@Jake: Oh my God that game sounds horrible, you know, in good way. I think I’d have to feel it myself to see if the parenthood metaphor actually works, especially as your “children” can fall in love. In a sense it sounds escort mission derivative: when you fail, people die. Fortunately I do not have the Wii and cannot experience the true dread of that game.

https://sites.google.com/site/hotlavy/all-articles/you-me-and-the-cubes—blood-on-my-hands-in-an-unknown-metaphors

(Disclaimer: I do have some potentially implementable ideas for text games, which I’m going to work on when I can make the time, which may be in 2015.)

@Jenn – I don’t know if it’s age that makes us impatient or the age that makes us impatient. And being a grown-up has all sorts of time challenges. I don’t want to live in a world where instant gratification in the only buzz going around, but I’m not sure if the ever-tightening electronic vines strangling our lives and increasing desperation to make ends meet will permit for anything else. Ah. That’s a little more cynical than I intended.

@matt – I know, I should’ve grabbed Jenn for last week. And maybe you should keep all those game ideas to yourself so you can pour them all into a single game! A game based on parenting books is an absolutely incredible idea. My head exploded with ideas as soon as you dropped it in. Those parenting books are a god damn nightmare. Brilliant, if I had a gold star, it would go to you for that idea.

@Jake – I’m completely ignorant of a lot of titles in console world. Part of me just assumed there wouldn’t be any interesting parenting mechanics in there but, of course, there’s Heavy Rain to begin with.

@BC – Thanks for the heads-up BC. From your description, it does sound a bit escorty though.

@Nicolau – Only two articles in two years! Fabulous. That’s a win in my book. You’re wrong and right. You’re wrong in the sense I was looking at alternative mechanical challenges that came from parenting, which I approached from the angle of adversity, rather than just “save/shepherd your children”. But you’re right in the sense they all interpret children as challenge, that they are burden.

When I set out on this mission against escort missions, I thought no game had really nailed down the parental complex. You love them. You despair of them. You want more life. You aspire to make their lives better. You want a lie in. But you don’t want them to spend their day waiting for Daddy to wake up. It’s a knot of contradictions that is difficult to impart. You can set out experiences, side by side, but none of these in isolation really cover the parenthood. I’m sure there are some people who are genuinely ecstatic as parents for every single days of their lives but the truth for most is something more difficult to explain. I doubt this feeling, this thing I want to see in a game, can be expressed in a single mechanic. It would require an all-round experience with competing goals and also appropriate rewards that are a world away from cloying cutscenes (e.g. Photopia does get this right, and you’re also right about “wanting to be around the norns”).

(Disclaimer- I haven’t touched some of the games mentioned in the comments.)

Though I really liked this piece, for the second time I read something in ED that created expectations in me that were not fulfilled. You started by saying: parenting is not an escort mission: it’s much more. And then you said a bunch of other hard, bad stuff. I was hoping for the good part. I mean, people don’t have kids because they want to sleep less and trying to prevent a living creature from dying. I guess videogames will keep failing in representing parenthood to a good extent is they don’t at least try to recreate something that, in some weird way, resembles love. And though that RPS video is a very funny example of an escort game, the chicken babies are so cute, I would feel at least a little bad about something bad happening to them in a game. We might get attached even to virtual creatures, like Jenn’s norns. I never played Creature, but what seems good about that game is that we do stuff not just because the game challenges us to not let them norns die, but because I just like being around them, and doing stuff with them. You forgot that #10.

I would definitely like to give a shot at a game toying with such concepts, but my line of ideas-to-be-worked-with is already too big. And I just rememberd my first game was a tamagotschi-like thing.

(Sorry to be so vague and uncertain. I tried to search the Internet for more information, but I only found Harvest Moon fan-fiction.)

I thought of another game-concept here — the interactive fiction IntroComp game “Bedtime Story,” where you play a father returning from a business trip and telling your child a story that your wife has started. You give commands to the protagonist of the story rather than playing as the PC, if that makes any sense, but your child provides some of the necessary constraint on your actions and a way of moving things along, in that he can reject your commands and make up new stuff in response. As an intro it just has one short puzzle in it, and it also has some dubious gender politics (you give the protagonist a sword, telling your son that “This is a boy’s story now”), but the mechanism is nice.

Another mechanic I thought of: There are all those parenting books out there with tips on what to do. And they all contradict each other and/or are completely incoherent, like that one game where there’s a tip to get a silk bag from the graveyard duck.

But what you typed *did* ping with me because, absolutely, it is often hard to make sense of where the game stops and life picks up. One always informs the other. And I think it’s important for us, as players, to use our own experiential datasets to make reverse-sense of games. (My old editor won’t permit the use of the word “mimesis,” ever, but I think it applies here.) So although games paint with much broader strokes, I would not apologize for using them as “paint”! Games are a good way to fill in the gaps, and conversely, “life” is a good way to think about the sizable gaps in game concepts. Oh, gosh, I think now I’m making no sense at all.

Moving right along…! I think it might be even harder to play Creatures now? In some ways? At the game’s outset it was always a little bit of a trudge but, for my own part at least, now the learning curve feels much more shallow, and slower, than I thought it was when I was a teenager. I think with age I’ve become impatient. Hmm.