I don’t remember much from the first weeks of parenthood – a colicky baby and extreme sleep deprivation will do that to you – but I do vividly remember one night with my baby son when absolutely nothing I did seemed to help him. I walked him around: he screamed. I tried to feed him: he screamed. I put him down: more screaming. So it went for a couple of hours. I remember thinking: this is like a text adventure video game where none of the answers are right.
Game designer and college teacher Nicholas O’Brien had similar thoughts. His first child was born during the Covid-19 pandemic in New York City, and he and his partner were trapped at home, on the endless merry-go-round of menial baby-care tasks. It was getting to him, like it gets to all new parents. “I didn’t have a lot of social or emotional outlets besides my partner,” he tells me. “I felt like I needed to create something about how I was feeling, work my way through it by making something.”
