# Parents or SO's of gaming addicts: Have you ever destroyed or given away a system, and how did that go over?

**URL:** <https://boards.straightdope.com/t/parents-or-sos-of-gaming-addicts-have-you-ever-destroyed-or-given-away-a-system-and-how-did-that-go-over/1012700>\
**Category:** In My Humble Opinion\
**Created:** [January 7, 2025, 11:28pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/parents-or-sos-of-gaming-addicts-have-you-ever-destroyed-or-given-away-a-system-and-how-did-that-go-over/1012700 "2025-01-07T23:28:21Z")\
**Posts on this page:** 2\
**Page:** 3

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**Author:** ![Rilchiam](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/r/2bfe46/32.png) [@Rilchiam](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Rilchiam)\
**Post date:** [January 11, 2025, 4:31pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/parents-or-sos-of-gaming-addicts-have-you-ever-destroyed-or-given-away-a-system-and-how-did-that-go-over/1012700/41 "2025-01-11T16:31:15Z")

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I’m happy for you. But FYI, when my father was trying to stonewall my mom into a divorce by refusing to fix the water heater, and my mom was trying to stonewall him into fixing it by refusing to compensate in any way, like going to a laundromat, and I had to go to school with dirty hair and not-quite-clean clothes, I don’t think they knew best. And that’s not something that happens to every kid.

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**Author:** ![msmith537](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/m/d9b06d/32.png) [@msmith537](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/msmith537)\
**Post date:** [January 12, 2025, 5:57pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/parents-or-sos-of-gaming-addicts-have-you-ever-destroyed-or-given-away-a-system-and-how-did-that-go-over/1012700/42 "2025-01-12T17:57:46Z")

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> [@sunacres](#):
>
> I’m sure a lot of Dopers have experience with this issue of intrusive video game usage! I never had the plug pulled on me and I never did it to my kids, but close!
> 
> If you haven’t seen the Netflix documentary _The Remarkable Life of Ibelin_ I highly recommend it. When a young man in Norway whose life was constrained by muscular dystrophy died, his parents were amazed to discover a worldwide network of people who loved and respected him via his gaming persona. The documentarians did a remarkable job of recreating the online interactions verbatim using logfiles. One of the folks he had a particularly close relationship with vanished suddenly one day because - you guessed it - someone pulled the plug.

My 10 year old son is a bit on the autism spectrum and making friends is challenging (or indifferent) for him. Not like he’s “unfriendable” or anything. But he’s a bit shy and indifferent to making friends and it’s challenging to find time for the kids to “just go play” anyway.

But with Fortnite he (along with his little sister) seems to have built a small network of regular age-appropriate friends (most of whom I’ve met). So that’s sort of neat.

It’s still a balance between being online and real world stuff.

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