Experiencing Video Games Through My Daughter’s Eyes

My daughter is 13 years old, and our tastes in video games couldn’t be more disparate. I like exploring, solving puzzles, and hitting enemies with swords or other myriad weapons. I even look at games not designed to be challenging as hurdles to leap over. I want to see them to the end and proclaim my victory by watching the list of people who worked on it scroll by as I add it to a list I have been curating since 2008 of every game I have ever beaten.

My child, on the other hand, plays games as a means of social interaction and relaxation. I have watched in horror as my child deleted her saves, abandoning hours and hours of progress, to restart both Animal Crossing and Stardew Valley on multiple occasions. She wants to hang out in video games, not defeat them. The moment action occurs in a game she loses interest. She doesn’t want to attack anything. One of her favorite games, Undertale, claims that title from her because you can get through it without killing anyone. I have videos on my phone of her taking on Undertale’s extremely difficult True Pacifist final challenge and watching her light up with personal pride at the conclusion. But she wasn’t proud because she beat a game. She was proud because she did it without partaking in video games’ favorite pastime: defeating bad guys.

The thing I enjoy witnessing on the rare occasion she decides to take on a bit of action, is she is great at it! Growing up with the necessary pinpoint precision of games like Minecraft, she is a fantastic Fortnite player and is more skilled with the “zoom-in gun,” as she liked to call it when she was younger, than I ever was or will be. But she didn’t play Fortnite to see Victory Royale. She played because it let her hang out with friends online, which was especially valuable during the height of the pandemic.

I have watched in horror as my child deleted her saves, abandoning hours and hours of progress, to restart both Animal Crossing and Stardew Valley on multiple occasions. She wants to hang out in video games, not defeat them.

Watching her taste develop as she has grown up has been a fascinating bonding activity that I adore. We don’t often play games together cooperatively, but I am absolutely captivated by what she is playing and why she likes it. I loved watching her play Bugsnax over and over, and breathlessly explain to me why she loved the characters and the game’s surprisingly dark conclusion. I learned that we both appreciate a well-executed mystery and twist under the guise of cartoon visuals, and that now extends to all the media we consume as a family, not just video games.

She also learned at a young age that if she didn’t want to go to bed, all she had to do was ask Dad about what game he was reviewing for work, and sometimes a whole hour would pass before I remembered that she had school tomorrow. She knew what she was doing to avoid bed, but to this day I don’t mind being manipulated in that way.

Her latest video game obsession is one we have all been pulled into as a family – the rare cooperative experience we all play together. Content Warning may look like a horror game to the uninitiated, but in practice, it’s a game about going into a spooky place, filming you and your friends (or parents in this case) getting into trouble, and going home to laugh about it together. I enjoy talking about it and reminiscing about play sessions with her as much as actually playing. For many, playing video games together is the bonding activity, but for my family and many others, the discussion about the games we’ve been playing, and figuring out what we like and don’t like about them also brings us together.

Kyle Hilliard is an executive editor at Game Informer. You can find more of his writing on GameSpot, IGN, Polygon, and The Washington Post. He also worked with Thorium Entertainment managing communications for the upcoming UnderMine 2, and you can hear and see him on nearly every episode of The MinnMax Show podcast.