Today, video games have become an increasingly common way of spending free time among children, which is confirmed by the fact that almost 90% of children in Croatia play some video game (Labaš et al., 2019: 21). Entering the virtual world is a space for children to socialize with their peers and a source of entertainment. The demand on the video game market today has become more significant, but also more accessible to a broader audience due to the development of different gaming consoles as well as different exciting genres, where in this case, the most demanding consumers are children. Precisely because of the increasing frequency of spending free time in the world of video games, as well as their increasing availability, children and their parents need to be aware of the positive and negative consequences of the same through the media. This paper will present the results of the research conducted between February and March 2023 with 53 parents of children in the seventh and eighth grades in an elementary school in the city of Dubrovnik. We used the survey method to collect the results. The research sought to determine the opinion of parents on the positive and negative aspects of playing video games, while examining their familiarity with consumer habits when purchasing video games, familiarity with the amount of time their children spend playing video games, with the content of the video games they play, the way they play video games, and reasons for playing video games. The results showed that most parents agree that the reason their children play video games is mostly for fun and hanging out with friends. Also, when examining parents’ opinions regarding the positive aspects of playing video games, most parents agree that video games provide entertainment and help in learning foreign languages. Nevertheless, most parents believe that playing video games leads to less socializing with friends. Mužić (2014) points out that the negative characteristic of video games is withdrawal from society due to excessive playing. He claims that the ever-increasing expansion of digital media causes among young people “an increasingly widespread phenomenon of exclusion from social life and confinement in the virtual world of video games, television and the Internet [...] where they spend all their free time in a kind of emotional desert [...] That it leads to alienation but also to losing sight of the value of real life.” (according to Haramija, 2020: 95).