When I was much younger my Dad hosted a bulletin board system and the members all played these text based war games sort of like "risk" or an RTS. I remember seeing the players dial in to his computer/bbs and their selections would scroll...then I'd watch my Dad enter his moves, purchases in the "game" also whenever he took his turns.
But the real switch flipped when he started bringing me home floppy disks from work of games like the black cauldron, king's quest, Tapper, etc, and I got to use his computer and interact with them. My Dad always encouraged me to use computers so I would play games on his whenever he wasn't messing with his bbs or otherwise needing it. Some of these were on multiple disks of course and it was exciting to me when I would get the message to enter the next disk.
He also bought us an atari 2600 later. I remember my sister, our neighborhood friends and I would play so much Space Invaders and Asteroids. We would sometimes have tournaments or days when there were 10 or so of us just taking turns trying to oust the person with the highest score, etc. Such good memories. I'm 45 yrs old now and my Dad has never been into games other than chess, but I certainly credit him with being the catalyst of my enjoyment of them.
tldr- dad gave me stuff that was interactive because I was usually not entertained otherwise
