Dream Daddy, The Dadification of Games, and Me

Dream Daddy, the Dad-on-Dad dating sim that became this summer’s gaming obsession simply through word of mouth, is a good game. Maybe even a great one. Yes, all the dads are super hot, the writing is good, it’s genuinely funny and heartfelt, but for me personally it meant a lot more. As someone who grew up with a single dad after my mom died when I was a toddler, it really made me feel close to him to be able to play as a dad with a similar backstory. But more than that, I appreciated how this game understands single fatherhood in a way that few other games have. And there are a LOT of games that attempt to wrangle this into their plots. Commonly called “The Dadification of Games”, this trend was most prevalent in the BioShock Infinite/The Last of Us era, but it’s far from a dying trend. The new God of War is even moving away from the more common father/daughter trope by giving Kratos a son.

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