At Newsweek HQ, most of our colleagues are either boomers in name or boomers in spirit, which means there haven't been many serious gamers among our ranks. But from the increasing number of game-related conversations we've had with our office mates, it's clear that this is starting to change. Our de facto Xbox 360 correspondent Rolf Ebeling, who in his day job is the creative director for Newsweek.com, posted here earlier this month about the experience of briefly abandoning his Xbox 360 for the pleasures and pains of God of War II on the PlayStation 2. Today, he meditates on the compatibility of videogaming with his imminent fatherhood.

Two weeks of packing, moving and unpacking five years worth of belongings into a new apartment have left little time for me to sink into the couch for a night of virtual combat. In sitting down to write my latest dispatch from the (mostly) Xbox 360 front, my intent was to humorously detail the horrors of not being able to school legions of anonymous teenagers in multiplayer beatdowns. Instead, my two weeks of online abstinence have left me pensive--and admittedly, a bit apprehensive about my gaming future.

You see, in three weeks I'm due to become a father. That isolated fact gives me pause enough, but what have sometimes shaken me are the casual comments and jibes by friends, family and coworkers with children. If I make the mistake of mentioning some new band I've seen, finally getting a decent night's sleep, or--as was the case recently--that I was planning on a late night session to write about and play games, the response is, well, buddy, when the baby comes, you can pretty much forget about all of that.

Ouch.

The prospect of losing the time, energy or, frankly, the social acceptability of playing games once I'm a parent isn't sitting well with me. Before you paint me as a selfish, emotionally-stunted twerp for saying this, let me explain: video games were a point of common interest with my dad as I grew up in the era of Atari.

His introduction to gaming was more annoying than fun, I imagine. I remember a uncomfortable morning ride home from a sleepover at a friend's house. Dad wasn't too pleased that the real reason for me making him wait in the car wasn't to get my belongings together, but a last attempt to crash "Missile Command" on the 2600 by scoring a million points.

Soon enough, though, I had a high-powered--32k of RAM!--Atari 800 in my bedroom. I think the fact that it was ostensibly an educational PC that happened to come with joysticks smoothed over his reservations. Sure, he was happy that I was learning the basics of PILOT graphics programming (the 1979 equivalent of Flash ActionScript), but I could see he was as fascinated as I was by Star Raiders, a space combat game that was as 3-D as you could get in just 32k of memory. A Depression-era kid a few years too young to try out for the Army Air Corps in World War II, he told me in detail about "Buck Rogers" serials and let me flip through his meticulous scrapbooks of fighter planes he'd made as pre-teen in the 1940s. It was fun to go a few rounds of two-player with him after homework. With the benefit of hindsight, I realize that he never let go of things he loved in his formative years, and could blend his love of P51D Mustangs and "Flash Gordon" with his kid's new passion. My mom still laughs about his having to quit whenever his hands cramped up after playing too much.

Games were not our largest mutual interest, but every time a new system that came out, there was always a brief moment where he would take a look at my latest acquisition. A few years before he passed away, I remember seeing some of that familiar Star Raiders enthusiasm on his face as I started up Colony Wars on the original PlayStation.

My wife and I are having a little girl, so as you might imagine, my hours of holding down positions in Ghost Recon: Advanced Warfighter 2 may not translate directly to playtime when she's older. But I'm hopeful that I can follow my dad's example and learn to blend our interests. That copy of Viva Pinata on my desk is looking better every day.