 360, so that we have four now. All the time playing games is not a competitive activity as it is for a lot of us. It is more a social activity. She wants my game character to hug her game character etc. If something is funny, we do it several times, or we look at things for a long time. It is fascinating how they explore a game world.

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Michael Vance
Father to Rebecca, 3, with another due anytime now.
(Technical Director, Treyarch)

There are obvious lifestyle issues with children. We moved so I could crunch and be near them more often. Work hours are changed, etc. The Spider-Man games are fairly safe for children to watch. I've never had any serious issues with working on them, although our approach to controller complexity makes it very hard for young people to pick them up.

Having a child does affect which games I'm willing to play around and with them, and it's always interesting which games my daughter likes. EVE Online is "the ship game", which is okay. World of Warcraft is the "scary monster game" and is absolutely not okay. This weekend, I was watching a trailer for Half-Life 2, Episode 2, with the dune buggy and some of the tripods in it. My daughter stopped to watch, dubbed them "the red car" and "the big spiders", and wanted to see more of them. Well, I couldn't actually play HL2 and start running around with people shooting at me, me shooting at them, etc.

Luckily, I had a copy of Garry's mod installed and could drive the dune buggy around there. I was thinking later of the best way to let her see the tripods and realized I could probably rig up a test level and somehow set the tripods to friendly so that they wouldn't attack the player (i.e. my daughter).

Currently Playing
The first game Rebecca ever played was Donkey Konga at around 15 months or so, mindlessly beating on the drums but very excited about it. It's interesting to note that in DK you can't fail during a song, and you get graded afterwards. Nice for kids to be able to screw around.

She has eagerly watched me play Guitar Hero, often getting out the controller and asking me to play her favorite songs, etc. Her first *real* playing experience has been with Nintendogs and Animal Crossing. She surprised me with the latter by showing that she had memorized the locations of all of the things of interest to her in the museum (spiders, hammerhead shark), and could easily navigate, with no prior experience, out of the museum and to the coffee shop to see "Brewster, the pigeon."

She even knows how to go up the stairs in the house and put the character to bed. Maybe I'm underestimating my kid, but I was impressed. The stylus has really simplified input systems and lowered the barrier of entry for children playing games.