Losing a parent is tough, but video games have an uncanny way of keeping a loved one’s memory alive, through their shared experiences.
My dad, Joseph, was not an emotionally accessible person — a practiced art he learned from his father, a retired Army colonel, and further refined by his own time in the Army. This made real communication with him tough among my four siblings and me. But we could always talk about games.
While my siblings and I rarely saw eye to eye on anything else with my dad, video games gave us all a reason to come together, find common ground, and occasionally even open up to one another. Even if that just meant looking over his shoulder while he played X-Wing, or Sid Meier’s Pirates!, that was time my dad and I spent together. It didn’t matter that I barely understood how spreadsheets in Railroad Tycoon worked; playing that game was still a small window through which I could relate to my dad.
