Who’s Your (Bad) Daddy?: Or, The Problem with Representations of Incompetent Fatherhood

Alisha and Ashley brought a game called Who’s Your Daddy to my attention this week. According to Patricia Hernandez at Kotaku, “Who’s Your Daddy is an early access multiplayer game. One person plays as the dad, and another person can play as the baby. The baby has but one goal: to kill itself, using whatever means possible. The parent, meanwhile, has to childproof an entire home in real time.” Brittany Vincent over at Motherboard explains a bit further how the game works:

As the father, players will have to close cabinets, install baby-proof electrical outlet covers, put away toys, remove access to spaces the baby can fall into, and perform dozens of other tasks to ensure there are no household dangers the baby can kill himself with in order to “win.” Baby players, meanwhile can toddle around the house, play with forks around power outlets, climb into bathtubs full of running water, and eat batteries like candy.

Dianne Depra of Tech Times explains how such a game came about: “Created by Joe Williams, the game actually started out as a joke. But as Williams worked on it, he saw the potential in the project and went on KickStarter to fund the development of the game, as well as validate if people would be interested in playing it. And they are!”

Indeed, people do seem to be playing it, and they’re talking about playing it as well, and, as a result, I’ve been really interested in what’s being said. The Steam reviews, thus far, seem to be mostly positive, as Hernandez discusses, and Hernandez, too, says that the results of Who’s Your Daddy‘s gameplay “are amazing.” Vincent also speaks positively of the game, referring to it as “a crash-course in child rearing with a suicidal, self-destructive infant son hell bent on climbing into an oven or being electrocuted. It’s black comedy at its finest.” And Vincent continues, “The game may sound gruesome, but the hilariously rendered infant model that toddles with its arms sticking straight out and a generic father model lend a ridiculous tone to the game that prevents you from taking it seriously.”

At the risk of sounding like a big ol’ fuddy-duddy, I think there are parts of the game we should take seriously. And one of those parts is the fact that game’s framing is predicated on the normalization of certain narratives about parenting—and, specifically, fatherhood. Because it seems to me that such narratives and such assumptions are a big part of what causes people to view this game as inherently funny. And those assumptions are what give me pause.

What it comes down to, for me, is the fact that the game hinges on the recurrent trope of the bumbling, incompetent, buffoonish, clueless father and the idea that fathers are just not great at parenting. That it doesn’t come naturally to them. Or, at least, that it doesn’t come as naturally to them as it does to mothers. That moms are mainly responsible for caretaking, for the day-to-day responsibilities of caring for a child. And that dads, well, dads do the best they can until mom gets back. Because the game does frame the idea of fatherhood in this way through the fact that, when playing through the game as the father, we are instructed, “Watch your son! Mom should be home by 4.” Mom should be home by 4. Through such a statement, Who’s Your Daddy tells us that we only need to father the child until Mom gets home, that we just need to hold out until four o’clock, and then, once she gets home, it’s up to her to ensure that the baby doesn’t eat batteries or stick a fork in a power outlet. Once she’s home, she’s the default death-diverter. Once she’s home, it’s time for her to take the job of parenting off Dad’s hands.

Vincent’s praise of the game demonstrates this assumption, for, she says, “Babysitting is a hard job because babies are irresponsible. They’ll drink whatever’s under the sink and stick forks in power outlets. It’s not that they don’t want to live, they just don’t understand how life works, and that’s part of why taking care of a newborn is so hard…Who’s Your Daddy turns this struggle into a hilarious multiplayer match.” But the struggle represented in Who’s Your Daddy isn’t babysitting. It’s fathering. And fatherhood and babysitting are not the same thing. Fatherhood is not just a temporary state of being in which one resides only when mom’s not around.

But this assumption, this manner of equating the struggles of babysitting to the struggles of fatherhood, seems to be a big part of what contributes to people’s conception of the Who’s Your Daddy as funny. Because the trope of the goofy incompetent father is a pervasive one. And it’s one we are consistently presented with as being something at which to laugh. But what if, instead of an incompetent father, we were presented with an incompetent mother? What if, instead of Who’s Your Daddy, we got Who’s Your Mommy? Would we be laughing then? Would we be laughing at the image of a mother racing around the house, trying to prevent her baby from drinking bleach?

I don’t think we would. Because, while bad fatherhood is often constructed as being funny, bad motherhood is often constructed, rather, as being monstrous. Because, while we see bad dads in games like Who’s Your Daddy, we see bad moms in games like Among the Sleep. Because, while we laugh at bumbling fathers, we condemn monstrous mothers.

So, yeah, I’m not laughing. And, sure, maybe that makes me a fuddy-duddy. But if what makes me a fuddy-duddy is critically engaging with our assumptions regarding parenting roles, then I’m cool with that. Because I think it’s important for us to think about the ways certain representations of and assumptions regarding (bad) motherhood and fatherhood become naturalized through what we find funny and what we find horrifying. And I of course understand that finding the humor in the often-stressful situation of parenting can be fun and cathartic, but I wonder, at the same time, if only certain people are allowed such catharsis, if only certain people are allowed to laugh, if only certain people are allowed to be laughed at, if only certain people are allowed to represent all this as being fun. And it’s that reification of normative and socially acceptable parenting roles that keeps me from seeing the humor.