Twenty families in the San Francisco Bay area (California) with new Atari home video game sets were studied from February through June 1981 to obtain data on how the game-playing affected family interaction. Records of play were kept for one week each month and each family member was interviewed at the beginning and the end of the study. It was found that: (1) the majority of families spent less than an hour per day in average game-playing time for the total family; (2) time spent playing video games decreased 13 minutes from the first recordkeeping period to the last for the total sample; (3) family and sibling interaction increased in nearly all families as adults and children played with each other; (4) families with all girls had the highest percentage of recorded time spent playing with other family members; (5) mothers were reluctant to play the video games; (6) all but 1 of 17 fathers in the study played the games with the family at least occasionally; (7) two-thirds of the families reported watching less television; (8) families reported spending less money on coin-operated machines; (9) no families reported a detrimental effect on school work as a result of playing the home video games and some reported school work improvement; (10) none of the families saw a relationship between playing video games and developing aggressive, violent personalities; (11) girls tended overall to play less than boys; and (12) most of the families saw their video games as a bridge to personal computers. Quotations from family interviews are included in the report. (Author/ESR)