Single Parenthood & I: Timmy Mallett, going down a K-hole

Nothing is going to make you feel older than the realisation that you don't even understand how their video games work any more.

As those of you who pay attention to these columns will probably already be aware, my children spend five days a week with me and two with my ex-wife. I live halfway between their two schools and work from home. It made - and continues to make - sense for us to do it this way.

But it has, over the last few days, caused me an unexpected issue which resulted in me entering a world which I frankly did not understand and which frightened me a little, although I do feel that I should add that the ‘frightened’ thing refers to how goddam old I felt as a result of seeing it, rather than seeing any disturbing content.

I’ll be the first to say that they’re money-grubbing bastards. But this is a free game which can be played for free without too many difficulties (yes, I’m aware of the inherent contradiction here), so I’ll allow it, but only under the strict supervision of me being in the room at the same time, with one eye on whatever on earth it is they’re up to.

For the uninitiated, Roblox is a video game, played in our house on the PS5, which has its own running around and chasing things component but which also has, extremely significantly, a game creation system in which players can create their own worlds and then open them up to players, whether for the game’s tiresome in-game currency, Robux (yes, I know), or free-of-charge.

I learned my lesson over not locking down your PlayStation account the hard way. When he was about two years old, Older Child mashed a keypad straight through to buying a £100 deluxe version of some game or other on the PS4. The first I heard of this was an email receipt from Sony thanking me for the payment, but a quick - albeit highly panicked; we could not more afford that now than I could now, which is not at all - phone call to Sony sorted it out. They could see that I hadn’t even downloaded it and refunded the money straight back to me. My account has been tripled-locked down ever since.

And the kids are good about it. They don’t often ask for games, and more significantly, they don’t ask for Robux or other in-game currencies, primarily because they know how little shrift they would receive from their father if they did. I understand exactly how much these game companies make from microtransactions and the like, and I loathe them for it. I’m not shy at being vocal about this subject to the kids, either.

From the glances over my laptop while I work while propped up in the nook of my sofa behind them, Roblox is absolutely baffling, its user-created sub-domains all the more so. There’s one game that they play called Sprunki, which seems to involve programming robots to create music through different breakbeats and the like. But like everything else on there, it has a thousand different off-shoots, the vast majority of which are unfathomably weird.

One thing that Roblox doesn’t seem to take particularly seriously is copyright, because there are thousands upon thousands of creator-made games which involve characters the right to which are definitely not held by the person doing the creating. (To be clear, I’m not particularly bothered about the effects of this on Sega, of all people. If anything, that all these games even exist just promotes the ongoing mystifying notion that Sonic is still a thing, so 34 years on it’s probably worth it to them.)

And the one that my kids cannot get enough of is one of these sub-games. It’s called Sonic Speed Simulator. In theory it’s supposed to be what it says on the tin. It’s Sonic the Hedgehog, except in 3D, and so fast that you have more or less no chance of being able to control the titular, blue for some reason hedgehog in any way whatsoever for longer than about five seconds.

Except that’s not quite what it is, because there are also hundreds of others in these online worlds as you at the same time, and very, very few of you are actually Sonic, because you can go in as your own avatar, and there’s a billion of those floating around. On one occasion I glanced up and one of them was tearing around in the shape of a gumball machine. Mostly, Older Child wears a 19th century female farm-hand’s smock, with an oversized pretzel strapped to his back and a Ukraine flag tucked into his hat. This is totally normal behaviour.

Because my kids are very attuned to me not buying this sort of thing, their ears are always pricked for anything that’s free. This, of course, means that I need to swivel my radar in order to make sure they need to steer clear of anything that looks like a rip-off or the 21st century equivalent to an old man in a raincoat with a bag of boiled sweets in his hand.

But over the last seven days, something very important came up which, because of that five and two arrangement with my ex-wife, required me to become involved as well. Roblox, or this particular sub-game, or whoever, was running a promotion whereby if you logged into Sonic Speed Simulator for seven consecutive days, you’d get a free character to play as. You didn’t have to do anything. Just log in.

My kids found out about this last weekend and started it on the Sunday evening when they got back from their mother’s. But it wasn’t until Friday afternoon, when they were getting ready to go back there, that the subject came up again. “How are you going to do seven straight days, if you’re at your mum’s every weekend?”, I asked, foolishly. “Well…”, replied Older Child. He has a very specific way of saying that word when he needs me to do something for him.

So yeah, I had to log in to Roblox and presumably collect this character, who, I found out, was Supersonic, who is essentially Sonic’s yellow… I don’t know. Brother? Cousin? Nemesis? Lover? Who knows? See, this is why everybody hates Sega so much. They’ve just kept adding all these characters and who knows who they are or what they do, although it is worth adding that it doesn’t matter, because all they long ago gave up any pretence of it mattering. And fortunately, younger child had written some helpful instructions:

(Number one is the account name, which I think I’ve successfully pixellated and blurred out?)

So, very early on Saturday morning - so early that, so far as any Americans were concerned, it was still Friday - I dutifully switched on the PS5, clicked on Roblox, and opened up Sonic Speed Simulator, and… nothing. Now, I wasn't surprised about this. The idea of a “GET/NOT GET” button sounded very much like something that Younger Child had imagined.

But there was no sign of Supersonic, although both kids had been very insistent that I wouldn’t have to do anything once there, so instead, I decided to have a little nose around. The character it loaded me up with looked far more impressive than Supersonic, who might more accurately be named Yellowsonic. I don’t know exactly who he was, but he was a red, angry looking Sonic (though I don’t think he was Knuckles - if you know, you know), he was made of metal, and he had two little underlings who made running around collecting things very easy indeed.

Within about ten minutes, I had a nosebleed. It was a full-on visual overload. The game is almost uncontrollably fast, all the more so when you land on some sort of boost, which is extremely often indeed. On top of this, while your internal gyroscope is turning into a Slinky, everything is coloured in RED, BLUE, GREEN and YELLOW, as if designed to make tears of blood drip from the corners of your eyes. Every once in a while, a five-second burst of I Believe I Can Fly by R Kelly would blast out of nowhere.

Combined, the effect was very similar to what it would be were you Timmy Mallett, going down a K-hole. And, of course, I obviously had absolutely no idea what to do. I ran around hoovering up trinkets and gold rings, which I might have been able to cope with better did I not feel as though I was embarking on a terrible psychedelic Bombalurina-fest every time he started moving.

But it didn’t seem to be having much of an effect beyond making my temples throb, so I stopped and looked up at the score. 1,440,000. No, hang on. 144 million. I squinted at the screen again. 144 BILLION? I felt a brief stabbing pain of guilt over my kids’ screen-time before realising that everything in this game seemed to be worth a minimum of 20 million points.

It only took me a few minutes to rack up an extra billion myself, though I strongly suspect it will have made no difference to the kids’ experience of the game, but that was about as much as I had in me, in all honesty. I’ve had some form of video gaming in my life since the late 1970s. But I don’t play many any more, and when I do, I try to make them sedate, where possible, or at the very least vaguely comprehensible. If anything, I bought my PS5 out of habit, rather than anything else. I’ve had one of each, since the first one.

And I enjoy the character creation every bit as much as the game-play. When I played GTA5, I decided that I just wanted to potter round like an old man all day, play a bit of golf, go to the betting shop (well, it’s a casino in this particular game), have the early bird special, that sort of thing. So I designed my character to look like some old man, pulled the screen back at the end of it all and… I’d accidentally created Jeremy Corbyn. Buff Jeremy Corbyn, but Jeremy Corbyn nevertheless.

Of course, “Mister Jeremy”, as he very quickly became known around my house, soon became tired of rounds of golf and ended up becoming the most feared drug dealer in Los Santos. Oh, he redistributed some wealth. He also ended up owning a flying motorbike for the purposes of doing crimes. He became quite the celebrity in my household. Good job the Daily Mail never found out about what he was up to.

As games become more sophisticated, so does the range of options available when you’re creating your character in the first place. Please meet Reybaud Prepuce, my FIFA 22 guy and the greatest footballer in the history of the game, here seen in his Brighton days in a career which has also taken in Sochaux, Real Madrid and Spurs, where he has won EVERY SINGLE TROPHY POSSIBLE. Why yes, yes he does wear the number 69 shirt. I am 52 years old.

But Sonic Speed Simulator made me feel old. I didn’t understand it. There was a time when I could be like this and it didn’t matter. I could crow about how I wasn’t up to speed with what younger people were saying because it came without consequences.

But that isn’t the case any more. It already feels as though my kids have their own language, half the time. And occasionally, I hear one of my verbal tics in the middle of whatever they’re talking about. Younger Child asked me why something had happened, “for some reason, presumably” this afternoon, and I smiled on the inside.

***

The kids got back this afternoon, and jumped almost straight onto the PS5, while I sat and glowered. “Did you get Supersonic, Dad?”, asked Younger Child. “Well - look, I tried. I logged into it, there was no button to “get” him. He wasn’t in the shop and I couldn’t figure out how to work your inventory. And anyway, isn’t that red, metal guy pretty cool, I mean he…”

“Found him, thanks Dad!”

Another small victory, even if I didn’t know what I was doing, or how we arrived at the outcome that we did.