Guild Wars 2

I have seen a recent trend with parents sharing their GW2 experience with their children. As a parent of young gamer, I can appreciate the stories that are being posted around the internet. I think it is great that families can come together and enjoy a game that is bridging the generational gap. It is not something that you see every day.

I thought I would share my story that happened during the weekend Lost Shore event. My boy is six and has always been interested in his Dad’s hobbies. So, it was pretty natural that he wanted to play GW2 after watching me play.

I broke down and bought a second account, so we could play at the same time. After explaining the rules and setting the guidelines, we took to making him a character. He decided on a human and a guardian (just like dear ol’ Dad ). We took the rest of the week to level him up to a respectable level ten prior to the event.

We logged on Sunday and headed to island. I patiently explained he should take out his staff and stay safely in the back, helping rezzing downed players. We caught up with the zerg and began to make our way. If he fell behind, I told him we were following the big group of people. He stayed up and things were running well.

As we battled a particularly difficult champ, I ran into the fray and did what was expected of a Guardian. Occasionally, I looked back to make sure the boy was okay. He now had his hammer out and was not far away chasing crabs.

At the end of the fight with the champion crab downed, we were breathless from a lot of hooting and hollering. I set myself to rezzing the dead. Noticing that I did not know where my son was, I stood up from duties to look for him. I did not see, so I turned around and asked where he went.

At the top of his lungs, he yelled “GET DOWN HERE DAD! WHERE GOING AFTER THE NEXT ONE!”.

I looked back at my screen and saw the zerg filtering down the hill at full bore. And who did I see at the front of this hundred man crab-meat grinder? There was my boy with Hammer overhead leading the charge straight into the gaping maul of another champion.

It was classic. My wife may never understand it (or even totally approve), but it made this old gamer and dad just a little proud.

That is my story. How about you? Do any gaming parents out there have a story they would like to share. I know I would love to hear it.

GraynX.8947:

I have seen a recent trend with parents sharing their GW2 experience with their children. As a parent of young gamer, I can appreciate the stories that are being posted around the internet. I think it is great that families can come together and enjoy a game that is bridging the generational gap. It is not something that you see every day.

I thought I would share my story that happened during the weekend Lost Shore event. My boy is six and has always been interested in his Dad’s hobbies. So, it was pretty natural that he wanted to play GW2 after watching me play.

I broke down and bought a second account, so we could play at the same time. After explaining the rules and setting the guidelines, we took to making him a character. He decided on a human and a guardian (just like dear ol’ Dad ). We took the rest of the week to level him up to a respectable level ten prior to the event.

We logged on Sunday and headed to island. I patiently explained he should take out his staff and stay safely in the back, helping rezzing downed players. We caught up with the zerg and began to make our way. If he fell behind, I told him we were following the big group of people. He stayed up and things were running well.

As we battled a particularly difficult champ, I ran into the fray and did what was expected of a Guardian. Occasionally, I looked back to make sure the boy was okay. He now had his hammer out and was not far away chasing crabs.

At the end of the fight with the champion crab downed, we were breathless from a lot of hooting and hollering. I set myself to rezzing the dead. Noticing that I did not know where my son was, I stood up from duties to look for him. I did not see, so I turned around and asked where he went.

At the top of his lungs, he yelled “GET DOWN HERE DAD! WHERE GOING AFTER THE NEXT ONE!”.

I looked back at my screen and saw the zerg filtering down the hill at full bore. And who did I see at the front of this hundred man crab-meat grinder? There was my boy with Hammer overhead leading the charge straight into the gaping maul of another champion.

It was classic. My wife may never understand it (or even totally approve), but it made this old gamer and dad just a little proud.

---

That is my story. How about you? Do any gaming parents out there have a story they would like to share. I know I would love to hear it.

I wanted to reply but leave your entire post in tact. This warms my heart. I love reading about families that play games together. I could sense the excitement in both of you as you experienced the game together.

Given the casual focus of GW2, it seems like a great place for loved ones to game together. Hope the two of you have more wonderful Tyria adventures in the future.

Hi GraynX,
Thank you for sharing your story, it really has made my day i have a vision of you seeing him leading the charge and you saying ’that’s my boy’
A lovely story and such a welcome change on this forum.

I did read a story on the Diablo 3 forum about a father showing his daughter the game with the pony level. When he opened it he called her over to look and without knowing the outcome the opened up and wiped them out not realising the carnage that was to pursue. She cried her eyes out saying he had killed my little pony.

That along with yours is is story i will remember, thankyou

Really nice to read fun stories like this thank you.
A great break from the “OMG fractals are the devil ANet is epic fail!” post #5267

What a lovely post This gamer Mom can completely understand your feeling of pride in seeing your son leading the charge into battle

that’s so cool! he even lead the charge with hammer in tow. that is so much win. i wish i had stories like that. may his Guild Wars 2 career be as fruitful as yours.

GraynX.8947:

At the top of his lungs, he yelled “GET DOWN HERE DAD! WHERE GOING AFTER THE NEXT ONE!”.

I looked back at my screen and saw the zerg filtering down the hill at full bore. And who did I see at the front of this hundred man crab-meat grinder? There was my boy with Hammer overhead leading the charge straight into the gaping maul of another champion.

Keep up, Dad!

Haha, great story

I play this game with my middle son who is 30, my youngest son who is 10 as well as my cousin. So I can totally relate to this article.

This is what makes gaming a joy. I play with my Grandson, and he is always telling me "Come on, follow me ! "

Priceless.

I haven’t got much time to play with my family due to being deployed. My wife and oldest (of 4) son have accounts. Whenever I skype with my son he asks if we can play GW2. I can’t wait to get home so I can roll around in a group with my wife and son. Soon my 2nd son is going to be old enough to play. It is going to get pricey getting computers for everybody. :P

Awesome to read of you and your little guardian’s adventures. My son and grandson play, as do my brother and his wife and my nephew. Spending family time this way is definitely a departure from sitting around the TV!

Great story, GraynX. I can only hope that one day I’ll be able to experience being a proud parent of a gamer myself.

awesome story it surely warmed my heart wish we had more stories like this

Awesome- as a gaming mommy I love it!
My husband and I play together and our daughter (5) loves sitting on his lap while we play.
She really wants her own account and we are seriously considering upgrading her pc so she can play too.
She wants to play a Charr ranger

What a wonderful heartwarming thread – thank you GraynX for starting it. That’s a great story – I’m a gaming dad myself, so I can just picture the scene, and I’m sure you and your son will have many more great gaming moments.

I’ll share my story as a gaming parent: I have five sons, aged 11, 9, 7, 5 and 2 years old. We started gaming together in GW1 about 2 years ago when an old med school friend of mine introduced us to the game, and we played through all the campaigns as a little guild of four. The boys loved playing rangers because of the pets, and we found pre-searing Ascalon to be a great playground for son number three to run around happily with his wolf, getting the hang of the basics.

We moved on to GW2 when it was released, and are really enjoying the game. My oldest son has tried a few professions and has now settled on a Norn guardian. The younger boys still love their rangers and enjoy exploring new zones like a safari, looking for new creatures to tame. This week I finally gave in and bought an account for my five year old son. This was earlier than I’d planned, but he had been taking such an interest, and had learnt so much about the game from his older brothers that I could see it meant a lot to him. He’d even been practicing his reading more than usual, and explained to me that this was because he knew he needed to read all the words in the game! My nine-year has had more mercenary thoughts on his mind however, and on realising that he was better at jumping puzzles than I am, offered to do them for me for the bargain price of 100 gems a puzzle!

Last weekend we had a proud moment in our little ‘fathers and sons’ guild. The boys had been working hard to get a favourite character to level 40, and we all tackled our first dungeon together. I was so proud to see the teamwork and spirit they showed in the dungeon, even when things got tough – and we got through the Catacombs with only a single party-wipe first time. Good times.

I feel very lucky to be able to share all this with my children, and I hope it’s a hobby we’ll carry on with for years to come. Gaming has allowed me to keep in touch with old friends far better than if we were not sharing this pastime, and I’d like to think that even when the boys leave home this will be a way we can still spend time together.

By the way @ Ualtar – I know what you mean about the IT costs. I’d recommend looking at reconditioned notebooks from eBay to start with. I found some five year old Dell Precision M6300 graphics workstations which run GW2 very well (they were top of their line in their day, but very cheap now) and are built like the proverbial brick outhouse. Good if you need to get a few extra computers for the kids to play on. My old study has now become the family ‘man cave’ with a spot for us all to sit together while playing.

I have been mmo’ing with my daughter for the last 2 years. She is now 13 and LOVES PvP.

so when our little 2 person guild rolls out into pvp and you die to her d/d elementalist, know it was a 13 year old girl driving the character

We only play a few hours a week, but GW2 is perfect for us.

Can make your own little guild. Can log for just a half hour and do hearts and DE. You can be different level ranges and still group up. You can do spvp or some wpvp in that time.

We love the game

I actually shed a tear.

Great post OP.

I would like to bump this post for great justice.

This thread has more value in my eyes than every other thread in the forum, summed up (especially the moaning troll posts).

My boy is 3 years old, and he’s asking me to play… i am looking forward to that moment, too!
And to the moment it will ask me to play rugby… :P But that’s another story, as epic as the OP…

Jairlyn.1429:

Really nice to read fun stories like this thank you.
A great break from the “OMG fractals are the devil ANet is epic fail!” post #5267

Since you brought it up yourself….I do wonder if the experience, which as a really nice one I agree, would be the same if they were going into FotM.

Best not to tell the kid about those yet I’d say.

My daughter is turning 7 this year. Is it ok to allow a child to play GW2?
I don’t want to introduce violence to young, but then again she does like the Power Puff girls cartoon and there is a lot of violence in that.

Would be great to duo with someone else, my wife tried EQ 7 years ago and told me to find someone else to play with. lol I guess she isn’t a fan.

So am I ready to share this with my daughter, I though I would have to wait till she was 10 but if it’s considered family entertainment, then I guess I need a second account.

I thinking I will give her my 80 Ranger and I’ll start a new character or vise versa? She would probably like to dress up a new character tho. She will probably like the character select the most.

You got me super excited GraynX

Thanks for the story

Sals.9534:

My daughter is turning 7 this year. Is it ok to allow a child to play GW2?
I don’t want to introduce violence to young, but then again she does like the Power Puff girls cartoon and there is a lot of violence in that.

Would be great to duo with someone else, my wife tried EQ 7 years ago and told me to find someone else to play with. lol I guess she isn’t a fan.

So am I ready to share this with my daughter, I though I would have to wait till she was 10 but if it’s considered family entertainment, then I guess I need a second account.

I thinking I will give her my 80 Ranger and I’ll start a new character or vise versa? She would probably like to dress up a new character tho. She will probably like the character select the most.

You got me super excited GraynX

Thanks for the story

My daughter is 5 and she hates any form of violence and she has told me some movies that I thought was fine for her ( Toy Story/ Nemo) is not right for her- strangely she is completely not bothered by violence in GW2- to her it is just a game and she gets what is going on.
So I guess it depends on the child and how they experience things- you will know her best.
If you do get it for her I’m sure she will love character creation

Sals.9534:

My daughter is turning 7 this year. Is it ok to allow a child to play GW2?

This is a great question, Sals.

I will admit my wife’s opinion and my own differ quite a bit. So, we comprised by trying to replace words like “killing” and “dead” with “getting” and “defeated”. I try to emphasis the ways we can help others in the game. Saving, defending and protecting are words I try to use a lot to emphasis that we do not have to only perform violent acts. This may seem minor and probably is, but it makes us feel like we are not focusing on the violence.

Now my son is six, if you ever have seen a group of six year old boys (and some girls) play together, you know that it typically revolves around swords or guns. So, the discussions we have about morals and violence in-game are not really that different than what we talk about when he is playing with his friends.

My suggestion is do whatever you feel comfortable with, but know that anything they are pretending to do in a video game, they are probably pretending to do elsewhere. And there are always ways to “spin” something, so they see the good they can do.

@Gehenna: If we do ever get to run the Fractals, I suspect the experience would be pretty fun. I would probably hear a lot of “Whoa!”, “Look at this!” and “Aw, Man! This is cool!”. That seems to be the level of enjoyment with everything he does in-game.

I want to thank everyone for their comments. It is great to hear your stories and know that there are families out there reaching the one true factor to how successful a game is; we are having fun.

My best friend has a 6 year old girl, she gets on the game sometimes with her mum’s characters and she loves it when I just walk around and follow her. She will find hidden places and refers to vistas as triangles and waypoints as diamonds and has so so much fun simply wandering around and enjoying the game’s visuals and achievements. Its amazing to play with her because her joy is contagious.

Thanks for this post. It really made my day.

As for the questions on violence and young children, I’d look up some research done on the subject. Most of it points towards the fact that parents or role models tend to be a more important factor than exposure to violence in development of a child’s set of morals and sensibilities about violence.

nice post OP!

i have a 3 year old boy and he is enchanted by the graphics of GW2. so i figured to make him a character (wich i steer around he does not get the concept as of yet to press AWSD buttons but he know how to jump) and we are just walking around through ascalon area’s (he wanted a cat so we made a charr together). i am not allowed to go of the roads and i must be nice to the animals but he say the spiders are scary so they “can go”. i dont mind him seeing the violence in GW2 as most of it for him is just pretty graphix and fireworks as he calls it. mommy is not so happy but she see us having fun so she is “ok with it” (for now).

cant wait till he is old enough so we can play together (but hey time goes very fast with the young ones!)

Awesome post! I play with my mother, one of my brothers, and we’ve even gotten an aunt into the game! Now working on my sister and her husband.

Last month my older brother came for a visit with his three kids – 7, 5, and 4months. Obviously the 4month old wasn’t up to the challenge, but my mother and I sat down with the 7 and 5 year old and helped them create a character all their own.

I was with my 7yo niece, and after going through all of the races and showing her the differences she settled on a female asura. Something about their size. And both of the kids were set about choosing a ranger – pets were a must have! We dive into the game and the first thing she asks is where can we find more pets? She wasn’t interested in killing anything, just running around and making friends and exploring. Once I explained the downed state and how we could help revive people then all she wanted to do was run around reviving any downed or dead players. She’d see the icon on the map and say “They need our help!” and off we’d go.

mcwurth.2081:

nice post OP!

i have a 3 year old boy and he is enchanted by the graphics of GW2. so i figured to make him a character (wich i steer around he does not get the concept as of yet to press AWSD buttons but he know how to jump) i am not allowed to go of the roads and i must be nice to the animals

This is very similar to how I played with my 7yo niece! She handled the directions with awsd and I controlled the mouse. And no shooting animals!!! Especially the moas, which is what she had for a pet.

I thought long and hard about letting my children play this type of game with me. In the end I came to the conclusion that most of the action in GW2 is no more graphic than the cartoon violence the boys would see in programs like Ben 10 and similar action cartoon series, or live action shows such as Doctor Who, Harry Potter etc. Young boys seem to naturally gravitate towards play involving battles, guns, etc whether or not they see it in a game. I agree with GraynX that the key factor here is how we deal with it as parents.

I have found that playing together actually gives plenty of opportunities to discuss issues like fighting and violence, war and peace, the difference between real and make-believe, and how to behave ethically and honourably. We also emphasise the roles of helping and saving, etc rather than focusing on ‘killing’ and it helps that the GW2 hearts give non-combat options.

I think there are a lot of positive learning experiences children can gain from playing games in family setting. Reading and numeracy are important in understanding what is happening in the game, and managing a characters inventory and gold is a useful exposure to handling money. Only last week my 7-year old complained he did not have enough coin to travel to a waypoint, so we sat down and looked at ways to save money and make money in the game, which he enjoyed, and now proudly tells me how much money he makes when he has gathered loot and sold it to a merchant.

Gaming also teaches skills such as teamwork, map reading, making and following plans, and going on missions together gives them a chance to find their niche in the group and shine. Some of my fondest memories are of times when the boys learnt to be brave like GraynX’s son and fought valiantly to the end for the team.

So overall I came to the conclusion that the positives outweighed the negatives, especially in this information age they are growing up in. We have to set boundaries about amounts of screen time, homework and outdoor activities etc as the boys would easily play too much if I let them, but that is pretty standard parenting for any activity.

I guess we all have to follow our consciences as parents and make our best judgement call based on knowing our children. Sadly there is still a lot of rather alarmist and ill-informed nonsense in the popular press about video games in general, so is nice to see parents looking at the pros and cons carefully and making thoughtful choices.

Gandolfi.1507:

I thought long and hard about letting my children play this type of game with me. In the end I came to the conclusion that most of the action in GW2 is no more graphic than the cartoon violence the boys would see in programs like Ben 10 and similar action cartoon series, or live action shows such as Doctor Who, Harry Potter etc. Young boys seem to naturally gravitate towards play involving battles, guns, etc whether or not they see it in a game. I agree with GraynX that the key factor here is how we deal with it as parents.

I have found that playing together actually gives plenty of opportunities to discuss issues like fighting and violence, war and peace, the difference between real and make-believe, and how to behave ethically and honourably. We also emphasise the roles of helping and saving, etc rather than focusing on ‘killing’ and it helps that the GW2 hearts give non-combat options.

I think there are a lot of positive learning experiences children can gain from playing games in family setting. Reading and numeracy are important in understanding what is happening in the game, and managing a characters inventory and gold is a useful exposure to handling money. Only last week my 7-year old complained he did not have enough coin to travel to a waypoint, so we sat down and looked at ways to save money and make money in the game, which he enjoyed, and now proudly tells me how much money he makes when he has gathered loot and sold it to a merchant.

Gaming also teaches skills such as teamwork, map reading, making and following plans, and going on missions together gives them a chance to find their niche in the group and shine. Some of my fondest memories are of times when the boys learnt to be brave like GraynX’s son and fought valiantly to the end for the team.

So overall I came to the conclusion that the positives outweighed the negatives, especially in this information age they are growing up in. We have to set boundaries about amounts of screen time, homework and outdoor activities etc as the boys would easily play too much if I let them, but that is pretty standard parenting for any activity.

I guess we all have to follow our consciences as parents and make our best judgement call based on knowing our children. Sadly there is still a lot of rather alarmist and ill-informed nonsense in the popular press about video games in general, so is nice to see parents looking at the pros and cons carefully and making thoughtful choices.

God, I am so in love with the posts in this topic so much. Thanks again for a wonderfully thought out approach to introducing younger children to a game. Even if you had chosen that it wasn’t in their best interest, you were reasonable in your thought processes.

<3

My brother is a big PvP-er.

I’ve been playing GW2 since beta but recently I was talking with my brother over the Thanksgiving holiday and told him about the game.

When I told him he could immediately pvp at level 80 without gearing or leveling he was instantly interested. So much so that he went out and bought the game within the hour.

Now he’s a busy guy and doesn’t have much time to play. He jumped straight into WvW for a couple sessions and was having a blast and I figured I wouldn’t see him in game much since I mostly PvE.

Last night in game he whispers me and says WvW is full, come level with me. So I log over to a toon I’m leveling and we go to Plains of Ashford since he’s playing a Charr. He wasn’t sure where to go and told me to lead.

After a couple hearts and events we end up at the heart where you get the gun to shoot, gunbutt/knockback and capture the skelks and minotaurs for the pit fight. The queue for WvW pops and he whispers me, “Leave queue, this is fun.”

Forget me leading after that, rofl! He was off, roaming about, healing NPCs, chopping down trees, doing hearts and events, grouping with players, randomly running into mobs or champions too powerful for him (whoa), trying to figure out what to do with all the loot in his bags, find the trading post, fall off vistas, etc.

I had so much fun just watching him, couldn’t stop laughing.

Anyway the hardcore games has died.

All my brothers 4 and my father dont like the grind going mode here i remember my father giving me my first uo account lol … now i assume i never bring my family here.