In this article, we offer an account of the strategy that parents in southern Peru undertake to control the “excessive” gaming of their sons. With this strategy, parents attempt to reconstruct the “networks” or “channels” through which parents and sons attend to, monitor, and are made communicatively available to each another, a strategy that requires them to—among other things—disassemble competing networks of socialization. Our analysis of this ethnographic material requires us to provide a theory of the role that the “phatic function” plays in processes of language socialization. [language socialization, phatic function, digital gaming, parenting, Peru]