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hi i'm shane i'm your biggest fan, i have been watching you ever since your zp peggle video which was *casually searches for the video to see how many years ago that was* 13 years ago holy crap! anyway i stopped watching you for a long while after you was not allowed to swear because a yahtzee video without swearing is like sex without an orgasm useless. I know you probably don't read this but i'm just trying to say how happy you make me every time i watch your videos. also i have a new suggestion so i know you have your own names for certain games like "spunk gargle wee wee" for first person shooters or "Jiminy cock throat" for open world games but how about a new one called "poo poo wee stinky fart bollock plop" which could refer to games that eeerm i don't know but it would be funny if you called a game "poo poo wee stinky fart bollock plop" maybe that's what you can call all these time loop games or card battling games or games that try to be all artistic and deep but really are about as complex as an episode of barny the dinosaur.
And then you have the Yakuza/ Like a Dragon series, where you don't so much play as a dad so much as a middle aged man who acts as a largely absent adult figure while faffing about. The uncle game.
You're basically describing the Odyssey. Odysseus is a dad who goes through many stages, including the Hero Dad (in the Trojan War), the Sad Dad (during his journey back home), and the Hairy Dad (when he is finally home). Meanwhile, his son Telemachus is trying to get out from under Odysseus' shadow, to become a hero in his own right.
Which of course means that our final dad form is probably the Odysseus from Tennyson's poem Ulysses, where he is at the end of his life, proud of his son but unable to relate to him, and facing years of boredom and decay, sets off on one final great adventure. Come, my friends, 'T is not too late to seek a newer world. Push off, and sitting well in order smite The sounding furrows; for my purpose holds To sail beyond the sunset, and the baths Of all the western stars, until I die. It may be that the gulfs will wash us down: It may be we shall touch the Happy Isles, And see the great Achilles, whom we knew. Tho' much is taken, much abides; and tho' We are not now that strength which in old days Moved earth and heaven, that which we are, we are; One equal temper of heroic hearts, Made weak by time and fate, but strong in will To strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield.
@@fruitshuit This would work in perfect unison with Yahtzee's old idea about "leveling down". Having an RPG character start off as strong, and gradually become weaker, making the game more difficult, as the player becomes more skilled.
Ironically we have never really gotten a game that has brought the Odyssey to life despite it being a public domain free to use story. I really want it to get something on the level of Black Myth.
Dad games is just becoming common nomenclature for chill games you can walk away from whatever to do other things. Separated from cozy, it seems, by 1:30 and more mature aesthetics. In short good. You should be proud of yourself for growing into more mature games that allow you the space to have a life while getting many hours in.
I'm 20 years old, Don't play SIM games but I'm largely invested in playing narrative city builders, Like Frostpunk, Would've played Animal Crossing if it had a good story. You either have downed something that grew your mental age to oblivion..... Or you're a fan of repetition and the slow process for efficiency.
8:00 You joke, but there is definitely a story out there about feeling abandoned by one's children and trying to find meaning to the time who remains outside of it.
I once read a YT comment about a centennial (is that how you write that word) grandma that felt like the world had moved on without her. Sounds depressing but would make for a great game probably
My guess is "Martyr Dad" where old men fulfill their fantasy of going out in a bright blaze of glory holding off 100 baddies for their family/clan to escape. How you milk a single combat section into 40 hours with DLCs and micro-transaction I leave to the executive ghouls, but I believe they can do it.
I thought that was part of the Hairy Dad. We don't want to see ourselves old, but we want to see our children succeed. We know we are not the heroes our kids might see us as, but hope they will be.
I don't think we will ever get to Martyr Dad, because even old men hate the fact that they are old. Unlike in movies, games don't have to deal with the actors becoming visibly geriatric. My guess is that gaming stops aging legacy characters around the 40s yr mark
My username comes from creating a GameFAQs account to post a FAQ for Railroad Tycoon II...way back on March 24, 2000. I turned 23 that summer. We are all senior citizens who used to be cool.
I think the progression of Geralt from "idealistic" (in the bad ends) fellow who has sex with anything to cynical man to dad with beard is a pretty good example.
You don't need cards in the third one as the options no longer exceed the number of your fingers. Geralt didn't change in that aspect, he still fancies a romp every now and then, even after sealing the deal with either sorceress
@@bottomlefto That's what makes Geralt relatable to older guys. It's not that we don't still enjoy a good tumble, it's that we can't do it as often or as enthusiastically as in the good old days. But when things are just right, "well damn, I still got it." I felt that energy when Geralt and Keira Metz had a good romp in the swamps of Velen (insert your own joke about referring to Keira's lady bits as "the swamps of Velen" here.)
You know what character type would fit in fine with the aesthetic of granddad games? Wizards, classic style with pointy hats. Gimme a game where I’m Merlin trying desperately to aim the knights of the round table in vaguely the right direction and away from the weird almost anime type crap they’re prone to. Maybe tell them that killing this green knight won’t prevent him from inflicting the same wound on you as he said.
That's like herding cats, nobody ever does what they're told to, and you can't keep them away from the off-limits stuff. I think it would end up like a Dishonored game, where at the end it calculates how badly you mismanaged things and how many of the consequences will be permanent threats to your world.
Now I'm thinking of a colony sim type game where you're the wizard advisor to a young prince/hero Chosen One type who keeps going off on quests, and you have to figure out what to do with all the princesses, widowed dragons, out-of-work minions of evil sorcerors, etc that he keeps bringing back.
"This is stupid and pointless" was my internal monologue for 12+ hours of Crime Scene Cleaner. Happily looking forward to the DLC so I can complain to myself some more.
Like god damn it, even a monkey could do this job, I have a degree, I should have been playing the forensic investigator but here I am mopping up blood all day.
This is the first video I've seen in a long time that acknowledges how the original God of War had emotional depth post God of 4 release. Calling it a "sad dad" game fits incredibly well, especially if you pay attention to the story within it. Respect.
Eventually in life, your satisfaction with watching a head explode goes down and your satisfaction with restoring order to a system under your responsibility that has fallen to chaos goes up. Pat from Polygon did a pretty good dad game round up.
I like how Yahtzee's "dad games" shorthand for sims focused on very mundane activities spiraled into an entire theory of video game history. Ramblomatic indeed!
I have a hot take, I think Death Stranding is a type of Dad Game, in at least the whole "delivery" aspect part. Like Hardspace, you're given more complex tasks but also improved tools to deal with them over time, and that tickles a part of my brain that enjoys this genre. Also you take care of a baby.
I'm honestly all for Atreus becoming an adult learning to balance being on his own while also holding his old man dear to his life. I also want to have the satisfaction of seeing Atreus be a badass as an adult that's nearly equal that of his father.
As a Dad in my 40s, I've actually given a lot of thought to this subject. I went through all the phazes, both in games and in life, which you illustrated here. Now at the end of my 'Hairy Dad' phase, watching my girls preparing to enter adulthood, I find myself less drawn to games where I directly or overtly act, or give orders which are precisely carried out, and more and more drawn to games wherein I give 'suggestions' or broad goals, and let the emergent gameplay of modern simulations-as-games evolve, often in direct contrast to my own goals. Games where I build something up, but then AI has to live in it, such as Oxygen Not Included or any of the various Tycoon flavored games. Knowing that my role as Dad is changing, yet again, and that I'm transitioning from the Directorial phase to the Advisorial phase, has affected my gaming as much as it's affecting my parenting. The Grey (or Gray, if you prefer) Dad Phase. Or Pre-Grandad. With the ever accelerating pace of AI development, I feel like the next few decades will be good to me, as a gamer, as I first suggest how the AI should proceed, then watch as it does it on it's own, with only token deference to me. Eventually, the games will play themselves, as I drool on myself in a corner, as it should be.
After hearing Yahtzee's poetry I was reminded of this quote from Hitchhiker's guide to the galaxy: “Vogon poetry is of course, the third worst in the universe. The second worst is that of the Azgoths of Kria. During a recitation by their poet master Grunthos the Flatulent of his poem "Ode to a Small Lump of Green Putty I Found in My Armpit One Midsummer Morning" four of his audience died of internal haemorrhaging and the president of the Mid-Galactic Arts Nobbling Council survived by gnawing one of his own legs off. Grunthos was reported to have been "disappointed" by the poem's reception, and was about to embark on a reading of his 12-book epic entitled "My Favourite Bathtime Gurgles" when his own major intestine, in a desperate attempt to save humanity, leapt straight up through his neck and throttled his brain. The very worst poetry of all perished along with its creator, Paul Neil Milne Johnstone of Redbridge, in the destruction of the planet Earth. Vogon poetry is mild by comparison.”
I suspect in ten to twenty years, we're gonna have a wave of "last hurrah" games, basically the equivalent of "old men do one last bank job" movies. Hopefully one and done lega-sequels where the old dads do one last adventure and definitively die, with their kids being... there in some capacity. Look, I'm not an aging game dev; they'll figure it out when it soothes their nostalgia, K?
"There are also several examples of pseudo-hairy dads, characters who exude hairy dad energy without having to escort children or have the full dad experience." Gale of Waterdeep.
As a former (and sometimes still) trucker, I always wondered why anyone would want to play a game about my shit job. That said I knew other truckers that would play Truck Simulator in their off time, and I would play Elite Dangerous and never fight just be a more fancy trucker in space so I suppose I actually do understand.
Because those games skip all the shitty part of the job and what's left is just driving. It's almost zen, with the exception of that one goddamn company with a narrow gate.
Having unloaded pallets at a grocery store at 2am for four years, moving shipping containers onto and off of my ship in Star Citizen with a robot folklift is actually pretty zen and being able to decide which contracts i take and where they go is a level of control I could never dream of having in real life shipping.
If nothing else, this made me realize that I've been a spiritual dad all my life, what with not having had a console since I got my first PC and playing the heck out of the original Sim City. Even one of my favourite Mega Drive games was Genghis Khan II.
Funnily enough, it was the SNES version of the first SimCity that started the throughline that led to me becoming a PC gamer when the graphics tech of PC finally caught up to consoles and arcade games with the invention of the dedicated GPU in the late '90s and game devs figuring out how to take advantage of them in the early aughts. SimCity, Aerobiz, and the PlayStation port of Civ 2 were my foundation games.
I saw a Parking Lot Simulator game and my first thought is "That's stupid. What do you even do?". Then I thought about it for a few more seconds and realized how many things you can do in it. From the building, traffic flow, ticket pricing, to plumbing, electricity, fire escape. You can actually do a lot, and it got me excited.
I'm about to be a 1st time father, due in 5 months. I'm 32. The part about "passing the torch; a sacrifice made over a very long time-scale" has given me great insight and perspective on how I'm going to view raising them. Didn't expect that. Thanks Yahtz.
I appreciate the maturity of endings. From always happy to please the kids to always sad or bittersweet at best to please the edgy teenagers to being able to do either as it fits the narrative.
@@AnotherCraig yeah... Well sorta. Zaphod visits the publishing offices of the Guide to meet with one of the researchers when the top floors of the building get stolen with him along with it. One of the other researchers offers Zaphod use of his nutrient soaked towel in this crisis situation. This was in Life the Universe and Everything I believe. Might have been Restaurant at the end of the universe actually not sure
I remember becoming a dad game consumer after getting my ass kicked in the original Modern Warfare 3. I could get good at it like I did for the previous yearly CODs, but I couldn't be bothered. My adult responsibilities were piling up, and I didn't want to spend my precious adult minutes learning the meta. Nowadays I mostly play chill, low-investment games
And so I learned that me and my friends at 10-14yo were sort of kiddads, as we all played Theme Park, Theme Hospital, Railroad Tycoon, Airline Tycoon, SimCity...
As someone who isn't near fatherhood but has played Dad Games, Papers Please and Shipbreaker specifically, I enjoy it because it allows me to slip into a different life. Its a bit like roleplaying but more grounded in reality. In a sci-fi or fantasy world, I don't have the mettle to be the glorious hero that saves the world, but I'll probably be a nobody, living his life.
As a Negative route for the dad path, Halo post 4 would have been so much better if John Master Chief actually grew past the sad dad phase over Cortana's death and grew up, got some therapy being a child soldier and all the deaths of his firends and decide to take the new generation of Spartans to be the heroes he wished he could be through and through, it would have been an uplifting story that through healing John could have become something greater, saddly we had the regression dad with John in Infinite where he regresses to his CE identity and he and the old gen fans who never got over Cortana's death are coddled by a litteral copy of her despite the original lamenting and fearing of being replaced in Halo 4 after a nervious breakdown. From the direction of the studio post 5 Guardians, it seems they are going through with appeasing the worst of the Halo fanbase by going back to CE even though we don't really have a reason to because the old gate keeping fans can't comprehend that they could just play the old games instead of yelling at a company and it's devs to cater only to them and shouting down everything new introduced like the worst kind of internet man baby. We could call Halo infinite the "Dad kills the new Generation" game.
I'm not a parent, but at some point around 30 I developed a crippling Cities: Skylines addiction and my idea of small talk shifted to the topic of "how to design a highway interchange". I still play fun games occasionally, but living out the fantasy of being a civil engineer scratches an itch that wasn't there a few years ago.
Arthur Morgan actually was a sad dad too! In one of the optional missions with the Native American chief, he tells the story of how he had a son he visited often, but sadly on one of his visits he arrived to find him and the mother both murdered for their money - all of $10. Which adds some depth to the moral crisis Arthur seems to be going through regarding their lifestyle of robbery. It was originally planned for the son to be part of the gang and having been killed during the Blackwater job just before the start of the game, but this didn't make it into the final script.
4x seems to be an underlooked genre of dad game. It has the slow steady work like city-builders, the mundane repetition of making sure things tick along well, interspersed with sudden and horrible violence as everything tries to eat you for doing well. Glasses-Dad? Heck I still remember after many moons, the anguished cry of my dad yelling "cheating bastard computer" when I was a lad.
And then there's the Step-Dad Game, which is the one that's so edgy, violent, and over-the-top that your dad doesn't let you play it, but that cool new dude your mom is seeing brings it over as a gift to keep you distracted for a few hours.
I love me some dad games! Its funny you got Euro Truck Sim 2 as a joke - a friend of mine bought me Bus Simulator as a joke present one christmas, and i ended up playing the heck out of it, then trying American Truck Simulator since i was more into American road trips. 719 hours of it later, its now my most played game of all time!
If I had a nickel for everyone I convinced to try ATS or ETS2 during the early days of the pandemic, I probably could've bought one of the map DLCs with them. Lotta folks get hooked (I have over 2,400 hours in ATS and schedule work vacations around the release of new states.)
@@SimuLord When its on sale (for like a fiver - madness!) i often buy copies of it for my friends to coax them into trying it. I feel like games like Star Trucker and Microsoft Flight Simulator have spoiled me a bit though - the freedom to walk around, exit your truck and press actual buttons in Star Trucker mixed with the visual fidelity and 1:1 world scale of MSFS has left ATS feeling tired and old. They keep adding DLC, and i keep buying it, but the core game sorely needs updating visually, and in terms of what you can do in it.
@@andrewhickinbottom1051 I disagree on the grounds that ATS knows what it is and sticks to what it does best-you'll spend at least 95 percent of a gameplay session on the road actually driving (and 1:1 world scale is great if you're moving at the speed of a jet airplane but it's Desert Bus if you do it on the road.) ATS has, post-pandemic, become my after-work wind-down game because I can drive from Seattle to Houston in two-plus hours and make some progress on a podcast or audiobook. It doesn't try to do more than it can do well.
My ultimate and first experience with a dad game was when i was 8 and played 688 Attack Sub with my dad and my brother on Sega Genesis. I still have fond memories of that time. Of course you had to imagine some of the imagery yourself. Most of the graphics were sound and small dots that worked as submarines, ships and torpedoes. I did like that they took the time too use cyrillic words for the russian subs though. So iwas probably born a dad game player.
What about after childhood, the next people to look after are the grand parents. Will there be a dad game for dealing with your own dad's dementia? And your mums funeral? And selling their parents home and squabbling with siblings and cousins over inheritances?
This was a great video. I found myself re-downloading Elite: Dangerous recently to unwind from my job driving around the USA fixing factory machines...
@@lazygamemaster748 Totally agree. On my last big gaming session on it, I took a Dolphin to the centre of the galaxy and back. It was Hella draining to do so, but I had the time to do it and I did get into some kinda mediative state with it. Just me, my nav computer, and the galaxy.
Oh, maybe we can finally get that Grandpa Link in a Legend of Zelda game I've wanted for so long. Link is still the hero that is reincarnated to stop Ganondorf but in this cycle his quest happens late in life. Link is a retired knight and has grandchildren. He's still the prophesied hero but older, slower, and not as strong as when he was younger. This quest may kill him but he has the motivation of a family to protect.
I think the most important aspect of Dad games is that they tend to let the player sort of hop over the truly difficult part of doing the thing and get to the interesting bit that very few people actually get to do. Just driving the truck for somebody else sucks, there's a lot of futility in the trucking business. But the game, totally unlike the real world, says oh, here's a loan for 1.5 million so that you can buy all the trucks and become the boss of trucking making all the decisions, minus any meaningful stress. SimCity and Cities Skylines allow you to casually decide where the highway goes, like Robert Moses, minus the hard part where you sell your soul to Satan for the power to do all that. They most often take something fun, but unprofitable in the real world, and make it both fun and profitable. I've never seen a game where you have to haggle, or get into a "race to the bottom" price war with a competitor that suddenly makes the business unviable unless maybe you try to do too much work in too few hours, for years on end. Instead, somebody pays you $100 to power wash their grill, which is an absurd price you'd never actually pay to a powerwashing guy for that job. That makes it fun. If these games were truly realistic, people wouldn't play them as much. They're almost always stunningly fantastical to the point of farce in certain crucial areas, like your access to capital, and that is the key to their appeal.
At some point, the games industry may have to come to terms with, "Yes, this is the demographic you want to associate with: they're young, they're cutting-edge, they come up with new slang at a rate that guarantees your game's characters will sound cringe-inducingly out-of-date by the time it hits the market. Now, by contrast: here's that market that has spare money for a $70 game and time to play it, rather than an aggrieved Twitter/X account and a crushing amount of debt. Do you notice the lack of overlap?"
I'm not even out of my 20's yet and booting up BeamNG a few days ago I found that its experimental career mode began to speak to me. Sure I still do more races than anything in it but when I learned the slower nuances of driving a box truck and navigating with trailers I realized I too am susceptible to such wiles.
My prediction for the next phase of the dad game would probably be the Co-op Dad game. Because if by a certain both the father and son become adults, then the logic would dictate having to work together with different skills, like a dad that knows how to bake bread and a son with a marketing degree opening a bakery. I always figured the next God of War game would have the option to Co-op as Kratos and Atreus, giving whatever pissed them off that day a double-decker knuckle sandwich with cheese. And then fishing.
I feel like survival games also fit into a kind of dad game mentality, without actually being a dad. I also dread the day gaming goes the way of movie trends of what I called the "divorced dad fantasy," with the likes of Taken and 3 Days to Kill.
My first dad game was Football Manager on the ZX Spectrum, and I still play the current Football Manager series 40 years later. I'm also a bit fond of the Truck and Train sim games of which there where also examples on the Speccy, Brighton Belle and Evening Star for the train fans and Juggernaut for driving lorries.
@@guguy00 Meh, whenever FM or CM changed to a new engine in the past, it was time to skip a year or two till they fixed the mess. So same old story really. I still like CM 01-02.
If we're going with the trend of "dad games", I reckon that while the next step after post-dad could be "dad whose kid is grown up", it'd be interesting to see a step beyond that; specifically "granddad games" beyond that one Flintstones romhack that Joel Vargskelethor ended up signal-boosting through his dismay and disbelief.
I'm still in the Dad/Post-Dad phase, I love my simulators and factory building games. Factorio and Space Engineers are my current time sinks, both of which are about to get huge updates.
the problem with the "Post hairy Dad" games was that they were mostly only received with a "meh" or an "ok". I think we will go back to the hairy dad era once again.
If we went from male protagonist to female protagonist by using the hairy dad as a slow transition does this mean one day in 20 years we'll get Mom games? I can't wait to find out how the disaproving stare mechanics work
Maybe after the Post-Hairy Dad Games, specifically where the ones where a young woman succeeds as the main protagonist, we might see the emergence of Mother Games, wherein the protagonist steps into a role of maternal protection for a child figure like they used to be. How exactly it would differ from the Hairy Dad game, I don’t know, but it could be interesting for comparison, possibly learning from the mistakes their own father figures committed while raising them. I mean, how many gaming protagonists can we name are actually mothers in some capacity? Normally, motherhood is something used as a tragic backstory for villainesses, portraying maternal affection for their children as something that can lead to obsession and madness, so having a positive depiction of motherhood in games would be a rather nice change.
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hi i'm shane i'm your biggest fan, i have been watching you ever since your zp peggle video which was *casually searches for the video to see how many years ago that was* 13 years ago holy crap!
anyway i stopped watching you for a long while after you was not allowed to swear because a yahtzee video without swearing is like sex without an orgasm useless.
I know you probably don't read this but i'm just trying to say how happy you make me every time i watch your videos.
also i have a new suggestion so i know you have your own names for certain games like "spunk gargle wee wee" for first person shooters or "Jiminy cock throat" for open world games but how about a new one called "poo poo wee stinky fart bollock plop" which could refer to games that eeerm i don't know but it would be funny if you called a game "poo poo wee stinky fart bollock plop" maybe that's what you can call all these time loop games or card battling games or games that try to be all artistic and deep but really are about as complex as an episode of barny the dinosaur.
And then you have the Yakuza/ Like a Dragon series, where you don't so much play as a dad so much as a middle aged man who acts as a largely absent adult figure while faffing about.
The uncle game.
Yakuza does give off major uncle energy, as in the single uncle that spends all year doing insane shit and then only comes home for Christmas
They call you Uncle Kaz, it's not subtle.
Kiryu is such an uncle.
@@d00gz_ That has to be the number 1 thing in their "RGG game's main character" checklist
Kiryu IS a dad, he's just not necessarily the best at it
You're basically describing the Odyssey.
Odysseus is a dad who goes through many stages, including the Hero Dad (in the Trojan War), the Sad Dad (during his journey back home), and the Hairy Dad (when he is finally home). Meanwhile, his son Telemachus is trying to get out from under Odysseus' shadow, to become a hero in his own right.
And now I have to go listen to Epic The Musical. Again.
Which of course means that our final dad form is probably the Odysseus from Tennyson's poem Ulysses, where he is at the end of his life, proud of his son but unable to relate to him, and facing years of boredom and decay, sets off on one final great adventure.
Come, my friends,
'T is not too late to seek a newer world.
Push off, and sitting well in order smite
The sounding furrows; for my purpose holds
To sail beyond the sunset, and the baths
Of all the western stars, until I die.
It may be that the gulfs will wash us down:
It may be we shall touch the Happy Isles,
And see the great Achilles, whom we knew.
Tho' much is taken, much abides; and tho'
We are not now that strength which in old days
Moved earth and heaven, that which we are, we are;
One equal temper of heroic hearts,
Made weak by time and fate, but strong in will
To strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield.
@@fruitshuit
This would work in perfect unison with Yahtzee's old idea about "leveling down". Having an RPG character start off as strong, and gradually become weaker, making the game more difficult, as the player becomes more skilled.
@@jonathanmette8348RUTHLESSNESS IS MERCY UPOK OURSELVES
Ironically we have never really gotten a game that has brought the Odyssey to life despite it being a public domain free to use story. I really want it to get something on the level of Black Myth.
They're starting to look interesting to me, and that's what really scares me.
Some sims do to me, but SimCity no longer does.
At least if you want to get in the genre has become more diverse than ever. Like Yahtzee said, it used to mostly be large vehicles simulators
@@kingsleycy3450 fair, fair.
Dad games is just becoming common nomenclature for chill games you can walk away from whatever to do other things. Separated from cozy, it seems, by 1:30 and more mature aesthetics.
In short good. You should be proud of yourself for growing into more mature games that allow you the space to have a life while getting many hours in.
I'm 20 years old, Don't play SIM games but I'm largely invested in playing narrative city builders, Like Frostpunk, Would've played Animal Crossing if it had a good story.
You either have downed something that grew your mental age to oblivion.....
Or you're a fan of repetition and the slow process for efficiency.
8:00 You joke, but there is definitely a story out there about feeling abandoned by one's children and trying to find meaning to the time who remains outside of it.
Damn. That . . . yeah that could have some serious legs.
I once read a YT comment about a centennial (is that how you write that word) grandma that felt like the world had moved on without her. Sounds depressing but would make for a great game probably
thumbnail goes hard as fuck
At my age it’s the only thing doing go that.
Daddy wants to drive the bus 🎵
@@Harlz5neighz The thumbnail or getting hard?
We've added "Dad Game" to our household vocabulary. My kid saw me trying Star Trucker and said, "So is this another Dad game in space?"
My guess is "Martyr Dad" where old men fulfill their fantasy of going out in a bright blaze of glory holding off 100 baddies for their family/clan to escape. How you milk a single combat section into 40 hours with DLCs and micro-transaction I leave to the executive ghouls, but I believe they can do it.
I thought that was part of the Hairy Dad. We don't want to see ourselves old, but we want to see our children succeed. We know we are not the heroes our kids might see us as, but hope they will be.
I don't think we will ever get to Martyr Dad, because even old men hate the fact that they are old. Unlike in movies, games don't have to deal with the actors becoming visibly geriatric. My guess is that gaming stops aging legacy characters around the 40s yr mark
That's just Red Dead 1 isn't it?
Ah, Halo Reach
This is basically what I attribute John Wick and movie like Nobody to, middle aged men fantasizing about being dangerous before becoming family men.
So, the first example of a "dad game" Yahtzee shows while defining the term is Railroad Tycoon II...one of my dad's favorite games...
My dad was big into Tycoon games and Civilization while I was growing up. Now that I've gotten older, I've had a growing interest in Civilization...
That was one of my favorites when I was a kid
... Have I always been a dad at heart?
My username comes from creating a GameFAQs account to post a FAQ for Railroad Tycoon II...way back on March 24, 2000. I turned 23 that summer.
We are all senior citizens who used to be cool.
I am feeling called out
@@0Gumpy0yes so have I. SimCity 3000 was my jam when I was a kid. Now that I'm a hairy dad, I only appreciate it more.
I think the progression of Geralt from "idealistic" (in the bad ends) fellow who has sex with anything to cynical man to dad with beard is a pretty good example.
From collecting titty baseball cards in the first game to the 3rd mostly being about helping Ciri is a good progression to point out.
You don't need cards in the third one as the options no longer exceed the number of your fingers. Geralt didn't change in that aspect, he still fancies a romp every now and then, even after sealing the deal with either sorceress
@@bottomlefto That's what makes Geralt relatable to older guys. It's not that we don't still enjoy a good tumble, it's that we can't do it as often or as enthusiastically as in the good old days. But when things are just right, "well damn, I still got it." I felt that energy when Geralt and Keira Metz had a good romp in the swamps of Velen (insert your own joke about referring to Keira's lady bits as "the swamps of Velen" here.)
You know what character type would fit in fine with the aesthetic of granddad games? Wizards, classic style with pointy hats. Gimme a game where I’m Merlin trying desperately to aim the knights of the round table in vaguely the right direction and away from the weird almost anime type crap they’re prone to. Maybe tell them that killing this green knight won’t prevent him from inflicting the same wound on you as he said.
That sounds a lot like the princess raising games I've seen before, there might be a knight version of that.
That's called the "RTS and 4X" genre.
Do I get to deliver wise-sounding lectures? If so, I'm in.
That's like herding cats, nobody ever does what they're told to, and you can't keep them away from the off-limits stuff. I think it would end up like a Dishonored game, where at the end it calculates how badly you mismanaged things and how many of the consequences will be permanent threats to your world.
Now I'm thinking of a colony sim type game where you're the wizard advisor to a young prince/hero Chosen One type who keeps going off on quests, and you have to figure out what to do with all the princesses, widowed dragons, out-of-work minions of evil sorcerors, etc that he keeps bringing back.
"This is stupid and pointless" was my internal monologue for 12+ hours of Crime Scene Cleaner. Happily looking forward to the DLC so I can complain to myself some more.
Spoken like dad lmao.
Like god damn it, even a monkey could do this job, I have a degree, I should have been playing the forensic investigator but here I am mopping up blood all day.
@@xsanguine8 Forensic Investigator is really hard when the previous player 100 percented Crime Scene Cleaner.
This is the first video I've seen in a long time that acknowledges how the original God of War had emotional depth post God of 4 release. Calling it a "sad dad" game fits incredibly well, especially if you pay attention to the story within it. Respect.
My dad plays post dad games. I'm currently in college. When I first found zero punctuation he remembered the name like the name of an old friend.
Eventually in life, your satisfaction with watching a head explode goes down and your satisfaction with restoring order to a system under your responsibility that has fallen to chaos goes up. Pat from Polygon did a pretty good dad game round up.
And in the case of SimCity, unleashing a tornado on the order you've imparted (after saving of course)
I like how Yahtzee's "dad games" shorthand for sims focused on very mundane activities spiraled into an entire theory of video game history. Ramblomatic indeed!
I have a hot take, I think Death Stranding is a type of Dad Game, in at least the whole "delivery" aspect part. Like Hardspace, you're given more complex tasks but also improved tools to deal with them over time, and that tickles a part of my brain that enjoys this genre.
Also you take care of a baby.
5/5 Would shake Jar Baby again.
Honestly, despite the fact I haven't played it, and am hesitant to play it. The game play genuinely intrigues me
@@meapickle It’s a game I wanted to like, if only to see Kojima’s weirdness unleashed. But I just couldn’t get into it. It’s really stressful.
Came for the funny, stayed for the surprisingly insightful, professional and well articulated analysis. O.o
I'm honestly all for Atreus becoming an adult learning to balance being on his own while also holding his old man dear to his life. I also want to have the satisfaction of seeing Atreus be a badass as an adult that's nearly equal that of his father.
As a Dad in my 40s, I've actually given a lot of thought to this subject. I went through all the phazes, both in games and in life, which you illustrated here. Now at the end of my 'Hairy Dad' phase, watching my girls preparing to enter adulthood, I find myself less drawn to games where I directly or overtly act, or give orders which are precisely carried out, and more and more drawn to games wherein I give 'suggestions' or broad goals, and let the emergent gameplay of modern simulations-as-games evolve, often in direct contrast to my own goals. Games where I build something up, but then AI has to live in it, such as Oxygen Not Included or any of the various Tycoon flavored games. Knowing that my role as Dad is changing, yet again, and that I'm transitioning from the Directorial phase to the Advisorial phase, has affected my gaming as much as it's affecting my parenting.
The Grey (or Gray, if you prefer) Dad Phase. Or Pre-Grandad. With the ever accelerating pace of AI development, I feel like the next few decades will be good to me, as a gamer, as I first suggest how the AI should proceed, then watch as it does it on it's own, with only token deference to me. Eventually, the games will play themselves, as I drool on myself in a corner, as it should be.
As a current truck driver I absolutely love interior decorating games. The Sims, Unpacking, Animal Crossing etc etc
Learning what yatz’s job before journalism explains so much
Like what?
Why is whoever is playing Mario NOT RUNNING? You gotta run. ALWAYS.
Yes an industry that has growing for about 40 years is seeing a raise in DAD games. In about 20-30 years we'll see grandpa games.
If you have been a fan of Yahtzee long enough you know most of his slang. I like it because I do the same thing creating random slang.
There's one in every office (as the use of the term "Foxism" in places I've worked can attest.)
Amazing to hear Yahtzee flex his limerick brain. Still remember fondly that one ZP full in limerick.
Kratos about to adopt that Kranky Kong energy
After hearing Yahtzee's poetry I was reminded of this quote from Hitchhiker's guide to the galaxy:
“Vogon poetry is of course, the third worst in the universe.
The second worst is that of the Azgoths of Kria. During a recitation by their poet master Grunthos the Flatulent of his poem "Ode to a Small Lump of Green Putty I Found in My Armpit One Midsummer Morning" four of his audience died of internal haemorrhaging and the president of the Mid-Galactic Arts Nobbling Council survived by gnawing one of his own legs off.
Grunthos was reported to have been "disappointed" by the poem's reception, and was about to embark on a reading of his 12-book epic entitled "My Favourite Bathtime Gurgles" when his own major intestine, in a desperate attempt to save humanity, leapt straight up through his neck and throttled his brain.
The very worst poetry of all perished along with its creator, Paul Neil Milne Johnstone of Redbridge, in the destruction of the planet Earth. Vogon poetry is mild by comparison.”
Oh my god, Yahtz, the limerick in the credits just threw me all the way back to your review of Wolfenstein on the PS3
I suspect in ten to twenty years, we're gonna have a wave of "last hurrah" games, basically the equivalent of "old men do one last bank job" movies. Hopefully one and done lega-sequels where the old dads do one last adventure and definitively die, with their kids being... there in some capacity. Look, I'm not an aging game dev; they'll figure it out when it soothes their nostalgia, K?
2:22 That perfectly dry and deadpan "choo choo" cracked me up.
"There are also several examples of pseudo-hairy dads, characters who exude hairy dad energy without having to escort children or have the full dad experience."
Gale of Waterdeep.
As a former (and sometimes still) trucker, I always wondered why anyone would want to play a game about my shit job. That said I knew other truckers that would play Truck Simulator in their off time, and I would play Elite Dangerous and never fight just be a more fancy trucker in space so I suppose I actually do understand.
Because those games skip all the shitty part of the job and what's left is just driving. It's almost zen, with the exception of that one goddamn company with a narrow gate.
Having unloaded pallets at a grocery store at 2am for four years, moving shipping containers onto and off of my ship in Star Citizen with a robot folklift is actually pretty zen and being able to decide which contracts i take and where they go is a level of control I could never dream of having in real life shipping.
If nothing else, this made me realize that I've been a spiritual dad all my life, what with not having had a console since I got my first PC and playing the heck out of the original Sim City. Even one of my favourite Mega Drive games was Genghis Khan II.
Funnily enough, it was the SNES version of the first SimCity that started the throughline that led to me becoming a PC gamer when the graphics tech of PC finally caught up to consoles and arcade games with the invention of the dedicated GPU in the late '90s and game devs figuring out how to take advantage of them in the early aughts. SimCity, Aerobiz, and the PlayStation port of Civ 2 were my foundation games.
Love this video! It's important to contextualize trends in art&media through the thought process of the artists and the consumers
I saw a Parking Lot Simulator game and my first thought is "That's stupid. What do you even do?". Then I thought about it for a few more seconds and realized how many things you can do in it. From the building, traffic flow, ticket pricing, to plumbing, electricity, fire escape. You can actually do a lot, and it got me excited.
1:41 Calling SimCity boring in an way possible just must be the most action gaming brained sentence Ive heard on TH-cam, Jesus Christ💀💀
I'm about to be a 1st time father, due in 5 months. I'm 32. The part about "passing the torch; a sacrifice made over a very long time-scale" has given me great insight and perspective on how I'm going to view raising them.
Didn't expect that. Thanks Yahtz.
Power wash DLC drops today dads!
Banger thumbnail, contemplative content, banger closing words.
I appreciate the maturity of endings. From always happy to please the kids to always sad or bittersweet at best to please the edgy teenagers to being able to do either as it fits the narrative.
I noticed something: Dad and post Dad games are defined by mechanics, whereas sad, hairy, and post-hairy dad games are defined by narrative.
I want to see this but for mom games. Hint: From personal experience, it's mostly life sims, puzzles and books barely disguised as games.
'Visual Novels.' (Tries to stealthily push stack of otome games out of sight with a foot) ... I've heard they're called 'visual novels.'
@@AnotherCraig Yeah. That's what I wrote at first, but decided to put it that way to include some RPGs that can rival VNs in text quantity.
Elites a good mix of Dad Game, trucking, mining, bounty hunting
That ending made me so happy, good to hear another Limerick from Yahtzee since the Wolfenstein ZP.
Entities "sucking on (X) for nourishment" has been one of my favourite yahtzee-isms over the years
Now that you've mentioned it, I found myself thinking... wasn't that part of Douglas Adams' list of uses for a hitchhiker's towel?
@@AnotherCraig yeah... Well sorta. Zaphod visits the publishing offices of the Guide to meet with one of the researchers when the top floors of the building get stolen with him along with it. One of the other researchers offers Zaphod use of his nutrient soaked towel in this crisis situation. This was in Life the Universe and Everything I believe. Might have been Restaurant at the end of the universe actually not sure
I also played American truck sim as a goof...then put 45 hours into it during lockdown
I remember becoming a dad game consumer after getting my ass kicked in the original Modern Warfare 3. I could get good at it like I did for the previous yearly CODs, but I couldn't be bothered. My adult responsibilities were piling up, and I didn't want to spend my precious adult minutes learning the meta. Nowadays I mostly play chill, low-investment games
Yeah, the moment I realized that there's an army of teenagers with way more energy than me, anything truly competitive lost it's gleam to me.
And so I learned that me and my friends at 10-14yo were sort of kiddads, as we all played Theme Park, Theme Hospital, Railroad Tycoon, Airline Tycoon, SimCity...
Ah yes, my fellow kids.
The ones who played Dad games from the start, because we popped out as old people.
@@Eeraschyyr 'popped out as old people' I love this!
As someone who isn't near fatherhood but has played Dad Games, Papers Please and Shipbreaker specifically, I enjoy it because it allows me to slip into a different life. Its a bit like roleplaying but more grounded in reality. In a sci-fi or fantasy world, I don't have the mettle to be the glorious hero that saves the world, but I'll probably be a nobody, living his life.
So... when the young heroine grows up, will we finally get the hairy mom era of video games?
The middle age masculine urge to get a job well done even in video game
As a Negative route for the dad path, Halo post 4 would have been so much better if John Master Chief actually grew past the sad dad phase over Cortana's death and grew up, got some therapy being a child soldier and all the deaths of his firends and decide to take the new generation of Spartans to be the heroes he wished he could be through and through, it would have been an uplifting story that through healing John could have become something greater, saddly we had the regression dad with John in Infinite where he regresses to his CE identity and he and the old gen fans who never got over Cortana's death are coddled by a litteral copy of her despite the original lamenting and fearing of being replaced in Halo 4 after a nervious breakdown.
From the direction of the studio post 5 Guardians, it seems they are going through with appeasing the worst of the Halo fanbase by going back to CE even though we don't really have a reason to because the old gate keeping fans can't comprehend that they could just play the old games instead of yelling at a company and it's devs to cater only to them and shouting down everything new introduced like the worst kind of internet man baby. We could call Halo infinite the "Dad kills the new Generation" game.
I'm not a parent, but at some point around 30 I developed a crippling Cities: Skylines addiction and my idea of small talk shifted to the topic of "how to design a highway interchange". I still play fun games occasionally, but living out the fantasy of being a civil engineer scratches an itch that wasn't there a few years ago.
Arthur Morgan actually was a sad dad too! In one of the optional missions with the Native American chief, he tells the story of how he had a son he visited often, but sadly on one of his visits he arrived to find him and the mother both murdered for their money - all of $10. Which adds some depth to the moral crisis Arthur seems to be going through regarding their lifestyle of robbery.
It was originally planned for the son to be part of the gang and having been killed during the Blackwater job just before the start of the game, but this didn't make it into the final script.
I await middle-age with baited breath, knowing I have lived long enough to see the inevitable dawn of the grand-dad game.
The Grandad game where you stop giving a fuck and have a good time since your time is almost up.
And become irascible and complain about the help.
4x seems to be an underlooked genre of dad game. It has the slow steady work like city-builders, the mundane repetition of making sure things tick along well, interspersed with sudden and horrible violence as everything tries to eat you for doing well.
Glasses-Dad?
Heck I still remember after many moons, the anguished cry of my dad yelling "cheating bastard computer" when I was a lad.
And then there's the Step-Dad Game, which is the one that's so edgy, violent, and over-the-top that your dad doesn't let you play it, but that cool new dude your mom is seeing brings it over as a gift to keep you distracted for a few hours.
I love me some dad games!
Its funny you got Euro Truck Sim 2 as a joke - a friend of mine bought me Bus Simulator as a joke present one christmas, and i ended up playing the heck out of it, then trying American Truck Simulator since i was more into American road trips. 719 hours of it later, its now my most played game of all time!
If I had a nickel for everyone I convinced to try ATS or ETS2 during the early days of the pandemic, I probably could've bought one of the map DLCs with them. Lotta folks get hooked (I have over 2,400 hours in ATS and schedule work vacations around the release of new states.)
@@SimuLord When its on sale (for like a fiver - madness!) i often buy copies of it for my friends to coax them into trying it.
I feel like games like Star Trucker and Microsoft Flight Simulator have spoiled me a bit though - the freedom to walk around, exit your truck and press actual buttons in Star Trucker mixed with the visual fidelity and 1:1 world scale of MSFS has left ATS feeling tired and old. They keep adding DLC, and i keep buying it, but the core game sorely needs updating visually, and in terms of what you can do in it.
@@andrewhickinbottom1051 I disagree on the grounds that ATS knows what it is and sticks to what it does best-you'll spend at least 95 percent of a gameplay session on the road actually driving (and 1:1 world scale is great if you're moving at the speed of a jet airplane but it's Desert Bus if you do it on the road.)
ATS has, post-pandemic, become my after-work wind-down game because I can drive from Seattle to Houston in two-plus hours and make some progress on a podcast or audiobook. It doesn't try to do more than it can do well.
Yeah the next line of simulator games will have you as the Obi Wan, having to teach all the kids things. Padawan Simulator. Dumbledore Simulator.
I think this is a really good analysis of the history of AAA games. As a 43 year old I feel exactly every phase of this exactly as described lol
it's so hard living in this world as someone who hasn't finished red dead redemption 2 yet
As a PC gamer who stubbornly insists on playing games from story-driven franchises in the order they actually came out in, ditto.
I stopped on the island
Ditto.
You're not missing much
I can live with it
Yahtzee bringing up he was doing a video for the lets drown out series on Euro Truck Simulator 2 and getting massively into it.
My ultimate and first experience with a dad game was when i was 8 and played 688 Attack Sub with my dad and my brother on Sega Genesis. I still have fond memories of that time. Of course you had to imagine some of the imagery yourself. Most of the graphics were sound and small dots that worked as submarines, ships and torpedoes. I did like that they took the time too use cyrillic words for the russian subs though. So iwas probably born a dad game player.
What about after childhood, the next people to look after are the grand parents. Will there be a dad game for dealing with your own dad's dementia? And your mums funeral? And selling their parents home and squabbling with siblings and cousins over inheritances?
Today we learnt some new yahtzee lore - he was once a data validation clerk. Somehow that fits.
4:24 Sheesh that was a risky jump!
Dude, Forklift Certified people are awesome. And crazy.
This was a great video. I found myself re-downloading Elite: Dangerous recently to unwind from my job driving around the USA fixing factory machines...
...by, let me guess, flying around the galaxy delivering those machines to be eventually fixed?
@@Vilamus there is something relaxing about driving. Space driving is even better
@@lazygamemaster748 Totally agree. On my last big gaming session on it, I took a Dolphin to the centre of the galaxy and back. It was Hella draining to do so, but I had the time to do it and I did get into some kinda mediative state with it. Just me, my nav computer, and the galaxy.
Oh, maybe we can finally get that Grandpa Link in a Legend of Zelda game I've wanted for so long. Link is still the hero that is reincarnated to stop Ganondorf but in this cycle his quest happens late in life. Link is a retired knight and has grandchildren. He's still the prophesied hero but older, slower, and not as strong as when he was younger. This quest may kill him but he has the motivation of a family to protect.
I think the most important aspect of Dad games is that they tend to let the player sort of hop over the truly difficult part of doing the thing and get to the interesting bit that very few people actually get to do. Just driving the truck for somebody else sucks, there's a lot of futility in the trucking business. But the game, totally unlike the real world, says oh, here's a loan for 1.5 million so that you can buy all the trucks and become the boss of trucking making all the decisions, minus any meaningful stress.
SimCity and Cities Skylines allow you to casually decide where the highway goes, like Robert Moses, minus the hard part where you sell your soul to Satan for the power to do all that. They most often take something fun, but unprofitable in the real world, and make it both fun and profitable. I've never seen a game where you have to haggle, or get into a "race to the bottom" price war with a competitor that suddenly makes the business unviable unless maybe you try to do too much work in too few hours, for years on end. Instead, somebody pays you $100 to power wash their grill, which is an absurd price you'd never actually pay to a powerwashing guy for that job. That makes it fun.
If these games were truly realistic, people wouldn't play them as much. They're almost always stunningly fantastical to the point of farce in certain crucial areas, like your access to capital, and that is the key to their appeal.
I'm looking forward to the "undead dad game" where he has to come back from the dead to help his great-grandchildren
At some point, the games industry may have to come to terms with, "Yes, this is the demographic you want to associate with: they're young, they're cutting-edge, they come up with new slang at a rate that guarantees your game's characters will sound cringe-inducingly out-of-date by the time it hits the market. Now, by contrast: here's that market that has spare money for a $70 game and time to play it, rather than an aggrieved Twitter/X account and a crushing amount of debt. Do you notice the lack of overlap?"
I'm not even out of my 20's yet and booting up BeamNG a few days ago I found that its experimental career mode began to speak to me. Sure I still do more races than anything in it but when I learned the slower nuances of driving a box truck and navigating with trailers I realized I too am susceptible to such wiles.
My prediction for the next phase of the dad game would probably be the Co-op Dad game. Because if by a certain both the father and son become adults, then the logic would dictate having to work together with different skills, like a dad that knows how to bake bread and a son with a marketing degree opening a bakery. I always figured the next God of War game would have the option to Co-op as Kratos and Atreus, giving whatever pissed them off that day a double-decker knuckle sandwich with cheese. And then fishing.
*Mentions SimCity*
*Calls it a dry, boring affair*
Clint from LGR screamed in horror so hard it was heard all over the world
yakuza is already showing us the next age as we play guys in their 60s fulfill their dreams of becoming pirates
That limmerick was worth all the dad game talk :)
It's funny how I spent my whole life seeing the "model trainset for dads" and always wondering how fun those look to be to build and run.
I assumed the rise of dad games was due to the distorting effect Yahtzee becoming a dad himself had on the universe
This video went surprisingly real rather than going hard, and I think the final joke at the end might be more prophetic than yatz hopes
I call these games "Chore Core"
I feel like survival games also fit into a kind of dad game mentality, without actually being a dad. I also dread the day gaming goes the way of movie trends of what I called the "divorced dad fantasy," with the likes of Taken and 3 Days to Kill.
A decade ago I did wonder what audience were those simulator games for...now I know, they were for me. 😅
I found my post dad game. Physical pinball machines
didn't think I would ever hear Yahtzee say "characters that exude hairy dad energy"
The man who coined "Spunkgargleweewee" still has a few tricks up his sleeve.
Remember way back when Yahtzee had a whole video series swapping poems with Jim? Crikey, that was ages ago.
My first dad game was Football Manager on the ZX Spectrum, and I still play the current Football Manager series 40 years later. I'm also a bit fond of the Truck and Train sim games of which there where also examples on the Speccy, Brighton Belle and Evening Star for the train fans and Juggernaut for driving lorries.
Any opinion on the delay?
@@guguy00 Meh, whenever FM or CM changed to a new engine in the past, it was time to skip a year or two till they fixed the mess. So same old story really. I still like CM 01-02.
If we're going with the trend of "dad games", I reckon that while the next step after post-dad could be "dad whose kid is grown up", it'd be interesting to see a step beyond that; specifically "granddad games" beyond that one Flintstones romhack that Joel Vargskelethor ended up signal-boosting through his dismay and disbelief.
Watching this while waiting to get my actual 40 ton truck unloaded
I'm still in the Dad/Post-Dad phase, I love my simulators and factory building games. Factorio and Space Engineers are my current time sinks, both of which are about to get huge updates.
The 2000s era: There was a dad here. It's gone now.
leaving out Witcher 2 to 3 as one of the best hairy dad evolution lol
the problem with the "Post hairy Dad" games was that they were mostly only received with a "meh" or an "ok". I think we will go back to the hairy dad era once again.
There needs to be a forklift simulator based on the old spoof safety video Klaus. With all of the blood and gore.
If we went from male protagonist to female protagonist by using the hairy dad as a slow transition does this mean one day in 20 years we'll get Mom games? I can't wait to find out how the disaproving stare mechanics work
Maybe after the Post-Hairy Dad Games, specifically where the ones where a young woman succeeds as the main protagonist, we might see the emergence of Mother Games, wherein the protagonist steps into a role of maternal protection for a child figure like they used to be. How exactly it would differ from the Hairy Dad game, I don’t know, but it could be interesting for comparison, possibly learning from the mistakes their own father figures committed while raising them. I mean, how many gaming protagonists can we name are actually mothers in some capacity? Normally, motherhood is something used as a tragic backstory for villainesses, portraying maternal affection for their children as something that can lead to obsession and madness, so having a positive depiction of motherhood in games would be a rather nice change.
This seems to imply that having a dad is some sort of recent video game stereotype but isn't that a normal thing for basically all of humanity.