Indie Gaming

One answer I heard of from a dad was: He collects tons of coop games to play with his kids, and prefers those, as well as some competitive games that you can play against easy/hard bots, so he can team with the kids.

BUT, if the kids specifically ask to play against him, he’ll take the duel, and play his best. He was okay with letting them view it as a mountain to try to climb. Kids often learn more about games than you’d realize, so after one or two matches of getting creamed they might start to do much better.

Depends on game and their skill, but I rarely go "full competitive", since most of the time I'm also teaching the game anyway. Letting them win sometimes is important so they don't drop the game immediately

Depends on the game. A game of skill, I tend to try to make it look competitive with some wins and losses for both but nothing too out ragious like lapping them, going flawless, trick shots, or running up the scores. I am usually teaching them how to play. I am thinking specifically video games or sports here

Games of luck, I try to play to play to win and sometimes explaining my logic if I asked why I did that. This applies to games of cards like Uno, Cribbage, yahtzee.

Depends what we are playing.

As a person that rarely interacta with kids, but also have friends that aren't really gamers I think I can give some relatively useful anecdotal advice.

It really depends on the person, their age, if you're in a group or one on one, and skill level. If I'm in a group I tend to go for the me vs everyone else role. So everyone combined can still beat me. If it's one vs one then I try to go easy or just look for some way we can play co-op instead competitive, if they're not that skilled or not competitive.