My family is coming apart – so it’s time for one last video game session
I wanted our last family games night to be the best fun we’ve ever had. Maybe we should have stuck with Mario Kart …
It is the end of an era for the Diamond family. For 20 years, there have been five of us living together. It has not been easy. Militant vegan daughters, sons who have inherited Scottish tempers, and a youngest child who attracts trouble like an industrial magnet, have meant our house has been conflict-laden at times. Throw in the fact that we are beset with all manner of mental health bobbins and chronic illnesses that resulted in two of our three kids almost dying in hospitals and you get a family that is combustible – but extremely close.
Through it all, we had games. They always brought us back together. Not just us all hunkering over Super Mario Kart like some kind of UN-mandated family therapy, but the conversations that happen when any of us spy another playing something new. Games are a cultural touchstone that helped us crack through the veneer of disagreements and distrust and remind us that we have more things in common than we sometimes feel.
But now we are moving out of the house we have shared for years. My wife has to go back to the UK for family reasons, #1 Child is moving in with her boyfriend and youngest child is moving in with a friend. This leaves the Son and I – we are moving into an apartment for the next few months, which Charlie is already dubbing the bro-tel. (I am filled with equal parts excitement and dread about this.)
So I wanted one last family games night to remind us of simpler times before we all go our separate ways. I wanted it to be the best fun we have ever had. I wanted … Quiplash!
Quiplash is one of the most important games in the history of our family, because I view it as the game that trained my kids to be funny. Seeing them all become fairly high-level comedy beings has been the greatest thrill of my life as a dad.
It’s a simple “fill in the blanks or answer the question with something funny to get the most votes” game, the beauty of it being you can play using mobile phones as controllers and five people can play. That’s why I have it as a go-to. Getting any family together to do anything is like herding particularly wilful sheep, and when was the last time you saw a shepherd try that while hunting for 10 working batteries for gaming controllers? Exactly.
It’s not just the genuinely funny answers that get votes: there is also a lot of love for old family running gags, most of which are at my expense, usually my baldness or my rigidity with rules.
However, while I am impressed by my grownup kids’ quick-thinking quippery, I am still appalled by some of their spelling. So for our final game, I introduce a rule that you can only vote for answers spelt correctly. This rule is not just ignored but aggressively mocked with answers that are part punchline and part Welsh street name.
I am in last place because they can tell which answers are from me. So, I start deliberately entering badly spelt answers to confuse them, so they give up trying to play the game seriously and while I am writing quality punchlines such as “God said ‘wrong door’” (you had to be there), I am faced with answers from them such as “pee pee poo poo”.
And then the rows break out. My two youngest kids work at the same trendy bar/restaurant, and they have issues with each other. One suggested a role for the other there that they are not happy about, so they declare they never want to work in the same place together again. Impressively, during the argument, my son still manages to answer “skittle flavour that just missed the cut” with “narly Netenyahu nectarine”. Which almost got my vote until I noticed that neither Netanyahu nor gnarly are spelt like that.
skip past newsletter promotion
The row escalates. Wife and #1 Child have reverted to doomscrolling on their phones instead. No one wants to play. It’s all falling apart. Not just this desperate attempt at one final family gaming session, but the family itself. In one week, our matriarch, the most important one of us, will be on the other side of the Atlantic. In a couple of months, #1 Child could be the only one still actually living on this side of it.
Memories start flooding back: the summer I spent playing Super Mario Sunshine with #1 Child when she was five. Evading guard dogs in the snow with my son on Call of Duty: Modern Warfare when he wasn’t much older. Seeing my youngest child fall in love with Kirby. The years of Mario Kart, Mortal Kombat and Just Dance. The conversations. The debates. The windups. There is such joy in those moments but now they are spilling through my fingers like water.
I think of all the times in recent years when one of the kids has asked me if I want to play a game with them. And I’ve been “too busy”. I wish I had all those moments back to create more memories.
My wife, ever the peacemaker of the family, declares the next day that we will have one more go at this the night before she goes back to Blighty. That prospect seems as good as it gets right now.
- Games
- Family
- comment
