A videogame about Fatherhood that has the internet by storm.
Pragmata was a new release by Capcom a few months ago, and it started gaining traction as a game about - fatherhood?
You have a companion, a robot girl named Diana, whom you fight alongside and protect throughout the game. As the story progresses, Hugh and Diana develop a sort of father-daughter bond − and that's the part of the game hitting players right in the feels and sparking massive discussion online.
"What... what is this feeling inside me? It can't be... It's like... I wanna protect... it's like... I want to be a... a... DAD..." one X user wrote. "I will burn anyone and anything that tries to harm her," wrote another. One Reddit user described playing the game as "therapeutic for my soul," following the death of his own daughter at the age of 8 in 2009.
Turns out, psychologists say, the instinct to nurture isn't something that just belongs to women, though much of popular culture may indicate otherwise. Men do by and large have an innate, paternal instinct as well, and it's something that can get activated whether or not they have children of their own.
Fatherhood is not perfect by any stretch of the means and life does have its challenges, but it’s one of those, “If you know, you know” moments. Even then, many parents, dare I say, “grow out of love” for their children because children’s values are now based on what their peers believe instead of what their parents believe. Peer influence is outpacing parental influence and most importantly, guidance, and that’s why my wife and I are blessed to be able to homeschool our children. As our kids hit their teenage years, we feel the independence our kids need and desire, but we don’t feel we are “growing out of love” for our children. We still enjoy our time together.
Of course the algorithm is part of peer influence, and beating the algorithm is an uphill battle, which is why kids shouldn’t be on social media platforms - and quite frankly many adults shouldn’t be either. The beauty is I can still send them videos from social media via screen recordings, mimicking email chains of the past.
I read this amazing book called The Boy Crisis a few years ago, and even though I don’t agree with everything the author says, it really does shed light on the importance of having a fatherly presence in children’s lives, with objective evidence stating that children perform better in every metric of life (financial, emotional, social, health, etc.), when fathers are present.
Whether I play Pragmata is up for debate, but odds are I won’t because I simply don’t have the time. You can say I’m living the game firsthand in a more visceral way as a father of 3 daughters at different stages of their lives, and there’s never a dull moment.