Games That (Possibly) Made Me Feel Like a Dad
Video games. They’re interactive. You play them. You’re the one doing all the verbs and making the story happen. As such, video games can accomplish certain narrative feats more passive mediums cannot. In a movie, you sit back and watch a story about a cop. In a video game, you are a cop. Of course, if a game gives you enough leeway, you can break the sense immersion and do whatever. But if you’re like me, you like being in the role, and you try not to sabotage the fiction for yourself.
Most of the time, games use this unique interactive quality to make you feel powerful. You’re an unkillable sci-fi super soldier mowing down legions of enemies or you’re an ancient warrior with a magical sword who’s going to slay an evil dragon or a criminal out to wreak havoc on the populace.
But some games take a different approach. In the game Papers, Please, you’re a border agent in a fictional Soviet inspired totalitarian country. Your job is to review passports, consult the constantly changing immigration guidelines, and decide who gets in and who doesn’t. You may let in refugees or others who don’t fully meet the criteria, but it’ll come at the expense of being able to feed and provide for your family. It’s a game designed to make you feel like a helpless cog in a machine you have no control over. (This game came out in 2013.)
Or take the gloriously dumb Surgeon Simulator, a game with intentionally bad controls that asks you to perform complex surgical procedures, making you feel like a clumsy moron as you botch surgery after surgery, just like you presumably would in real life provided you haven’t trained to be a doctor.
Two games I played this year used this interactive effect to make me feel like a dad.
Or at least I think they did. As I write this, I am 27 years old, and I am not, nor do I ever intend to be, a father. However, if we’re to believe everything pop culture has ever said about good parenting, then we know that parenthood involves a degree of selflessness. The ability to put the needs and wants of your children over your own. If that’s at least partially true, then these two games made me want prioritize my digital children over my selfish desires, and thus I felt at least somewhat like a parent.
So let’s talk about them!
Dream Daddy: A Dad Dating Simulator
Dream Daddy: A Dad Dating Simulator, as you’ve probably already guessed from the title, is an incredible game. Though it came out in 2017, I didn’t play it until January of this year because the jokey dating simulator has been done before, and I didn’t see any reason to think this one would be any different. But Dream Daddy received overwhelmingly positive word-of-mouth, even by ironic game standards. So I gave it a shot.
You start the game by making your avatar in the game’s custom character creator. I named my character Mojito Brown (a name I made up in college to mock what I thought MMA fighters named themselves for some reason). He looks like this:
I’m the type of person who spends way too much time in character creator tools. So when I have to make a character, I just try to make Questlove. (Or as close to Questlove as I can get.) Not enough game characters look like Questlove.
The girl in the above screenshot is Amanda, the player’s eighteen year old daughter. Amanda’s awesome. She’s precocious, talented, and better socially equipped than most people could ever hope to be.
The game begins with you and Amanda moving out of your old house that you shared with Amanda’s other parent, an unnamed partner who died before the events of the game. (You choose the sex of said partner, so it can be either a mother or father.) You move to a small cul-de-sac in a town called Maple Bay, and once you settle in, you discover that all your neighbors happen to be single dads. (Well, most of them are single.) Once you meet all the dads around town, Amanda signs you up for Dadbook (which is what you think it is) to allow you to keep in touch with them and plan dates and hangout sessions.
The game then splits off into separate storylines with each of the seven available dads, as well as a through-line with Amanda as she’s preparing for college and going through the trials and tribulations of being a young adult.
The secret weapon of Dream Daddy: A Dad Dating Simulator is the writing. Based on the name and the genre, you may think you’re getting more of a meme than a game. But what you’re actually getting is an incredibly funny game textured with emotional nuance and empathy. The storyline with Mat, a dad who owns the local coffee shop, involves you helping him cope with his grief for his dead wife that has eclipsed his desire and passion for playing live music. Another storyline involves your want to be competitive with Brian, another dad, that’s really an exploration of your own insecurities and how they can drive you to behave like an asshole.
However, while there’s plenty to love in every corner of this game, I found myself particularly drawn in by the parts with Amanda. There’s a scene a little later on in the game where Amanda comes home crying and you don’t know why.
Here’s somebody playing the scene below. (Having some problems with the embed. It’s supposed to start at 4:50 and end at 12:23. Apologies if that’s still not the case.)
A brief summary in case you don’t feel like watching: Amanda’s best friend is named Emma, and Amanda also has a crush on a boy named Noah. Emma’s been her best friend since her mother/other father died. And yet, Emma not only started secretly dating the guy who she knows Amanda has a crush on, but basically poisoned her whole friend group against her and they’ve also started doing some nasty stuff to her.
After Amanda tells you this story, she says, “I know it’s pretty dumb.” I told her it wasn’t. I told her that real friends don’t do what Emma did, that not all friendships are worth maintaining, and that friendships with considerate people who care about you are the ones that are worth the effort.
Though my response sounds calm and measured, that’s only because I had so many dialogue options. My immediate reaction was rage.
The first time I experienced this scene, I immediately picked up my phone to write a series of joking texts to a friend explaining the situation and precisely what I wanted to do to Emma. Sadly, I couldn’t find these texts. But that’s probably for the best, because at some point while writing them, I realized that I wasn’t ranting out of a desire to be funny. I was ranting out of righteous paternal fury. Let’s just say that those texts got dark.
That reaction may sound over-the-top. But I don’t think this particular dilemma is the usual high school drama. Amanda’s suffered tremendous grief, and Emma not only knew that, but probably bonded with Amanda because she could provide comfort. Then she tossed Amanda aside for a boy. And not just any boy. The boy Emma knew Amanda liked. That’s a step or two beyond typical high school shit. That’s real life “there’s a toxic person in your life” shit.
True, Emma is a child, and equally true, she may be a bit of a late bloomer in the empathy department. But good fucking god, it’s been such a long time since I’ve felt such a pure blast of raw hate for a fictional character. I didn’t even know what Emma looked like. Yet I wanted to burn the Earth down just to hopefully get her in the process.
However, at some point, I realized that if I had that choice, or a scene in which I had the option to be passive aggressive to her or something like that, I wouldn’t have taken it. I wasn’t playing as someone divorced from consequence. I was playing as Amanda’s father. That’s why I felt as passionately as I did, and it’s also why I was aware of the fact that whatever I said to her could have a profound impact on her well-being and her development as a person. Amanda’s growth was more important than my own desire for paternal vengeance, so I gave her the advice that I thought would make her a happier person.
As it turns out, the knowledge that I did right by Amanda was more satisfying than revenge. Maybe not in an “I’m playing a video game and this is an appropriate environment to act on my worst impulses” way. But definitely in a broader sense that comes with the knowledge that maybe, just maybe, my fictional daughter will have a better life because of my influence.
Also, the game doesn’t give you an opportunity to lash out at Emma anyway, so there’s that too. But some games do give you that moment…
My Child Lebensborn
My Child Lebensborn, a phone game available on iOS or Android, takes place in Norway in the years after WWII. You adopt a child from the now defunct Lebensborn program, which took children deemed worthy by the Nazis, mostly those of unmarried women and Nazi officers, and put them in the homes of “pure” Aryan parents. The game lets you choose between adopting a boy or a girl. Because Dream Daddy was still on my mind, I chose the girl. Her name is Karin. (The boy’s name is Klaus. And don’t worry, it’s not some horrible “choose one or the other in front of them” kind of thing.)
Karin is now seven, and in a week’s time, she’ll be starting school with her best friend. It’s all she can talk about as you feed her, bathe her, patch her clothes, and perform all the tasks expected of a parent. Karin’s beyond excited. Then school starts, and the relentless bullying begins almost immediately.
Karin doesn’t know much about her lineage. She has vague memories of kind German women and every now and then a German phrase finds its way into her speech. However the rest of the town knows all about Karin’s parents, and in the post-WWII environment in Norway, most of the adults give their children free rein to treat her as they see fit. In other words, Karin’s chum in a sea of ravenous sharks.
You do your best. You work your menial job at the factory to make sure all her needs are met. You’re kind to her when possible and you help her when she’s upset. But all this provides little comfort as Karin’s day-to-day life is abject misery. Sometimes, the bullying is your usual schoolyard bullshit. Sometimes, particularly in the later chapters, Karin experiences downright evil. You have no power to stop any of it, but at the very very least, you can help her understand her circumstances. So you set off to find her birth parents in the hopes that she can meet them and have a conversation.
Eventually, you track down her aunt and grandparents on her mother’s side. The sister mails you some train tickets and invites you to visit. The day of the trip arrives, and for the first time in a while, spirits are high. Karin’s never been on a train, and she finally gets to meet her birth family!
You get on the train, and you overhear some people talking about your daughter. “This may not go well” thinks the perceptive gamer.
Then you finally meet Karin’s grandparents. They’re every bit as despicable as you feared.
Here’s the sequence, starting from getting on the train. (This is me playing. I’m on an iPhone 10, so apologies for the white bar that keeps showing up.)
Throughout the conversation with the grandparents, you are given a handful of opportunities to tell them off. I wanted with all my heart to take each and every one of them. But I didn’t want to give them the satisfaction of knowing they got to me, and I wanted to instill in Karin a sense of value when it comes to where and when to invest her rage. Because these people certainly aren’t worth it. They aren’t even worth the drop of piss it would take to save them from being on fire.
A bit macho? Maybe. But it’s not my job to teach decency to those beyond saving. My job was to look out for Karin, to provide the best example I can, and to make sure she has someone she can lean on once the trip is over and the heartbreak sinks in.
Still, I cannot begin to describe to you how much I wanted to tear into these people. Both verbally and physically.
And that feeling never went away. Later in the game, the one teacher who was nice to Karin moves out of town, and he’s replaced by a monster who routinely humiliates Karin on a physical and emotional level. It’s heartbreaking to watch, and the game gives you zero opportunities to stop it. (Except to take her out of class, but this is a move the game eventually forces you to make anyway out of narrative necessity.)
Part of your morning routine is to take Karin to school. You tap on the school to drop her off, then you tap on the factory in the distance to go to work. Usually, the whole process takes two taps of your screen.
However, in this part of the story, I found myself taping on Karin’s school over and over and over again in the futile hope that the game would allow to me to confront the teacher. At some point, I realized that anything I could hypothetically inflict on the teacher would probably wind up being returned tenfold on my daughter, so I stopped trying. But I felt an overwhelming need to do something. Don’t get me wrong, I wasn’t expecting the game to give me a “go beat the fuck out of Karin’s teacher” button. But the inability do anything at all made me feel completely powerless.
Which is precisely the point. You are raising your daughter in a world where everything is against her. I can barely cope with the consequences of that in a video game. In real life, I can’t even fathom it.
So yes, I remain firm in my decision to not have children.
It probably doesn’t reflect well on me that, at least in these particular games, my sense of paternity was riled not by love for my fake children, but by anger and a desire for retribution. But I’m not sure what I felt for either of them is really “love” in a true parental sense. Amanda and Karin are not actually my daughters, and I was well aware of that the entire time with both games.
And more importantly, I’m not convinced that a video game is really capable of capturing that love. Of course games can generate empathy and make you care. But that’s not the same thing as actually raising and loving a child.
However, I won’t deny that these games make you feel lost in the illusion.
Sure, the world of Dream Daddy is basically a utopia of sorts. Or at least it doesn’t feel anything out of the real world. And sure, much of the gameplay in My Child Lebensborn is brutally repetitive (to make a point) and some of the restrictions it places on you feel a bit forced. But though I don’t “love” Amanda and Karin, I grew to care deeply for both of them to the point where it outshined my desire to take the traditionally petty “gamer” option of being a vindictive dick whenever possible.
It’s interesting to me that both of these games got there by limiting your options as opposed to giving you more power to shape the experience. Maybe some day there’ll be a game that gives you that ability. But normally, taking control away from the player calls attention to itself, and I didn’t think it could or would be an effective tool for making you feel like a parent. And the more one thinks about the implications of powerlessness making you feel that way, the darker this particular rabbit hole gets.
I don’t think I got the full parental experience. But maybe I got somewhere close.
