How a Video Game Helped Me Understand My Sick Child Was Finally Healthy

The greatest sound a parent can hear, after days of fevers: laughter.

A screen shot from the Apple Arcade video game What the Car. Many “whats” are uttered while playing it, and there are, at times, cars.

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Problems often come in bunches. In my case, it was getting laid off from my previous writing job on a Thursday, and my youngest child getting sick on a Sunday. Cold? Flu? COVID-19, which we have yet to catch (or at least detect), three years into all this? Ear infection? RSV? Strep throat? The answers are numerous, but only a few are solvable with medication, and more often than not, the reality is that you're stuck with a grossly upset child until whatever's in them passes through.

Day one. Day two. Day three. Day four. DAY FIVE. DAY SIX. DAY SIX?

I was at a funeral service recently, and the family spoke about bearing witness to the exact moment the person in question passed. There was sadness, but peace, too. It's rare we experience such commanding moments of grace, but readers, recently I was in the room for such a moment. Six days into a powerfully annoying sickness that had struck my three-year-old kid and kept them in a state of yuck for nearly a week, I heard something surprising: laughter. 

Real laughter. You know, the belly kind, where it takes over their whole body? Let me share:

"I don't want to speak too soon but I feel like her temp lifted," I texted my wife in astonishment.

All of this happened while we were playing What the Car, a new game on Apple Arcade from Copenhagen-based Triband, where players need to guide a car from one end of the level to the other, while dealing with the car growing rockets, sails, legs, short legs, long legs, extremely long legs, and, once, way too many legs! It's from the same developers of the equally charming What the Bat? and What the Golf?, and describe themselves as a "comedy games studio." 

The "play" part, I should make clear, is me holding the iPad. She's observing, or, on occasion, pressing one of the big glowing buttons to start a level. What the Car is a little too complicated for a three-year-old to control, but the humor is straightforward. But acts of play are not strictly about the people holding the controller; it can extend to the audience, as well, either through their reactions to what's happening on-screen or influencing the person with the controller.

This is especially notable when kids are young, and can't grasp what the most well-intentioned user interface is trying to convey. See: kids walking up to a television and trying to make it scroll, presuming every display in their lives must also be a touch screen. It's a very reasonable guess!

What the Car's humor is big and broad. It doesn't require nuance for a three-year-old to grasp a car having seven legs, causing it to roll around in weird ways, is weird and, thus, funny. It helps that What the Car explicitly calls attention to these moments via level introductions—see the video below—prompting a shared moment of laughter between the two of us before I'm playing. 

"A car…with legs? ARE YOU KIDDING ME?" [cue sitcom family laugh track]

It didn't take long for my kid to become curious enough to poke at the controls, at which point we ran into an issue I have with a lot of video games: failure states. What the Car is better than most, because it does not make fun of the player for a mistake, but when you miss a jump, you're dropped back at the start and asked to complete the whole level. "Now, back in my day, games were mean and we liked it!" Unpacking everything that implies is a story for another day, but in general, I wish games had options where the game would just keep moving. Let the player miss the jump, but drop them back on the track and allow them to keep moving forward. 

Curiosity should be rewarded, not punished. More options are better. Because the end result was that my child became frustrated after missing a few jumps, and instead of continuing to enjoy What the Car, we turned off What the Car, grunted, and loaded up a coloring app, instead.

It's fine. Kids have short attention spans! But it feels like there was a missed opportunity, too.

Nonetheless, What the Car—a video game, of all things—told me what a thermometer and a suddenly hungry belly would later confirm: my child was no longer sick. How cool is that?

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Also:

• Apple Arcade’s journey has been a strange one. It started as a service pitched around reviving the golden age of early App Store games, while these days, it’s good for a boutique new release like What the Car and versions of existing games in the App Store without microtransactions. It seems like a pretty good deal.

• The other games from the What the Car developer—What the Bat, What the Golf—are worth checking out. It’s rare to see humor and design so successfully fused.

• For the parents in the room, I cannot recommend SP!NG, a game about manipulating the physics as a tiny object to help it navigate a bunch of spaces, on Apple Arcade more highly. I spent hours meticulously playing through it, and it appears there are new levels available for it now. Oh no, I’m going to do it again.

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