Imagine the scene – you and your girlfriend are visiting her heavily MAGA family. You have just avoided speaking about politics at the dinner table like the politically passive little goose that you are, and you both sneak off to a room in their house that conveniently has every game console in history within it.
But oh no – the room has already been occupied by her large Dad! He still looks mad from breakfast time when he called Taylor Swift, the world’s first empath billionaire,“a friggin commie” and your girlfriend threw an egg at him. You can tell the argument is about to occur again. Quick, you need to find a game that can make them both forget their differences and instead give you a big wet kiss on the lips! Here’s 5 games that can do that!
Microsoft Flight Simulator
Planes – they have the power to bring families together (as long as it’s not a family of polar bears). Dads go crazy for this kind of simulator, so give your potential father in law the controls and watch a man who could tear you in half realize a childhood dream. The genius of this plan? He will almost certainly get bored and land the plane after 15 minutes of flying, thrilling your girlfriend as it will be like she just lived the life of Taylor Swift.
Madden NFL 24
The one common ground shared by Republicans and Taylor Swift is a love of watching Football. That, and buying overpriced merchandise in support of a blonde messiah figure. And the genre of country music. And, in probably millions of cases, Taylor Swift. And –
The point is that there is an actual common interest that all of you could bond over! Just don’t pick the Kansas City Chiefs, or else you’ll kickstart the argument you’re so desperately trying to prevent.
Band Hero
Taylor Swift was seemingly in every single music video game between 2008-2009, but afterwards did not appear in a single game until 2022. Band Hero is probably the best game featuring Swift, with 3 of her songs within a collection of Certified Dad Classics. If you only use the “random song” function you can keep telling your girlfriend “maybe the next one will be Taylor Swift”, all while knowing there’s only a 4% chance of this happening and activating her Dad’s “Secret Elite Pyramid Conspiracy“ mode.
Knack 2
As father and daughter squeeze uncomfortably up on either side of you on the rooms sole bean bag chair, you begin to wonder how different the last big winner of American consumerism and the last big winner of America’s flawed democracy are, or if, at a time where humanity has a maximum of a few years to completely overhaul most of society’s structures and prevent billions from living a lifetime of famine and droughts, the history books will be able to easily distinguish between those who use their massive influence to rot society and those who use it to hardly change it at all beyond stamping their own name all over it.
Knack 2 is the second game about “Knack” in the “Knack” franchise, and everyone will be too busy questioning what a “Knack” actually is to think about any other existential questions!
Portal 2
You may be thinking “hold on, this is famously a two player game and there’s three of us, how will this work?” Well it’s simple – sit back and let your girlfriend and her dad play. By the 6th level of increasingly difficult puzzles their arguments will have gone way beyond political grievances and into airing the shared traumas that led them to have their different views on society. You can take over playing from whoever storms out first!
