Neil Patrick Harris recently got into a trouble that mostly all dads get into at some point in their lives. While some dads purposely let their kids win at gaming, others like Neil don’t really stand a chance of winning. But how does it even matter if you win or lose when you are playing against your own kids?

The American actor who has been casted in a holiday movie for HBO about getting an NES, paired up with Nintendo to promote the release of Big Brain Academy: Brain vs. Brain as well as the upcoming movie. Brain came out on the 3rd of December on Switch but Harris got to play it with his kids ahead of the release. In an interview for a renowned magazine, Neil Patrick Harris talked about how he rarely wins the gaming sessions with his kids. He revealed that his 11 year old twins regularly crush him at the game.

He added: “I thought the older I got, the more nuanced my skill set at say, Super Mario Kart would be, and I think that’s not true. I think the synapses must slow down, or my children are just very, very skilled because they whoop me pretty much uniformly. It’s demoralizing, but I’ll take it, and watch them laugh at me.”

Every father eventually hits this phase, where either it’s having a 1 on 1 with your little one in your driveway, or getting slammed by them in a video game. It’s very fun to drop the hammer in Mario Kart on a second grader but it isn’t very amusing when he/she becomes a fifth grader and has no hesitation in humiliating you. It doesn’t matter if you win or lose, nothing beats gaming with your kids. It’s a pathway that helps you to strengthen your bond with your little ones.

Harris also confessed that he’s been a fan of Nintendo since he was a kid and that he’d never dreamt that he would be teaming up with the company someday. Dads are already superheroes in their children’s eyes, but whenever they go an extra mile for their kids, they become even greater for them. Similarly, this 48 year old actor has also been able to earn some extra dad points from his kids as it was because of him that they got to play the game before it had even released. Nintendo’s promo video makes Harris look a little better at the game than he actually is in real life.

Neil admitted that he uses Switch as a bartering tool with his children. He only lets them play the game once they are done with their schoolwork. It’s a great trick that most dads use in order to make their kids complete their schoolwork in time. This ruse benefits dads in two ways: one, the kids complete their work without making any fuss and two, daddies get a little extra time to get a head start before the true showdown at the game begins.