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#72: The dad-game problem

Nathan Brown

10 Nov 2021 — 6 min read

At E3 in 2016, I was in a roundtable presentation of Sony Santa Monica’s freshly announced God Of War reboot. And, rarely for me, I asked a question. I was struck by the stark tonal pivot on show; on how a series I’d always known for its out-and-out, over-the-top god-killing ultraviolence was now telling the supposedly tender story of said god-killer raising a kid.

Game director Cory Barlog had earlier spoken at length about his own experiences as a father, and how they’d informed the game’s direction. I asked him how confident he was that this would resonate with an audience that sees the name God Of War and thinks, right, I am going to rip Zeus’ eyes out of their sockets, and brutally sacrifice a young woman in order to solve a door puzzle. They may not, I suggested, be quite so interested in teaching Kratos’ annoying wee kid to hunt deer. Perhaps Barlog was putting a bit too much of his own reality in a game that had always succeeded by virtue of its ultraviolent fantasy.

Well, Barlog’s God Of War reboot came out in 2018 and we all know how that panned out. And in fact, I shouldn’t have been as surprised by it, or so skeptical of its conceit, as I was. There is a simple, marketing-level logic to what Barlog and co were doing: the audience that grew up ripping out Zeus’ etc and so on were now, in all likelihood, of parenting age themselves. Nor was God Of War the first of its kind: the dad-game era kicked off, to my mind, with the first season of Telltale’s The Walking Dead. In the nine years (god) since that original, quintessential dad-game came along, there have been countless big-budget games about dads struggling to be dads, and particularly in reconciling their struggle to be a dad with their day job of killing things. Dad-games are just part of the furniture these days.

But! Time marches on, and all that. We all just keep getting older, and the demographics are changing all the time. The dad-game, as envisioned by Barlog, Telltale, Naughty Dog and so on, is no longer enough.

A while ago a pal shared this tweet from veteran game journalist Arthur Gies, posted when the Halo Infinite beta was in full swing last month:

I didn’t really get it. I didn’t see those two games as competing. They’re notionally in the same genre, but several sub-genres apart; each has its hardcore audience, and their releases are far enough apart for fans of both to buy both. I reckoned that there was buzz around Halo because the beta was on, that there would be buzz around the Battlefield beta a couple of weeks later, and there would be buzz around both games when they each came out. I was confident there was plenty of room for the two to coexist. Plus ça change.

Then a pal pointed out that, actually, those games are competing with each other — in the sense that they both have to convince people to care about them in a post-Fortnite, post-Warzone, post-Among Us and Roblox and Minecraft world. And the scales suddenly fell from my eyes. There is another sort of dad-game: not games about dads, but games that are for dads — and mums and the childless too, of course, forgive me the lazy shorthand. They are for people of a certain age, rather than parents specifically.

In which case, holy shit, Halo and Battlefield are absolutely dad-games. It is 20 years since Combat Evolved. In the series’ first decade, five games were released. In the second, discounting re-releases and spin-offs, there have been just two (Infinite will be the third). What cultural cachet does Halo have among a Gen Z audience, or even a young millennial one? Does a new, premium-priced Battlefield move the needle all that much with the youth of today? I’m not convinced it does, and that strikes me as quite a problem.

It seems that the terms of engagement have shifted somewhat. It is no longer merely a question of how you make the latest sequel to a 20-year-old game relevant to established series fans who are now 20 years older. Now it is also about how you make those games appealing to the generation, or generations, below them. People who have very different expectations and aspirations for what games should look like, and feel like; for how they should present themselves, and what they might allow you to do.

I was reminded of all this yesterday by Forza Horizon 5, a game whose numerical subtitle makes clear its dad-game credentials, but has this weirdly split personality. It is a serious driving game for serious driving-game fans, but is dressed up in Gen Z clothes. Its character creator, while allowing for a welcome degree of fluidity and representation, ultimately insists you look like some flavour of Love Island contestant. There is incessant banter over bland shopping-centre dance music. Everyone is young and attractive and simply will not shut up, ever, because heaven forbid you concentrate on driving a very fast car. This is not a driving game, it says. This is a festival! A welcoming, inclusive celebration of… well, something! Go wild, have fun, express yourself! That said, you did just crash your car quite badly into the side of a building because we’re pretty finicky about torque and traction and braking distances and all that, and you have now lost the race.

All the people I know who are playing Forza Horizon 5 — most, admittedly, of dad age — are put off by this stuff. How many of the people that the game’s more Buscemi-esque elements are designed to attract are actually attracted to it? Is this really a game to bridge the generational gap, or simply one built in such a way as to irritate its real audience? These are difficult questions, and a difficult problem to solve. Forza, for all its qualities — I am enjoying it tremendously, set dressing aside — is clearly not the solution. Thank heavens for the mute button, eh.

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