I have yelped, I have screamed, I have been brought nearly to tears when gaming with the boy
Not that one, the other one,” I say to my son. He’s trying to squirt sap on the blade of a windmill in such a way that the added weight will set it in clockwise motion. It’s a tricky task, made trickier by the fact he is aiming for the wrong one and, thus, setting it tumbling in the opposite direction.
“The other one,” I repeat. “The other one.” My tone is animated, my voice raised. My heart rate is at car-crash levels and my jaw is clenching tight enough I could bite through a concrete bollard like an apple.
Several weeks ago, I asked friends which co-op game would be good to play with a six-year-old: It Takes Two was the unanimous response. Released four years ago, its premise is pleasingly abstruse; a couple on the precipice of a divorce have an argument. Having witnessed this, their daughter cries tears of sadness on to a pair of dolls while wishing they’d just get along. Due to science, this transplants their souls into said dolls, leaving them – and you, the game’s two players – to navigate a magically altered version of their house and garden on a quest to console your daughter and regain human form. It Takes Two exclusively utilises split-screen co-operative play, so that every task you perform must be co-ordinated with your playing partner. You hold a lever, they push a button. You find a path through a maze, they blaze a trail through it. It’s absurdly fun, extremely tricky and dangerously, compulsively addictive.
It all began a few weeks back, when he was too enfeebled by chickenpox to do much of anything and I dug out the PS4 I hadn’t plugged in for three years and sought out something we could play together.
It’s something I’ve always wanted to do with my kids when the time came. My own father had a deep distaste, bordering on distrust, of games. To be honest, aside from kvetching about Northern Irish politics, we have almost zero shared hobbies at all. I loved sport but, with a logic I can’t really fault, he’s always considered it little more than competitive exercising, and would have no greater interest in watching a game of football or rugby, than he would in going down to the park to cheer on joggers. The only sport he does like is Formula One, both because he’s an engineer and because he has clearly never looked up the definition of the word “sport”. It’s always left me cold, but I would often watch the races with him, attempting to scry some form of pleasure from their contents. They would divert me for a while but, eventually, I’d become lost in the jargon he’d touchingly impart about carbon disc brakes and eight-speed transmissions, and he would grow weary of questions I would ask about whether the drivers wear nappies.
When it comes to sport, my son takes after his granddad and I don’t really pine for him to love it as I do. With gaming, however, I thought I could latch on to a passion we shared together, something over which we could truly bond. I’m happy to report that this has proven to be the case, but it hasn’t all been plain sailing.
When excited, the boy tends to jump up and down in front of the screen, entirely blocking my view
When we started, my son had never held a PlayStation controller before. For this reason, his co-ordination is erratic. When excited, he tends to jump up and down in front of the screen, entirely blocking my view. His ability to move through the game is limited and he loves nothing more than to fall off platforms and run backwards into enemies and hit the wrong bloody blade on the wrong bloody windmill.
These are all obvious, even charming, features of a child doing something quite complicated for the first time, and it would take a monster to hold these flaws against him. Sadly, I have become just such a monster many, many times in the past few weeks. Show me a patient, placid father and I’ll show you one who hasn’t tried, for the 417th time in a row, to co-ordinate the timing of a pressure release valve and an arrow being fired, with a six-year-old who is standing directly in front of your screen, holding his controller, one-handed, like a sandwich. I have yelped. I have screamed. I have been brought nearly to tears. And through all of this, I have experienced more joy than I ever thought possible.
The thrills, and frustrations, of co-op gaming are so potent, their pleasures and punishments so devastatingly pure, that nothing else we’ve done together has come close to bonding us so closely. I have died alongside him more times than I can count and every death is forgotten once we pull ourselves past each checkpoint; inching forward, as if by our fingernails, one error, one accident, one fatality, at a time.
I marvel at his steady progress and increasing acuity; his indefatigable perseverance, and immutable good humour in the face of my occasional, but lessening, outbursts of frustration. And I am shamed, as I should be, by his utter lack of judgment when it comes to my own, quite frequent, missteps.
I’m not just watching him learn, I’m learning from him, and I find myself as happy as any parent has ever been. It’s just I’d be a tiny bit happier if he hit the correct blade of that bloody windmill. No, not that one. The other one.
Photograph by Getty Images
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