I’ve been writing about video games for years. I teach college courses about them. I speak about how they can be used in the classroom. But I never play video games alone; I always sit on the couch with my boys (eight- and ten-years-old) and we all thumb away at our gamepads together. Gaming is one way we bond with one another — one way we engage in “family time.”

You’d probably imagine that anyone who dedicates as much of his time to thinking about digital play as I do would want to sneak some time with adult games like Uncharted and The Last of Us once the kids head off to bed. But I don’t. Games don’t actually interest me in and of themselves. I’m only concerned with the way they bring people together. I’m interested in the social aspect of games — both the way groups of people relate as gamers, and also the way we collectively make meaning out of our experience in the world through participation in game-narratives. Games are different from media like television and cinema. In a video game, the meaning lies much deeper than the surface of the story.

There’s a game expert named Ian Bogost who coined the term “procedural rhetoric” to describe the way in which the process of going through a game’s motions persuades players to embody particular ways of being. He points out the way players learn to make meaning by acting out a game’s procedures. Another researcher, linguist James Paul Gee, suggests that a game works according to a systematic logic that’s very similar to a language. He says that learning to play is tantamount to a kind of literacy — players master the ability read the game, to decode the system and make meaning from it.

I find both of these theories useful; but ultimately, I prefer to think of video games as if they were a type of ritual. And I’m not alone, nor unique, in my opinion. Johan Huizinga, a very influential cultural historian from the first half of the 20th Century wrote, “there is no formal difference between play and ritual.” He actually sees religious rituals, political rituals, and social rituals, as a form of play.

Think about when we go through a rite of passage. Consider that we’re actually role playing. For instance, when we participate in a wedding ceremony, there are particular lines we say, places we walk, and manners of behavior. We’re play acting within a specific set of boundaries. We’re following the rules of a game. In fact, when we participate in any ritual — Jury Duty, the Pledge of Allegiance, a Bar Mitzvah, Thanksgiving Dinner, a School Dance, etc. — we’re going through the motions of a specific narrative; we’re acting out a story.

The same is true when we play video games. And these days, children play an awful lot of video games. My boys probably engage in video game rituals more than they engage in any other sort of ritual. They do it repetitively, play-acting their way through the same Minecraft scenarios over and over again. That’s a little scary when I consider that these rituals are shaping the way they make meaning out of their experience in the world. It is almost as if they’ve inadvertently joined some sort of digital media cult. Therefore, as their father, I see it as my job to make sure that they don’t blindly accept these digital narratives. I need to make sure they learn how to think critically about the rituals in which they engage.

“Joint Media Engagement” is the term experts use to describe the way that families encounter digital media together. But I suspect that you don’t need me to present the research which points to the positive benefits that come from families playing video games together. It seems like common sense. When I play video games with my kids, I’m helping them to develop a new critical media literacy for the 21st century. They need me to help them analyze and interpret the games that we’re playing together, the rituals they’re engaged in on a daily basis.