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My dad didn't give a fuck about video games - a christmas thread
My dad was a biologist. He worked for the very serious Muséum National d'Histoire Naturelle. He wore a button-up shirt almost every day, generally with a tie. He had gray hair at a rather young age. In a nutshell, my dad was the very serious kind.
Also, he was born in 1949 and raised in a large family. He had five brothers and one sister, and a very serious dad himself. His mum was busy most of the time. He grew up like lots of other dads did, thinking it was normal not to pay too much attention to one's kids.
Yet my dad wasn't a bad dad - just a very quiet, frowning one. The kind of dad that would low key dissuade your friends from ringing at your door and ask for you because they'd be too impressed. "I dread he's going to start speaking latin to me", my best buddy would often say.
Now that you know my dad a little, it won't come as a surprise that video games weren't exactly his thing. He was more into long strolls into the wilderness. Very long strolls. Agonizingly long strolls. We would go for one almost every Sunday after lunch.
I'm being unfair there, making it sound like it was a chore. It wasn't. My dad would always flip a stone or dig through a burrow and pick up an incredible variety of animals. He would show them to us, have us hold them even, then he would set them free.
Once, not too long before he died of a brain cancer, my dad told us he sometimes preferred the company of animals over humans. Although the information wasn't easy to process for a human such as me, I kinda see what he meant by that. But that's a story for another day.
Fast forward to christmas 1993. After a long fought battle, I had been able to convince my parents that I absolutely needed a computer, and that the best candidate to open the doors to employability for me was the (still fairly new then) Amiga 600.
(I can see you, Atari ST lovers. And as we're in the holidays period, and love is in the air, I just want to tell you that I'm very, very sorry that your childhood sucked)
So I run to the christmass tree, open my biggest present, completely disregard the others and lift off to my room to unbox my computer. I am through the roof - especially as one of my sister's friends already has provided me with a box of 3'12 floppies full of pirated games!
And after one hour of two, I hear footsteps coming up. It's pretty late already, so I imagine it's my mum, who comes to tell me it's way past bedtime. But no, it's my dad. He grabs a chair, sits next to me and asks:
"So, think you could show me one or two games?"
"So, think you could show me one or two games?"
I forgot to mention that my dad was into F1 racing, as the vast majority of men his generation in Europe were I believe. The Sunday afternoons we would not spend strolling, whe would lose them watching Prost and Senna fight in the streets of Monte Carlo.
So i scramble through my floppy discs, knowing exactly what to look for. I find one, put it in the computer, and after a few magnetic growls I'm able to show him Vroom. I thought it was one of the most visually impressive game there was - the feeling of speed was mad!
I play a race or two, bumping into other cars and wrecking my vehicle because I'm more interested in what happens on my dad's face than on the screen. He seems to... enjoy it? So I ask him whether he wants to try it for himself, and to my greatest surprise, he says "sure".
And here we are, my very serious dad and me, passing the joystick back and forth, accelerating and breaking and cutting corners and trying so hard to beat the clock - I suck at the game, I'm not even that into it, and my dad is a total nightmare of a pilot but hey who cares.
Then suddently it's really late, so my dad says we'd better turn the computer off because I should go to sleep. I obey, and as the machine shuts down, I ask him what he thought of it all.
- "I Like it. It was fun!"
- "We can do it again if you want!"
- "Sure !"
- "I Like it. It was fun!"
- "We can do it again if you want!"
- "Sure !"
We never played again.
My dad was, after all, still a very serious dad.
My dad was, after all, still a very serious dad.
But the fact that for once, he took the time to show interest for my passion left a mark on me that's never going away. For me, it was normal to be into what he liked, like F1 racing and long strolls. But the other way around? Until that day, I didn't know that was possible.
I wasn't desperately needing validation. I hadn't even asked my dad if he wanted to play with me before that day. But the fact that he came to me, wanting to know more about what he identified was an important thing for me - well, that felt like a thousand Amiga 600.
Of course, dads are slightly different nowadays. It's much more common to share interests with one's children, be attentive to what they love and supportive of their passions. But I think part of what happened to me still holds. Sometimes the best present is time spent together.
And yes, I'm comfortable ending a long thread like this one with such a dumb conclusion. It's that week of the year 
Enjoy your time with your loved ones, and if you're not together, don't forget to call them... and ask what makes their heart beat these days. 
Enjoy your time with your loved ones, and if you're not together, don't forget to call them... and ask what makes their heart beat these days.
