Replaying games from my past with my young children has been surreal – and transformative | Games

TThanks to the decidedly Scottish holiday weather, my family and I celebrated Hogmanay at home rather than at the party we had planned to attend. My youngest son’s little friend and his parents came over for dinner, and when the younger members of our group started getting out of control around 9 p.m., we threw them a little countdown to midnight party. Animal Crossing.

The last time I played Animal Crossing was at the height of lockdown. Caring for my island paradise helped me cope with being confined to a 2.5 bedroom basement apartment with a baby, toddler and teenager. (I wasn’t the only one – National Video Game Museum collected an archive people’s experience with animal crossing during the Covid-19 pandemic, and it is clear that this has been a lifeline for many.) Our guests brought their Switch family with them, and we set the kids up with their little avatars so they could join in on the New Year’s Animal Party.

They spent about 10 minutes gleefully hitting each other with bug nets before gathering with other residents in a plaza with a giant countdown clock in the background and the island’s raccoon tycoon Tom Nook offering party crackers and glittery top hats. I had a sudden, exciting memory of New Year’s Eve 2021, spent on the couch alone, but not alone, because I was with my friends on Animal Crossing, watching the same countdown clock tick. My youngest had just started walking and stood unsteadily on his short, stocky legs. Turning away from the screen, I saw him joking with his older brother, happy to have woken up so late. It was surreal.

Watching my kids discover and become familiar with video games often feels a little surreal. They enrich or even overwrite my early memories of the games in question, such as playing New Game+ or a brand new save file. Around this time last year, we all started playing Pokémon together, the Switch remake of the Game Boy Red and Blue versions that I myself played to death in 1999. Now Pokémon isn’t just a thing I loved. How baby but the thing I loved through my children. Super Mario 3D World now feels like a completely different game with four-player chaos and sibling bickering. Games are transformed by their presence, their reactions, the differences between the way they react and the way I do it.

My youngest recently wanted to try a Zelda game, and the only age-appropriate game was the Switch version of Link’s Awakening. I bristled. When he was a child, my youngest boy was terribly ill in the hospital, and I spent long hours next to him in the ward, trying to contain my terror by playing Link’s Awakening, my headphones unable to drown out the insistent honking of the machines. He recovered, but my associations with the game remain dark, despite its summery setting and outrageous appeal. I swallowed my reflexive worry and handed the controller to my son once we found Link’s sword buried in the sand of the beach. It was a healing moment to watch him swing it at spiky land urchins, rock-spitting octopuses and squat pig-like spearmen, healthy and intact, with an expression of mischievous delight.

Video games were something distant and mysterious for my parents, and they treated them with some suspicion (but, importantly, never disdained them). I invited them in, tried to show them the worlds I saw on the other side of the screen, and although they watched them with interest, I was like a visitor from another country, showing photographs of places they had never been, trying to explain my feeling awe. With my children, I am more like a guide: I know the area well, and they are very happy for me to guide them through it.

Later, when our tastes diverge, I’ll probably be a tourist at their games. I’ll feel the same way I did 10 years ago when my friend’s 12-year-old showed me his Minecraft server full of collaboratively created automated gadgets. (He’s now an engineer.) For now, though, Animal Crossing has caught on. I created a family island that my kids could look after and then dug up the old yellow Switch Lite that contained the island I used to hole up on when they were tiny and we were cut off from the world during lockdown. This is a magnificent island, the result of hundreds of hours of painstaking work, but it has been withering since the pandemic; I was in awe of returning to this place and all its mixed memories. But my kids are desperate to visit. They can help me make new ones.

What to play

For decades, programmers and developers have been creating old joke I haven’t been able to get Doom to run on unlikely things, from calculators to refrigerators to ATMs, but it’s nonetheless been a while since I’ve seen the ubiquitous 1993 shooter in a new light.

IN Doom: Gallery Experienceyou wander the gallery’s halls with a glass of red wine in hand, looking at pixelated recreations of Renaissance, Greek and Egyptian art, collecting snacks to fill your cheese meter. Its developers describe it as “a work of art intended to parody the wonderfully pretentious world of gallery openings.” It’s brief, but it definitely brightened up my first day at work in this gray January.

Available: You can play it in your browser via itch.io
Approximate playing time: less than 30 minutes

What to read

• New York Times published Video games can’t afford to look that goodA long, thoughtful, interactive look at the many existential questions about how games are made, with bloated budgets and over-the-top graphics.

• Talk about free game and gatcha games were once universally criticized. It is now often argued that criticism of these business models ignores the reality of the majority of people who play them, people in parts of the world where console games are not available. Developer Bruno Diaz claims that it would be disingenuous to shy away from criticizing these pay-to-play models: “We should not view these companies as satisfying needs, but rather as exploiting inequality.”

• Video game researcher and archivist Felipe Pepe believes that the American-centric approach history of video games presented erases the gaming experience millions of people in other parts of the world: the history of home computers, networked homes, unofficial mods and gaming cafes.

• Information from Game files Stephen Totilo, who discovered previously confidential numbers in Aktivizhn lawsuit: the stated cost of developing Call of Duty Black Ops: Cold War was $700 million, excluding marketing. This is the largest game budget ever reported.

What to press

Block of questions

Today’s question comes from David: “What would be your favorite video game character’s favorite game?”

My favorite video game character (that I didn’t create myself) is Kazuma Kiryu from the Like a Dragon games. He spent a lot of time playing old Sega games in the virtual Tokyo arcades under my watch, but I think he would have done it. Love Animal Crossing. This would appeal to his sense of responsibility and good tendencies, and it would be an escape from the violence of his actual lifestyle. I don’t think of him as a gamer – the guy was born into a yakuza family in 1968, before they had the NES – but I can imagine him solemnly watering flowers and customizing furniture, as a break from painting the faces of bad guys with his fists.

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