Children’s console games have come a long way in recent years. Gone are the motion controlled mini-game bundles and second rate movie tie-ins. In their place we have experienced and talented developers working with budgets the size of blockbuster movies.

This is an image of a happy family; a father and his two adorable children bonding over a video game. It's a stock photo, of course. Their excitement is fake, their game controllers disconnected. It's cheap theater, but I have to believe that somewhere in the country a genuine version of this scene is playing out — I…

A young Chinese man in Sichuan province is in a little hot water with his wife and the courts because of his affinity for video games. The man, Zhang Ping, is being taken to court by his wife for neglecting his household chores in order to play online games, reports News Guangdong.com.

Since the year before I got married, it's become an annual ritual, an immutable part of my life. For one week every summer, my husband's family all get together in a bunch of little apartments down by the beach, on the Outer Banks of North Carolina. The horde of us are about thirty strong, these days, and with the…

Commenter Normalaatsra has never told his parents or brother his darkest secret: he loves Tekken. For many people this would not be a problem. So why is Normalaatsra hiding the disc from his family? Find out in today's very special episode of Speak Up on Kotaku.

Mother's Day is this weekend, and so the commercials for flowers and jewelry and Hallmark cards are incessant and overwhelming. But this year, for a gift, I did exactly what I did last May: I went to Amazon and I ordered my mom a new video game.

Not only did Nathan and Jen Glemboski use the lure of sweet, puffy marshmallows to lure their child into playing a real-life version of the arcade classic Pac-Man, they then sent the link into a gaming blog for our amusement. As long as you're living under my roof you'll eat those marshmallows!

Commenter Madammina's tale of playing through Kingdom Hearts with her little brother reminds us how much fun it is to play video games with our loved ones in today's Speak Up on Kotaku.

Being the parent of a 9-year-old boy and a gamer, I'm a huge fan of parental settings.

It's okay to work all night and sleep all day with Go Play Lumberjax, the first game in Majesco's new line of family friendly games for the Nintendo Wii.

In June, Yahoo's 'lifestyle' site Shine hosted a Sony Online Entertainment survey into the gaming habits of US families. As well as the heart-warming finding that 87% of parents regularly play videogames with their children, the survey also looked at how parents perceived their child's development being affected by…

KingIsle entertainment has announced the launch of the open beta for their family-friendly MMO Wizard101, which combines magical adventures with card-based spellcasting battles to create something that seems to have attracted a larger following than they originally expected. Never underestimate the power of rabid…

I'm not sure if it is a good thing that the best MMO at E3 2008 could be a game aimed at 9-14 year-olds, but I am sure that Sony Online Entertainment's Free Realms is a very good thing indeed. There are plenty of free MMOs aimed at the kid market out there, but they all tend to share certain bad traits. Shoddy…