Learner Dad: Instead of basking in being Fun Dad, I had to look for his tablet

Picture: iStock 

My son's world collapsed recently because the video game platform, Roblox, went down for a couple of days. Any attempt to log in brought up a 'sorry try again' message. He did, about 4m times, but his favourite virtual world remained off-limits.

Roblox is probably a mystery to anyone who doesn’t have kids. But it mushroomed in popularity during lockdown with the company reporting that 50% of all US kids aged under 16 play games on the platform.

That would explain why the #RobloxDown hashtag trended on social media for three days until the company managed to fix whatever reduced our kids to tears. Or at least pushed them back towards Minecraft in a huff.

I don’t get the attraction of the games on Roblox. My son likes to hop up on my lap when he’s playing one called Defenders Depot, where it’s all about accumulating weapons so you can kill off the bad guys. There doesn’t seem to be any dexterity or quick reflexes involved, it’s all about wandering around and accumulating stuff. I told my seven-year-old that it seemed like a lazy game, he took it very badly.

In fairness, he didn’t take the Roblox outage that badly. He was disappointed that it happened at the weekend when he’s allowed screen time, but he got that it was down for everyone and there was no point moping around.

The problem started when Roblox came back. He bounded in from school and said that his friends had played a bit the night before and it was very sad that he was going to have to wait until the weekend to play it again. I knew where he was going with that, so I told himself and his sister to go find their tablets and play for half an hour.

He couldn’t find his tablet. His sister could and started playing this strange game called Adopt Me!, leaving him to carry out a room to room search, crying with frustration. 

I was livid myself. Instead of basking in 30 minutes of being Fun Dad, allowing them to play video games mid-week, I had to traipse around the house looking for his tablet. Talk about unfair. 

(I think this was the Woke Gods punishing me for buying my son and daughter navy and pink covers respectively for their tablets. Gender stereotyping aside, navy is a very hard colour to spot in a crowded room.)

After 30 minutes of searching, I rang my wife at work and said this is ridiculous, we’ve tried everywhere, where did you hide his tablet? She said, 'I didn’t hide it anywhere, the last place I saw him using it was on the blue couch'.

Navy on blue? Sure you’d miss it easily enough. 

My wife hung up, I could sense the gloating off her.

I told my son he could have ten minutes. But he couldn’t log in. We needed some code that had been emailed to my wife, who had installed the game. I rang her again. She didn’t answer, she was out of coverage. My son divorced his parents.

I struggled to be a good father when this was going on. I did the classic thing of trying to help the child, while giving out to him for losing his tablet, to cope with my own anger. But I kept looking for a solution, inspired by my father, who considered driving 30 miles to Courtmacsherry on Christmas Day in 1982, because he heard the shop was open and might have the batteries that didn’t come with our Sankyo tape recorder. We eventually told him he didn’t need to go. 

My wife eventually arrived home from work to find us waiting for her at the door.

My son input the access code and hopped up on my lap to play for 10 minutes. It was his way of saying thanks for trying.