Dadcore
I had the extremely good fortune to be born into a family with a long history of playing games and not be the first generation to take up the digital variety. My father was playing games on a PC as far back as my memory allows me to reach, often fixated on a single title played every day. For over ten years, it was Warcraft II, single-player. Before that, it was the classic Earl Weaver Baseball and both games played until it became simply too inconvenient to keep playing on more modern hardware.
There’s a point to this bit of personal history. Another son whose father has what appears to be a fairly consuming gaming habit has made a website to showcase how far it’s gone. Using player data from Steam, you can see how many hours the gaming dad has played and the numbers are on the verge of insanity. He’s logged nearly 400 hours into BioShock 2 and almost 600 on Far Cry 2 and its expansion content. If I hadn’t seen the behavior before, I’d assume it was utter madness (and, frankly, it’s still hard to imagine).
You can input your own Steam ID and compare your stats with the dad right on the site. It’s all a little bit sweet, if you ask me. If I weren’t already planning to call home for Mother’s Day today, I think I’d probably be making the same call just to tell my father that I love him after this.
My Dad Used to be a Banker [Thanks, Paddy!]