Did anyone sneak to play games as a kid?

[StaceyPowers]

When you were a kid or teenager, did you have to sneak to play video games? If you did sneak, what creative or inconvenient means did you have to use?

Policies toward violent video games were surprisingly liberal in my home (while disapproved of, they were tolerated). But I did have to sneak to play any MMO.

In the beginning, this led to me using Telnet to MUD. Telnet doesn’t show you what you’re typing, so it was quite an adventure trying to compose full-length news posts in-game without being able to read a word of what I was typing.

 

[kingpotato]

As a kid yeah, I had to sneak to the living room and had to made sure that my parent's room was closed because the TV was going to make noise when I turned it on before I could lower the volume. I never had a problem with playing violent videogames or anything like that, the only problem is that I used to spent to much time playing games.

[Alyxx]

I'd sneak all the time to play more violent games on my dad's computer. I remember I wasn't allowed to install anything so I ran stuff like Doom, Quake and Sin straight from the shareware CD's.

[killamch89]

I used to do this during exam period when I was "supposed to concentrate only on studying". Otherwise, I never had to really because i did my homework or any other assignment at school before I got home so I could play games at all evening.

[StaceyPowers]

On 9/18/2019 at 2:06 AM, kingpotato said:

As a kid yeah, I had to sneak to the living room and had to made sure that my parent's room was closed because the TV was going to make noise when I turned it on before I could lower the volume. I never had a problem with playing violent videogames or anything like that, the only problem is that I used to spent to much time playing games.

Heheh, I remember doing that with TV as a kid, but it was because of content, not the time of day.

On 9/18/2019 at 11:12 AM, Alyxx said:

I'd sneak all the time to play more violent games on my dad's computer. I remember I wasn't allowed to install anything so I ran stuff like Doom, Quake and Sin straight from the shareware CD's.

Smart :) 

15 hours ago, killamch89 said:

I used to do this during exam period when I was "supposed to concentrate only on studying". Otherwise, I never had to really because i did my homework or any other assignment at school before I got home so I could play games at all evening.

My habit was to do as much of my homework at school as possible so that I'd have just maybe one or two tasks left when I got home that wouldn't be too intensive. Then, I would stretch them out over the rest of the afternoon and evening while playing my MUD. Whenever parents would come upstairs, I'd quickly hit minimize on the game, and then appear to be hard at work on the assignments. Meanwhile, as they were standing in the room, I'd be praying nobody was killing me or robbing me in the game while it was minimized, lol.

The most dramatic thing I ever maximized and came back to was discovering that a member of one of the game's mafias had robbed me of all my money, and his brother was offering to "help" by giving it all back, thus attempting to put me in his debt =D Ironically, as a result of the incident, we became close frenemies.

[Alyxx]

2 hours ago, StaceyPowers said:

Smart 🙂

Yeah, my dad couldn't really do much to stop me from doing it lol

[killamch89]

6 hours ago, StaceyPowers said:

Heheh, I remember doing that with TV as a kid, but it was because of content, not the time of day.

Smart 🙂

My habit was to do as much of my homework at school as possible so that I'd have just maybe one or two tasks left when I got home that wouldn't be too intensive. Then, I would stretch them out over the rest of the afternoon and evening while playing my MUD. Whenever parents would come upstairs, I'd quickly hit minimize on the game, and then appear to be hard at work on the assignments. Meanwhile, as they were standing in the room, I'd be praying nobody was killing me or robbing me in the game while it was minimized, lol.

The most dramatic thing I ever maximized and came back to was discovering that a member of one of the game's mafias had robbed me of all my money, and his brother was offering to "help" by giving it all back, thus attempting to put me in his debt =D Ironically, as a result of the incident, we became close frenemies.

I just got it out of the way so I didn't have to bother with it during my game time.

[StaceyPowers]

On 9/21/2019 at 7:28 PM, killamch89 said:

I just got it out of the way so I didn't have to bother with it during my game time.

That wouldn’t have worked for me. I needed at least a small amount of homework to justify/explain why I needed to be sitting at the computer. Otherwise, it’d have raised questions about what I was doing. When I stayed up until 1 in the morning gaming, it was because I had “soooo much homework.”