I don’t remember much from the first weeks of parenthood – a colicky baby and extreme sleep deprivation will do that to you – but I do vividly remember one night with my baby son when absolutely nothing I did seemed to help him. I walked him around: he screamed. I tried to feed him: he screamed. I put him down: more screaming. So it went for a couple of hours. I remember thinking: this is like a text adventure video game where none of the answers are right.
Game designer and college teacher Nicholas O’Brien had similar thoughts. His first child was born during the Covid-19 pandemic in New York City, and he and his partner were trapped at home, on the endless merry-go-round of menial baby-care tasks. It was getting to him, like it gets to all new parents. “I didn’t have a lot of social or emotional outlets besides my partner,” he tells me. “I felt like I needed to create something about how I was feeling, work my way through it by making something.”
The result is Bundle of Joy, a quasi-ridiculous yet heartfelt game about early fatherhood. It breaks baby care down into frenetic microgames: aim your spoon to feed baby! Press a button with decent timing to burp baby! Try to get a pair of tiny socks on to baby’s feet! Fit the baby’s head through the impossibly small opening in this tiny jumper! Some of these made me laugh with recognition; my kids are in school now, so I had forgotten about the little bulb that you use to suck snot out of a tiny nose, and how much they hate it when you try. I’ve never had to fit a nebuliser over one of my children’s faces, but I have now successfully managed it with a virtual child.
These frantic vignettes are interspersed with moments of reflection. If you fail at the games, you get stressed out, and the game makes you take a break and perform a few deep breaths. When the baby is sleeping, you can talk to your partner, reflecting on your feelings (and theirs). But mostly, you’re caught up in the endless now, a sequence of repetitive actions. It does capture something of the busy monotony of caring for a baby: you’re never at rest for a second, but the tasks are all so unstimulating and repetitive that it saps your very sense of personhood.
O’Brien initially made a prototype that was more narrative-driven, and heavier in tone, but he landed on this minigame-driven format because the act of play felt more closely aligned to his actual experiences. “The thing that was so important to capture was that chaotic energy, that moment to moment feeling that you have when you’re taking care of an infant,” he says. “So I thought, ‘What’s a gameplay type that’s very similar to that?’ The WarioWare/Bishi Bashi format immediately jumped to mind.”
The difficulty of each day varies based on how the baby has slept (and consequently how you have slept); day after day, when you revisit each game, there’s a new wrinkle. The baby kicks their feet more enthusiastically when you’re trying to get the socks on. A hand will appear to swipe the spoon away from their mouth. It takes an hour or two to play through, depending on how deeply you engage in the written dialogue during moments of calm.
The thoughts and feelings that show up in these reflective moments are based not just on O’Brien’s experiences, but those of other dads who shared their stories with him. They touch on many of the complex feelings that early parenthood excavates from your marrow: not just the exhaustion, joy and tedium of the moment, not just the self-doubt, but how you feel about your own parents and the way that you form relationships. On the advice of his partner, he’s kept it to the experiences of one parent, rather than guessing at the experiences of the other; you can choose your co-parent’s gender at the beginning of the game, and everyone’s skin tone, but you are always playing from the perspective of Dad.
Making Bundle of Joy has been an act of catharsis for its developer, and he hopes it might be cathartic for players, too. “You feel stuck on a loop. I think a lot of parents have that feeling. Even when you’re not in lockdown, you lose track of days,” he says. “Especially for dads, I don’t think that there’s a lot of material out there that’s positive and reinforcing and encouraging. I hope it’s positive encouragement for people going through that experience. You’re doing it, you CAN do it. You don’t have to beat yourself up along the way. The baby will do that!”
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