Gamers are used to all kinds of battles in video games, but the most fearsome enemies of all are not axe-wielding skeletons or goombas— they're parents. With a difficulty level more extreme than any Dark Souls title, sometimes the hardest part of a video game is simply getting to play it. Parents of gamers can often act like prison wardens; there are those who refuse to even let their kid spend half an hour a day on the screen. There are others who blithely buy their eight-year olds the latest Grand Theft Auto and then go screaming to the retailer because the game is too mature. But most of the time, parents simply don’t get video games if they haven’t grown up around them.

I’ve collected a series of hilarious web comics and memes that explore this divide. Parents have the wackiest misconceptions when it comes to what their children are playing. These misunderstandings can be hilarious (every character will forever be Mario and every console will forever be Nintendo). There are other memes that envision what it will be like when future generations come into their own and finally take over the world with a gaming population. The results might be less utopian than you’d think. These comics and memes will no doubt resonate with some of your own experiences growing up.

Here are 25 Hilarious Gamer Memes That Prove Parents Just Don’t Understand.

25 What Button Do I Press To Bond With You?

Every gamer has a story about trying to play video games with their parents. In a rare fit of trying to bond with their kid, dad or mom awkwardly try to sit down and “game” with you. It’s the only way they’ll ever get to spend time with you after all. What often happens is something akin to a toddler taking their first steps or an awkward teenage boy fumbling with his first tryst. They brandish the controller like the flight controls in a cockpit. Before long, mom and dad decide that, you know what, spending time with you isn’t all that it’s cracked up to be— and you get to go back to your precious games all alone! All…. All alone….

24 Advanced Theoretical Physics

This one hits home for me. After a decade of watching me waste my life playing games, my mother finally assimilated the bare-bones concept of pausing a game. For her, it became something of a sacred incantation: “pause it, pause it” whenever— ugh— she wanted me to eat the dinner she laboriously prepared and bond with me. Gross. But by the time my mom figured out you could pause games, I had already graduated to online games. Suddenly the sacred incantation didn’t have the same effect. Parents seem to have a difficult time understanding that, no, you can’t pause an online game. That would require every single player on the server to agree to a time-out. Oh god, that would actually work. Don’t tell them! What have I done!?

23 This Is Always The Problem

To the parents of a gamer, blaming video games is an age-old scapegoat. This is especially true if the parents in question didn’t grow up around video games. Shigeru Miyamoto, the towering giant of the industry who gave us Mario and The Legend of Zelda, once summed up this trend incisively: “Video games are bad for you? That's what they said about rock-n-roll.” Next time mom and dad get on your case about playing too many games — provided you’re lucky enough to have a mom and dad who get on your case about it — drop the mic with this quote. They know all too well what it was like growing up with parents who once blamed rock n’ roll music for all their problems.

22 Bad Case Of Xbola

You might have the type of parent who love blaming games for your every problem. Feeling sick? You play too many video games. Feeling neglected? You play too many video games. Suffering from carpal tunnel syndrome brought on by a sedentary lifestyle? Okay, that one might really be video games’ bad. I’m not saying every parent who harries you to get off your behind and stop gaming is in the wrong. Video games can become an addiction like anything else (psst don’t tell my bosses I said that), and so it’s on mom and dad to rouse you out of your rut. But lots of other times, video games are often an easy bullseye for parents who might not want to confront their own poor parenting skills. Perhaps they need to level up that particular skill-tree.

21 I Learned It From You!

Sometimes the hypocrisy of mom and dad can be beyond frustrating. Some of them get all bent out of shape when you spend an afternoon gaming— even though they spend their whole nights in front of the TV. “I LEARNED IT FROM YOU, MOM AND DAD!” When Let’s Plays became a thing several years ago, parents couldn’t wrap their head around the fact that their kids weren’t even wasting their time gaming anymore— they were wasting their time watching other people waste their time gaming. But as this comic from LoadingArtist so aptly captures the hypocrisy, watching others play games has been a pastime since the first caveman painted a wild herd of antelope and signed it, “don’t forget to like and subscribe.”

20 Bless His Pacemaker

The best grandparents, you know, the photogenic ones from shutterstock, tend not to berate their grandkids for gaming too much. Instead, they enable their addictions just to win their affections. They did their tour in the trenches of parenthood and they don’t have to deal with the nightly fights anymore. But no matter how well-meaning your grandparents, they’re often delightfully clueless when it comes to modern games. They’ve managed to absorb a few terms— Nintendo or Pikachu— and now everything is Nintendo or Pikachu. It’s adorable. That is unless we’re talking about a degenerative memory disorder and suddenly this becomes a very dark meme indeed.

19 A Monster's Mind

In addition to apparently creating entire lazy and apathetic generations, video games are seen as the bogeyman when it comes to criminal activity. Paranoid parents have long decried intense video games as a bane on society that will lead to Clockwork Orange hyper hurtfulness. The argument makes sense superficially. If young kids are taught to point and shoot from the earliest ages, then it stands to reason that Nintendo has been breeding a cell of sleeper agents since kindergarten. But that theory has been debunked time and again, and as recently as this week. What parents never seem to grasp is that kids aren’t going to go out in the streets and get their Stanley Kubrick on because that would mean actually leaving the house! There’s no time for crime because there are way too many great games like these to play!

18 Parenting Priorities

From the very first time your parents shut off your console and forced you to go play outside, you probably swore an oath that when you’d be a cool parent when you had kids. Instead of making them embrace the great outdoors, you’d sit them down and make them revisit the classics in the pantheon of your youth. The only problem, of course, would be leaving your room and convincing someone to have kids with you in the first place. Unfortunately, one of the side-effects of aging is realizing that your parents weren’t just being mean, they had good reasons to get you exercising so you wouldn’t, you know, waste away. Just as you get your freedom to do whatever you want. Nonetheless, you swear you’ll be a cool gamer mom or dad. Unless your kid wants to be an athlete.

17 They Only Want The Best For You

Some parents — whether rightfully or wrongly — deny their kids video games based on the ESRB rating. If you refuse to buy your ten-year-old an M-Rated game, well then I tip my fedora to you. If you refuse to buy your eighteen-year-old an M-Rated game at Christmas, which also happens to be their birthday, then I still tilt my fedora to you but at a disrespectful cant. In the future, modern gamers will be parents themselves. Having grown up on a steady diet of games, they’re not going to deny children games because they’re too intense. They’re going to deny their kids games that suck. “It’s sucks” indeed. It seems that mom and dad spent too much time playing video games that they forgot to learn grammar.

16 First World Gamer Problems

This one’s for the parents in the house. The tongue-in-cheek self-awareness of this first-world-problems meme is on point. For all the complaining in this article how misunderstood gamers are, it has to be said that gamers take their parents for granted. The only reason that we have video games and a nice warm house in which to play them is because their parents love them and provide for them. In fact, the only reason why gamers exist in the first place is that their parents wanted them (or they were maybe too lazy to go to planned parenthood). And if you didn’t exist, how would you own all the n3ewbz in CoD? Checkmate, gamer kids.

15 Not Just For Kids Anymore

So you play games to escape to a fantasy world where you don’t have to deal with your loser parents who are constantly trying to “make you into someone” and “just want the best for you”? Well, how would you feel if the situation was flipped? This comic hilariously imagines how your parents would react if they suddenly discovered the magic escapism of video games. What if they started talking as harshly about you as you do about them? Not that fun, is it? All those games you played where you romanticized being an orphan is starting to seem kinda mean in hindsight now, isn’t it? You’re sure to feel hurt when they start playing Planned Parenthood Simulator.

14 Books Are Ruining Our Kids!

No matter what generation you grow up in, the older generation invariably believes things were better when they were around. As a millennial, I can attest to this phenomenon. It took me some time to accept that fidget spinners weren’t the harbingers of the apocalypse I thought they were (I’m not still totally convinced). As this comic incisively shows, new technology is always feared by parents. Video games are the big bad today, but not so long ago it was TV, and before that books. I’m not even kidding about the books. Less than a couple centuries ago, in Victorian society, novels were considered morally decadent. Now we have classes studying novels from that period. If the trend continues, you could one day hold a graduate-level conference on how to no-scope a dirty camper in Call of Duty! Progress!

13 Using Your Imagination

Parents may lament how video games sap their children’s imaginations. They need only look to their own childhood and see the manifest evidence: they used to frolic in the hilly groves to the beat of their own imaginations, playing pirate and cops and robbers. But that’s because they grew up with parents unbound by modern liberal constraints on physical punishment and they had a good reason to get out of the house. So it can seem like it’s only when children are deprived of getting to play their favourite games that the imagination goes wild. That’s true. After all, kids find all sorts of creative ways to sneakily play games instead. Speaking from my own experience, some of my favourite games opened up my imagination. If you’re going to make creative stuff, you could do a lot worse than spending time in the lush virtual worlds of the twenty-first century.

12 Nintendo Expert

The Far Side by Gary Larson is the legendary one-panel comic that ran from 1980 to 1995. If you’ve ever laughed at a one-panel webcomic, I can pretty much guarantee that the creator’s passion was inspired by the Far Side. Here, Larson puts a twist on the stereotype of parents fearing for their video game-addicted children’s futures. Made at some point before 1996, the comic is intended to be ironic (having been around in 2005, there were no job offerings for Mario experts; believe me, I checked). But the comic is unintentionally prescient. Not only will people pay you to sit around testing games (though that gig’s not the golden goose it’s cracked up to be), but game designers and programmers are highly in demand.

11 Can Never Unsee

Sometimes your parents’ lack of video game knowledge can give them an objective perspective. There are times they see things that can never be unseen. While you traipsed along gleefully squishing goombas and knocking your noggin against floating blocks in Mario, your parents are the only ones to ask, “just what the heck is going on here?” Why do those blocks look like power outlets and why do those turtle shells look like little santas? Suddenly you can never unsee it. Not unlike little children and their accidental wisdom, parents see the world as it really is before the games had brainwashed you.

10 Listen To Your Parents

If you were ever a human child with at least a passing interest in video games, your parents likely badgered you to go outside every moment you touched the controller. There are certainly times where that badgering is warranted, specifically if you’ve been in your cave for days on end. Other times, your parents kick you out when you just started playing. And I don’t mean when you lie about having just started playing when it’s really been six hours, I mean you actually just started playing, like, three hours ago. On those occasions you cannot escape banishment to the dreaded realm of vitamin D, modern games got your back. Nintendo Switch is making it easier than ever to take your games on the go and resist all efforts to healthily exercise in the sunshine. Take that, mom!

9 No Family Of Mine Is A Filthy Casual

It’s easy to fall into the trap of thinking your parents are lame and don’t know anything that matters about pop culture. I mean, they’re the ones who are always doing the boring things like paying the bills and putting food on the table. You, on the other hand, are well-versed in all the tertiary character trivia in all the spinoffs of the Marvel universe. But more often than not, your parents possess a bank of pop culture trivia that may astound you. In their day, they knew all the hot deets about tv and movies that would put any schoolyard chum to shame. It’s not that they don’t care about modern pop trivia, it’s that modern stuff will invariably suck to their romanticized youth. I’ll let this sentiment be expressed in the immortal words of Grandpa Simpson.

8 King Of The Hill Mode

King of the Hill was a hit animated cartoon that ran on FOX from 1997 to 2010, or as you might have known it growing up, that annoying show about Texans you had to sit through while waiting for The Simpsons to come on. Personally, I realized that I hadn’t given King of the Hill nearly the chance it deserved after coming across such wonderful material from the show over the years. Take this excerpt for example. Hank Hill is playing a Grand Theft Auto-like game for the first time when he accidentally harms a parking attendant. His flustered reaction is all-too-familiar to any kid who has tried in vain to bond with their parent over they favourite video game. The experience usually only reaffirms the brutal nature of the game in the parents’ eyes.

7 Nothing Left To Teach

Gamer parents get to lord it over their kids that they’ve been playing games since before their child’s conception. In the first few years, that might mean that their kids will idolize their superior skills. However, quite a different story will take shape in the years that follow. All those times you were “showing your kid how it was done,” he was learning and watching and biding his time. Soon, your own ten-year-old is whipping you in the games you once had mastered. It can be embarrassing. You inadvertently trained your child into a video game super soldier like Tiger Woods’ dad stuck Tiger on the golfing green before he barely could walk.

6 Why Can't You Be On Twitch Like The Other Kids?

This is the dark side of future gamer parents. When most gamers fashion picture themselves as future parents, they fashion themselves much the same way Amy Poehler does in Mean Girls: “I’m not like a regular mom, I’m a cool mom.” But what happens when, in a cruel twist of fate, your kid doesn’t care about important stuff like gamerscores and only wants to study so they can get into a decent college? Oh my, it’s almost too terrible to fathom. In contrast to the twentieth century, the stereotype of the nerdy gamer with no friends has been all but reversed. Nerds push jocks into lockers in VR for failing to get their SAT scores in the 2000s.