My parents have just about always supported my gaming hobby, and even in my mid-30s, my mom loves that she can get me a videogame for Christmas which is a very easy gift that she doesn't have to worry about getting wrong. She asks me before every Christmas if there's a particular videogame I'd like, and I usually give her a few ideas, and she'll pick one off the list and give it to me. It's a great easy gift and she knows it's something I'll spend my leisure time on, when the rest of my time is working or w/e. Every holiday there's a handful of games that I like but they're not my top games and I keep those on a list as ideas for my mom for Christmas... it's usually Assassins Creed, Doom, Wolfenstein, some Nintendo game, or what have you, and now that you can buy digital game codes on AMazon it just makes it so much easier. She usually prints out the Amazon page and puts it into a small box, wraps it, or wraps it up with some underwear or socks or something... She always gets a kick out of giving a bunch of Hanes socks, and then stuffed into the sock thing is a print out with 'Assassins Creed: Black Flag" or something.
My dad used to play games with me when I was younger. He was the first in our family to beat the last level in Super Mario Bros, always was the best Tetris and PacMan player. He was really good at Rad Racer and routinely beat the game, something none of his kids could do. He used to like racing games on Playstation like Rally Cross, loved Vigilante 8, and played some Madden/NCAA football on Playstation as well. He'd just do the practice mode and liked learning the plays. We'd make our own game using the practice mode where we'd keep track of down/distance on our own, and use the "Respot Ball," and basically like play a game to 21 or something... This way, the Play Clock wouldn't count down, there'd be no delay of game or game clock issues, and if a specific play didn't work out the right way then you could kind of just replay it without needed to do anything. Now a days, he doesn't play any games anymore, but I brought a Raspberry Pi w/ emulators over to their house and he was back in his element with Ms. PacMan, Dr. Mario, and Tetris, though honestly, he probably shouldn't play them because it'll give him a heart attack, he gets so worked up about it.
My mom never played videogames, but she often recounts the story about how back in the 1990s when we got Super Mario Bros 3, she got an awful flu bug that week. The kids were all at school and she was bored at home, so she decided to try playing the game... somethign her kids and husband played regularly. She managed to get the console on and get into the first world but couldn't figure out how to jump over the first pit in the first world... Not really understanding that B was a modifier to make mario run faster to make a long jump, something that is just an essential feature of most platformers and so it's not something that Mario 3 trains you to do, because it's been such a basic staple of Mario since even pre-Super Mario days. She got so frustrated she just turned it off.
Neither of my parents play phone games or shitty PC/browser games, which I'm happy about. It's frustrating for me going to my in-laws and we'll be hanging out at their house, not really doing anything, but just kind of sitting around on a Sunday afternoon and my mother in law will be playing Candy Crush or some other shitty mobile F2P game, and I'll just be like ... why are we even here to myself. If I went over to visit my parents and my mother was playing Candy Crush on her phone I'd be like, well, I guess I won't stay...
As a youngster and teen my parents kind of liked that I played videogames. My mother will often tell my wife how easy I was as a teenager because I really didn't get into trouble... my vices were videogames and the computer, and sure, I wouldn't do homework and I spent WAY too much time online or playing videogames in the 90s, but honestly while other kids were out experimenting with drugs or alcohol, getting pulled over and harrassed by the cops, I was usually at home playing a game... either with friends or alone, and that's honestly what I liked doing the most. To this day, sure I love going out for drinks, going out to dinner, going to shows, and so on with friends, but still I long for days when my wife has plans with her friends or coworkers or something and I get a night off to sit around, drink some beers, and play a game. I get up early on Saturdays or Sundays specifically to go out, get a coffee, come home and play a game of Madden or something. It's something that's basically never changed about me, the only things that have changed is that, generally, I don't have any time to play games anymore, and I have virtually limitless amount of money to spend on games. I really wouldn't have the job I have now without videogames, either. I'm a software engineer, not in the gaming industry at all, but virtually everything that motivated me to learn development and software frameworks had some relation to gaming... Learned server environments from setting up TFC and Counter-Strike servers, learned basics of command line from installing games, learned PHP, HTML, and JS from setting up stats websites for my CS server, learned web frameworks from setting up videogame forums and blogs, etc. Honed my photoshop abilities, learned how vectors and compression worked from making TFC/CS maps and textures... Learned 3D modelling from TFC making mapping models, etc. I honestly would have never jumped into any of that if it weren't for videogames.
