Terraria.
Terraria swords. Terraria books. Terraria YouTubes. Terraria gaming. Multiplayer.
I can happily ignore all of this as long as it fits in the limited time box she's allotted each day, but then her eyes turned towards Mommy.
Mommy, you should really learn how to play Terraria so we can do multiplayer.
For the longest time, I presumed her approach was simply to ensure that I would become addicted and she'd get more play time. After all, it worked so well for Daddy except for the fact he's not home a lot.
I finally became convinced that she really simply wanted me involved her Terraria life, which is when I panicked.
I despise crafting, mining, and questless games. My gaming niche is strictly quest driven third person shooter. Which is odd because my favourite P&P RPG games are story driven nearly diceless experiences like White Wolfe versus the destructive insanity of Hackmaster. Anyway, there will always be a soft spot for 2D side scrolling games from my Mario childhood (who doesn't have that soft spot!), but that's about all Terraria could offer. Everything else in that game sucks for me.
Finally, I promised her that I'd let her put together a set of lessons to teach me Terraria when we were in Australia. She was ecstatic! Days of planning. Days of prepping a world for me. Days of re-planning. Tonnes of negotiations for how long we'd "practice" each day.
Today was the first day. And the last.
"I don't get this. What am I supposed to do?"
"I know you don't like crafting or mining; I'll do all of that and you kill things."
"OK"
*died*
"This game really sucks."
"MOMMY! Please be patient. [insert 15 minutes of instructions]
30 excruciating moments later, Ellie had to really come to grips with the fact that I was motivated very differently than her in gaming.
She wept.
I was hollow with sadness.
An agreement was struck that she would still give me daily lessons on how Terraria worked so that I would understand what she was referring to when she talked about her accomplishments, and that I'd keep the game on my Surface so that she could keep my character up in case my interest increased.
So the remaining 30 minutes of this horrendous hour was her putting our computers side by side to build up my character, bouncing back to her computer to have her character protect us if extra bad guys came.
I went into the bathroom and hid with a glass of wine and my Kindle.
