brentfield

I believe my 24 year old son and his 26 year old live-in girlfriend have developed a codependent video gaming addiction where they enable each other. I would say that my son plays around 8 hours a day when he has to work, and then play around 12-18 hours on his days off. He has no real interests beyond video games. What can we do to try and help him, when neither believe they have a problem? I have seen behavior like this with friends I had when I was younger that were functional alcoholics. He plays every day and I don’t know how he would do if he wasn’t able to play. We went to Hawaii recently and he had two of his online gamer friends meet us there and they played Switch a lot. He even bought a PlayStation Classic at a swap meet to bring home from there.

Thank you very much for your swift answer and for your advice. In my younger days, I gamed a lot, but this was pre-Internet, so my wife was the only other person that I gamed with. So, our son grew up with gaming and he and I played a lot together as he grew. So, that may play into the genesis of the addiction. My wife’s favorite story about the Boy and gaming was when I gave him an unplugged controller and it didn’t take him long to figure out that he wasn’t playing. He was about nine months old when that happened. When he was about sixteen, he and I wrote a gaming column in our local paper. The premise was that we would review a game from our different points of view: mine was that of a person who grew up without the Internet and preferred single player games, and his was that he grew up playing mostly online and he would concentrate on the multiplayer aspects. We called it “Father and Son Gaming.” So I was the first enabler, really, but he wasn’t playing every day and not for such extended periods. I enjoyed being able to do this with the Boy and I considered it to be excellent bonding time. I didn’t see a problem, then. Because of all we played together and my keeping up to date about new games, I’m already a part of that world for him. (I keep up to date because it’s all he really talks about, so it’s my only avenue to get him to engage with me for a brief period, at least.) I will heed your advice and earnestly try to get him to recognize a problem. Thank you, again.

Thank you for doing an AMA! I'm a huge fan of all your work. You've done a ton of voice acting on everything from Spongebob to the recent Marvel release as Taskmaster. Do you enjoy voice acting more than live action? And do you prepare differently? I guess you owe a lot of your voice acting work to Sean Connery, since his sword was the one that improved your voice!