![]() I registered for one, went once, and withdrew, just as I’d tried working on Wall Street one summer to placate my parents, then decided never to do that again. I majored in English, but he never stopped suggesting that I take an accounting course. I obsessed over baseball, and he paid attention to golf sometimes we would dutifully follow each other’s sports so we would have something to talk about, or meet in the middle and watch tennis. I watched shows he hadn’t heard of, and he watched the news and the stock market. ![]() “Anything good?” he’d ask when he’d see me buried in a book, and I’d reluctantly turn the cover toward him, feeling frivolous and knowing he’d inwardly wonder why I was wasting my time. I read sci-fi and Stephen King he read business books, biographies, and Holocaust histories. I liked the cold, and he liked the sauna. He was much older than my friends’ fathers, and when we went out, strangers assumed I was his grandson, which irrationally made me feel further removed from him. Given our age gap, there weren’t many interests we shared. God of War didn’t make me think of my dad because we’d ever played games together. When Atreus was younger, we learn, Kratos was rarely around. The Spartan’s son, Atreus, is down to one parent, and not the one he would have chosen to survive. ![]() In the new God of War game, the player’s comparatively quiet first task is to build a funeral pyre for Kratos’s just-deceased second wife, Faye, who has died, evidently, of non-Kratos causes. God of War III began with one of the set pieces that the series is famous for: an assault on Olympus, featuring Kratos climbing a Titan and dispatching skeletal soldiers as a combo counter climbs and laudatory text-“BLOODTHIRSTY!” “VICIOUS!” “SADISTIC!”-flashes on the side of the screen. Talk about baggage from a previous relationship. (He didn’t intend to, but still.) But by the time the God of War released this month begins, Kratos, whose goatee has grown into a gray-flecked beard, has relocated, remarried, and fathered a son, an impressive fresh start considering that his cursed skin is still coated with the ashes of his murdered former family. In fact, he’d killed Calliope, his daughter, along with his wife. (For one thing, my dad never would have worn that goatee.) In God of War’s original trilogy, Kratos was a father, but he wasn’t much of a father figure. Kratos, a tattooed, 6-foot-6 killing machine motivated mostly by vengeance, had never before reminded me much of my dad. Even, apparently, places like an action-adventure game starring a reimagined Kratos, who’s no longer the same Spartan demigod who slashed and slaughtered his way through six previous PlayStation titles. But after you lose someone, you start seeing them in places you never expect. I wanted to turn off the brain region that masochistically returns to a tender subject, the way one’s tongue keeps compulsively feeling for the unfamiliar gum exposed to its tip when a tooth falls out. The franchise’s focus on kinetic combat dependably induced flow, a state of mental immersion that the magazine Byte once called the “TV trance.” Flow would make me unfeeling, an appealing alternative to sadness. In the God of War franchise, death and loss were little more than excuses to mash more buttons, doing damage to every obstacle that stood in the way of whatever predictable reckoning would come in the closing cutscene. ![]() Despite Kratos’s fraught father-son situation, though, the old games were never known for their emotional depth. Given that 2010’s trilogy-concluding God of War III had ended with its iconic main character, Kratos, beating his own dad to death, I probably should have known better than to expect to get through the franchise reboot without thinking about anything but triggering the next checkpoint. Mercifully, The O.C.’s only dog, Dustin, disappeared without a woof after the first few episodes, never to return, which left nothing to remind me of my own dog during each 44-minute reprieve from the pangs. In the disbelief phase that had followed the late-night, crying call from my mother, who had delivered the unexpected news, I’d looked forward to getting the game and mindlessly mashing buttons, submerging myself in the screen as I had a few years ago when I’d watched all of The O.C. A week after my dad died, I got God of War. ![]()
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