The New Fatherhood·—
Spending Virtual Money to Make Virtual Money
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The book is now out everywhere! It’s been wonderful to see the response from dads around the world, sharing their favourite passages online, emails coming in from far and wide, reviews from folks who clearly get what the book is trying to do, and why it’s so necessary.
One hiccup last week was an influx of messages from dads outside the US, asking why the online stores were showing delivery times in July. After a little digging around, it turns out the initial run of books sent outside the US has sold out! My publisher is working on a re-up, and the books are making their way across the Atlantic as we speak. So if you’ve ordered a copy and received a delay notice, or are looking to get one before Father’s Day, don’t worry. Any orders placed will put you at the front of the line for the next drop. Get it while stocks last, I guess?!
After a sold-out event in London last night, I’ll be in Manchester next Tuesday, June 2nd, the next leg of the tour. Homecoming date. Hope to see some of you there.
The idea of my kids not playing videogames was always a non-starter.
Our house is stacked with consoles, the closed TV cabinet door hiding all manner of oblongs emblazoned with a trio of logos: Nintendo, Microsoft, Sony. And those are just the ones in active circulation. There’s a cardboard box in the bottom of a cupboard filled with the dusty remains of those who came before, ancestors who paved the way: an imported Japanese GameCube, delivered after Santa’s last hurrah; a Nintendo 64 with a copy of Goldeneye seemingly sealed into the cartridge slot; a Dreamcast, sadly left us way too young. When we moved to the US, and were only granted 500kg in shipped goods (which seems like a lot, until you realise it’s only twenty 25kg suitcases), we were faced with the difficult decision of deciding whose yellowing Super Nintendo we would keep—mine or my wife’s—before selling the other.
During my own childhood, videogames were an escape, a world to fall into whilst hidden away in my bedroom, my parents confused as to why I was spending so much time jumping through green pipes and eating reality-shifting mushrooms. (One of those things I’d end up doing a lot more as a fully-functioning adult).
But with my kids, it became a bonding ritual and a passing of the torch. During the COVID-19 pandemic, Spain entered a period of lockdown that we were sure would end soon, naive and utterly oblivious to the 42 days we’d spend in the house with a five-year-old and one-year-old, their exit from the front door deemed an illegal act. It was during this time that Nintendo released Animal Crossing: New Horizons. It was, as Keza Macdonald writes in the fabulous book Super Nintendo: The Game-Changing Company That Unlocked the Power of Play, a game that “offered community, creativity, relaxation and connection to a world that was suddenly starved of all those things.”
Japanese videogame designer Katsuya Eguchi was the mastermind behind the game, and created it with his own children in mind, after his job as a producer and director for Nintendo, working on classic games like Super Mario Bros 3, Super Mario World and Star Fox, meant missing time spent with his children at home. As Simon Parkin wrote in the New Yorker, covering the game in March 2020:
Eguchi joined Nintendo, in 1986, at the age of twenty-one and found himself alone, in a new city, severed from friends and family. Even as he climbed the company ladder, he routinely had to work past his children’s bedtime. Animal Crossing was his response: a game in which people, playing at different times, could bond in unprecedented ways. Eguchi could finally spend time with his children.
This game would bring my daughter and me together, fulfilling Eguchi’s vision. We’d spend the endless pandemic days working on our island, visiting friends across the world who were also doing the same. It would become our first foray into a shared digital world. But it wouldn’t be our last.
For the last year, I’ve been getting up every Saturday and Sunday to work a weekend job.
I’ll head to the kitchen, pour myself a glass of water and walk into the living room. I’ll check with the kids if they’ve eaten breakfast—fun fact, parents with younger children, at one point in your future, your offspring will start making their own breakfast on the weekends while you stay in bed, often, but not consistently—and my daughter will ask me, “Are you ready?”
And we’ll pull on our pixel overalls and clock in for a shift on the farm.
I turned my daughter onto Stardew Valley a few weeks shy of her 10th birthday. Released in 2016, the game is, at its most simple, a farming simulator: you begin having left a stressful city job behind, taking up residence on a dilapidated farm you’ve inherited from your recently passed grandfather. You start with a crummy set of tools: a pickaxe, a hoe, an axe, a scythe and a watering can, and are given very little instruction.
