In the last 10 years that pattern is increasingly, for me, built around competitive or cooperative multiplayer. Yet, despite the amount of time that this trend has sustained itself, the experiences that exist all fall into well tread and familiar genres. Overwhelmingly we get shooters. After a year of playing cooperative games with my family, we have all begun to notice that what we’re looking for, somehow, doesn’t exist.

My family plays video games together, online. We recently introduced my daughter, Cara, to Sea of Thieves, a game, Ben and Caleb, my son and grandson (Cara’s son) and I had played countless hours before. Sea of Thieves with three generations of family members, aged from 28 to 67! Recently we sailed off of the known map into a region called The Shroud, with only a journal and a talisman to guide us.

Recently my sister, Kacy (58), and my daughter, Cara (49), have both been bitten by the gaming bug. We meet regularly on Xbox and play online games together. For us it is social, challenging, and fun even though we didn’t grow up playing video games. We’ve come late to gaming, learning to navigate in virtual 2- or 3-D environments using a dual-stick controller, suffering the embarrassment and frustration while loving the challenge.