Craig and I found ourselves playing catch on the baseball field one evening. We had been college roommates and had reunited when I moved with my daughter, Amanda, to the same town that Craig lived in. His passion for sports had carried through to adulthood: he trained the school baseball team that his twin daughters, Briar and Hazel, played in, while carrying his one year-old, River, in a papoose.
The two of us (and River, of course) had managed to get some time alone during the victory party for another of the team’s successful matches. Notoriously clumsy as I am, one of Craig’s throws hit me in the forehead. He rushed over and, in his words, “did the dad thing” as he examined my head. “Don’t tell me you’ll have to kiss it to make it better,” I teased. “You would be so lucky,” he responded with a smile on his face. I called his bluff : “I mean, I feel I deserve it,” and felt the blood rush to my face as he leaned down and kissed me on the forehead.
It’s important to note at this point that neither Craig, nor this entire scenario, is real. Craig is one of seven dateable dads in Dream Daddy - a queer dating simulator videogame. Dating sims are a sub-genre of visual novels: games in which the story is told largely through text, usually with stylised illustrations of the characters and scenarios. Players take control of an avatar character and choose how the story progresses by selecting options at narrative forks throughout the game. If you ever read a Choose Your Own Adventure book as a child, they’re essentially an interactive version of those. There are no controls to remember, nor complicated gameplay mechanics to learn: just a button press or mouse click to progress through the story.