My Dad loves playing video games as long as its a card game on his iPad. He spends hours playing Solitaire and Freecell on his iPad. But doesn’t give much attention to anything else on the App Store. Needless to say, this has been a constant point of debate between us as I would like him to partake in what I made my career.
I remember an episode that happened in the family sometime in 1999 with the demo version of Caesar 3. I was a big fan of the game; it ended up being a major cause for me to game development. And I wanted him to play the game.
Here’s what you need to know about my dad: he is a history-aficionado and a Hindi litterateur. It made perfect sense to me that he would be interested in playing a game about Roman history and society.
He agreed to try the game for a time and started playing. I and my brother helped him a bit with getting acquainted with the game. After a while, we retired to sleep; what happened next, we found out the next morning. Because, when we woke up the next morning, my father was still playing the game for some 13 hours straight now. He had built a city that filled the map to its brim and had some 10,000 citizens pushing the game to its limits. It was a beautifully designed, prosperous city and a huge marvel for the kid me.
When he got up, he immediately made us uninstall the game; he had just seen how addictive games could be.
Fast forward to the present day, he happily plays Solitaire on his iPad. I have been wanting to collaborate with him for some time on building a game universe and story together. To give him a better sense of story-telling in games, I want to introduce him to some games and get him to play them.
This will be a series of blog posts about this endeavour. It would have been pretty straightforward to buy those games for his devices. Instead, I will convert this into an opportunity to experiment with different library sharing and streaming options available to me (for example, Steam Link).
Going forward, let this be a chronicle of this exercise. While, I was attempting to set the context in this post, going forward I will share my experience with getting some of these services.
If you know of a service that can help me do this better, please do leave a comment.
Until next time, then!
