In my spare time, I play a lot of video games, and so does my 14-year-old son, Connor. From a very young age, he would sit in my lap as I played some game, and I’d let him handle the controls as soon as he could handle them. I remember him watching as I played the Grand Theft Auto series—an open-world game in which you go anywhere and interact with the environment in any number of ways, but you advance the story mainly by directing your character to commit all kinds of violent crime. I let Connor play along with that one, too, but we had some very different rules. No stealing anything. No hurting anybody. No breaking the law. And we had a blast driving around cars we bought in-game, jumping motorcycles over ravines, running in races, and so on. The game as designed was not the game we played. In many ways, the game we played was better.
