Burnie Burns, Co-Founder of Rooster Teeth Studios and Co-Creator of one of our favorite web shows, "Red vs. Blue," chats with Daddy Brad about video games and parenting and some of the benefits of playing video games with your kids. For many parents today, gaming has always been apart of their lives. They grew up with Nintendo, so for video games to be a part of their family life is not surprising. With the online gaming interactivity available today, gaming can be shared across the globe with family and friends. We're all for limiting screen time, but there's no reason you can't share that screen time with your children.

Play Video Games With Your Kids. Episode 847.

Brad:  What's the biggest constant in your life pre‑ and post‑kids? Videogames. [videogame sound effects]
[music]
Brad:  Hey, I'm Daddy Brad, and welcome back to dadlabs.com. We all played videogames as kids, and our kids play videogames, so why not play videogames as parents? In fact, why not make videogames a family activity? I know what you're saying, we need to limit screen‑time, yes, but think about it, videogames can be a great way to span the ages. We sat down with Bernie Burns, co‑founder of Rooster Teeth and one of the co‑creators of Red vs. Blue, and a dad, and we asked him his thoughts about videogaming and parenting.
Bernie Burns:  What I think we're seeing now is gaming bleeding over more so into the adult years, because a lot of people now grew up with games. There are people who grew up with Nintendos in their house that are now to the point where they're having kids. It's more acceptable, it's like, "My kid's gaming, I want to play the latest games too. I'll sit down with him." There's a whole category game called "casual gaming," which is like, "OK, we're going to do something together, we're going to sit down and we're going to play this game." Arcade games on Xbox Live, there are a lot of those, even on an iPhone or an iPad, there are tons of games. Start with something as simple as "Angry Birds," where you can trade off and play together. Those are the ones we like to do a lot.
This is a great online activity. If you have a relative or grandparent who lives in a different city...we've all done it, right? Where you have the grandparent on the phone and you're like, "Say hello to your grandmother," and they're like, "Uh..." you're like, "Come on, talk!" and the grandparents are doing anything they can to get the kid to tell them what's going on.
If you can sit down in your living room in Texas, where I live, and you've got grandpa over in North Carolina and they all have on headsets, they're playing a game and they're having a conversation and interacting through the game. It's a great way to keep kids captivated and keep them talking for at least 20, 30 minutes.
For instance, one of my youngest kids, he plays a game called "Minecraft," which is a great game. It's almost like super‑Legos in a way. You go out and you mine resources, you save those resources, and then you combine those resources to make other things. You dig up iron ore, then you put it in a furnace which you also built, then you get wood and make fire and then you smelt the iron ore to make iron bricks, and then you can use that to make armor.
As you invest the time of cultivating these resources and saving them up, and the ingenuity to create something new, then you have these cool constructions that you can show other people. Then he went from there, he saw online that people were doing modified versions of the game because this is an open‑ended game, where you can go into the computer and modify it. He learned all about the file system on the computer just so he could access his games.
Games are a gateway to technology for everything. If you look at any kind of technology, the things that games are popular on, they become massive hits. You can make a very, very, very big argument that the iPhone is popular because it also is one of the most popular gaming platforms out there.
Brad:  I've never been a very big gamer, but you know what, I am enjoying playing some games with my kids. It's turning into a cool family activity. A little "Minecraft," "Madden '12," "Wizards 101." We'd like to thank Bernie Burns for sitting down and sharing some of his thoughts with us, and we'd like to thank you for watching dadlabs.com. We'll see you next time.