I was reminded by a conversation today about the way that Game Dads give you time, and I wanted to write a quick thing here about it.
When you become a dad, game time becomes precious. You remember Game Time, don't you? That's the time you used to spend playing computer or video games.
There's not very much of it around, now that you have kids, huh. There's time, sure - time in waiting rooms, time waiting in the school pickup and dropoff queues, time while the kid goes to Brownies or whatever, but it's not Game Time. It's not time to yourself, unbroken, with room to concentrate on a thing that you're doing purely for fun. It's... spare time, but it's not the spare time that you talk about when you talk about the things you do in your "spare time" because there aren't things you can do in this time, this time isn't up for Doing Things in, this time is something else, something gritty and polluted. Time waiting for the kettle to boil or for the oven timer to honk or whatever. It's ragged time, dirty low-grade unuseful time, time where you have to be in a place and you have to keep an eye or an ear out for when you're needed. It's chopped-up meaningless time, like bits of string too short to be of any use.
You don't think about this time. You don't remember it, except maybe resentfully. It's not memorable; it's scrag-ends of leftovers after someone's taken big bites out of your hours.
This low-grade time is exactly the sort of stuff that gets sucked up into people's phones. Phones are great at eating this time, they can nibble even a few seconds at once, but they don't give you much in return. They give you such tiny packages of interest that you can't even call them bite-sized, nothing they give is even big enough to bite - their entertainment is like dust or powder, filling up your time-belly but never letting you chew, leaving you unsatisfied. Nonetheless, this is where your low-grade time tends to go. Nobody seems particularly happy about this, but we do it anyway. Maybe we don't do it exactly, maybe we just let it happen.
The Game Dad creates Game Time.
It takes the games that you used to have to commit an hour to, and it overlays them with instant save states, meaning at any time you can pull a console out of your pocket, play for a minute or two or three, then instantly save and put it right back in the pocket again.
The Game Dad collects the wispy mists of useless time that would have otherwise been lost to doomscrolling, and it condenses them into Game Time. It gives you time to play the games that you meant to play twenty years ago but didn't have the time for. This time is chewy and satisfying. It scratches your restless brain and fills up your empty stimulation tank.
When the tank's full, when you've had enough Game Time, you turn the Game Dad off and your hands are still, your mind is quiet, and you don't feel the tug of your anxiety rectangle. The time that comes after Game Time is quiet time. You don't want to switch to a different app, your device is back in your pocket. Instead, you might chat with someone else whose car is also up on the lift at the mechanic, or just watch the clouds and have an idea.
Boredom feels different now, because now you've got time.
For the first month or so I had my Game Dad, I would often notice myself going through a familiar cycle; mind restless and hands idle, reach for my phone, remember that the phone is just going to make me feel bad because it's the Feel Bad Machine Full Of Woe, reach into my other pocket and Play Fun Games. And then, no longer feel like playing a game, put the Game Dad away, now my hands are chill and my mind is satisfied and I don't need the phone.
But then the weather changed, and I went back to wearing jeans rather than cargo shorts, and the Game Dad wouldn't fit, and my time went back into the doomscrolling device and my mental health went back to shit.
Buy some cargo pants. You're a dad now anyway.