My Newborn Slept on My Chest While a Game Helped Me Understand the Passage of Time

Many of us have probably played video games with a sleepy newborn draped over our bodies. Sometimes, that experience is a little more profound.

I’m open to running—and paying for!—more pitches at Crossplay, even from those without a byline. I’m more interested in life experience than work experience. Drop me an email. -pk

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After a long and miserable experience at the hospital, we came home with a healthy baby girl and a distinct feeling that a paradigm shift had occurred. So my wife could rest, I’d often handle naps, sometimes wearing the baby around the house as I cleaned in a misguided effort to multitask, and sometimes putting her down in the bassinet, remembering that I should try to nap, as well.

Then, there were other times where she sometimes rested on my chest while I played the 2022 adventure role-playing game Pentiment. 

Pentiment is a game about an artist named Andreas Maler living in 16th century Germany in the fictional town of Tassing. The very first resident of Tassing you meet is Ursula, a toddler in the family whose house Andreas is staying at. From there, you go on to meet many more children. These children, unlike the more commonly imperiled children in other games, will instead pet cats, learn to draw, wake you up at night wanting a story, cry at lunch, cry at dinner, steal your hat, ask you questions, and do other things that children have done for ages and will continue to do as long as there are cats to pet and hats to steal. 

Once I’d successfully put our daughter to sleep with some rocking and singing, I would sit back on a large pile of pillows, put another pillow on my lap to prop up the arm holding her to my chest, turn on the Xbox, and somehow play the game with the other hand. In this scenario, the controller balanced on my knee, as the developers surely intended. 

The track-based movement and the single-button approach for most interactions and conversations made this surprisingly feasible, as did the lack of voice acting that allowed me to turn the volume down low. We’d sit there, one asleep and the other very tired, soaking in the barely audible scribbles of the pen used to tell a story that deeply resonated with me in those moments. 

Pentiment’s children feel like they exist within the community—granted, as social norms and economic considerations would have dictated for the time—and the game reinforces this by almost always giving Andreas the opportunity to address them directly, or at least include them in conversations he has with adults. Not only do they feel like a part of the game’s world, but they feel like a part of Andreas’s world, and in the relatively long timeline of the game many will grow up to have families of their own. 

How Andreas interacts with the children is informed by his own experiences, as chosen by the player. Time spent in Flanders means “Cat in the Cradle” ends up being the late-night story on demand, a love of nature leads to a version of Andreas who teaches children facts about the various plants around Tassing. 

This is all very familiar mechanically for anyone who has played a role-playing game in the past, a genre the team who made Pentiment certainly know well, but here, those life experiences are used just as we use all of our own history: lenses to make sense of certain things, stories to tell, and ways to inform how we approach a situation.

Andreas' experiences with Tassing and the many children who live there are constantly determined by shared experiences and history, stories from the land or books or religion or beyond. And in turn, those experiences inform Andreas’ own art and are captured in greater questions of posterity through art and creation. 

This view of information and history, how it layers and shifts, is what landed right on the open, receptive nerve of new parenthood. When our daughter arrived, I suddenly felt very aware of how I fit into a broader timeline of existence. Time became harder to define but stretchy in a way it hadn’t been before, pulling a past viewed from the other side of something new, but certainly still there, and stretching ahead in ways it never had before. Such zooming out, in prior years, might have caused a feeling of insignificance, but with the introduction of our daughter, it felt beautiful in a way that time had never felt before. This new, beautiful, stretchy perception of time and how to find ourselves in it continues to be one of the defining characteristics of parenting for me.

Children exist in a space that was there before they arrived and will hopefully continue to be there for generations to come. In some cases they may need something akin to protection, a role they’re reduced to in so many games, but more often than not, they’ll just need help figuring out the world around them and how they fit into it. And we’ll help, sharing stories we were taught and lessons we learned from the places we’ve been, figuring out how to triangulate the intersection of what came before in our lives with the shorter line that is the new life asleep on your shoulder. 

Now our daughter is almost two years old, and our cat is almost seventeen and starting to show some signs of her age, spending more time napping, sometimes on a fleece Pentiment blanket my wife got me for my first Father’s Day. 

Our daughter adores her and routinely demands that my wife and I draw “kitty!” with her crayons, so our cat is surrounded with crayon drawings of her likeness, drawings that reassure me that she’ll always be part of our family’s shared history.

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