Originally published on BabyCenter.com June 26, 2013

CraveOnline recently posted a series of videos involving moms playing videos games – and playing them very badly. It was fun watching them until I realized the horrible truth that I might well be in their shoes one day.

It’s easy for me to laugh at an older generation that struggles with technology that wasn’t around when they were young. I remember trying to teach my mom how to use a computer and having to start with a description of what the mouse does. And while I’m relatively new as a dad, I’ve been an uncle for most of my life and have always been able to show off at least some degree of skill when it comes to video games. But times are bound to change.

In my case, it’s not so much that technology is passing me by but rather that I’ve sort of withdrawn as a customer of modern video games. Modern video games have lost me as a customer mostly due to the fact that the industry has bored me with its focus on first-person shooters. Call of Duty, or really any shooter game, is just not my bag. When I play games like Halo with my friends, I already look like some of the moms in those videos. I could get better if I tried, but I don’t have any motivation to do so. Shooting people from a first-person perspective, be it Nazis or aliens, just doesn’t appeal to me.

For a very long time, I considered video games to be just something that I do. But watching the videos posted at CraveOnline made me look at my own gaming habits. I have a Wii and a DS, and the odds of me getting a new console that isn’t a major Christmas present for my kids in the distant future are pretty slim. I play PC games like Baldur’s Gate and Neverwinter Nights, which were released more than a decade ago. And while I am still up on sports games like the Madden franchise, the current version I play is 2008, which means that there are six years of new developments that I have missed.

Quite simply, I found my niche as a video gamer and just sort of stayed there, ignoring the industry as it moved in a direction I wasn’t interested in. As a result, even though I still think of myself as a video gamer, there is a time in the not too distant future where my kids are going to invite me to play a game with them and then post the hilariously bad results online.

But if they ever take a day to sit down and play Super Mario Brothers 3 with me, the day will be mine.

That’s my perspective. To get the view from the mom side of things, click here to check out fellow blogger Jenni Buckley’s side of things.

_{Featured Image: Thomas Hawk, CC BY-NC 2.0, cropped and resized}