My kid left for Aikido camp this week. Seven days of no noise, no YouTube shorts blaring at 2x speed, no controllers and laptops thrown casually on the coffee table. I thought I’d earned a break. Then came The Ask.

“I’m gonna be out for the week and can’t take my VR headset with me. Can you keep my streak alive in Yeeps please?”

Now, if you’re over 35, that sentence sounds like a collection of nonsense words, possibly from a ransom note. But “Yeep” is a VR game - full name Yeeps Hide and Seek, which sounds harmless enough until you find yourself virtually crawling on your hands in a plastic helmet while your real body collides with the coffee table.

I thought, “How hard can it be?” I mean, I’ve been gaming since the days of floppy disks and dial-up modems. I’ve seen the evolution from pixelated sprites to hyper-realistic graphics. I’ve played everything from Pong to the latest AAA titles. How different could a VR game be?

Well, let me tell you, it’s like asking a caveman to operate a smartphone.

Let’s break it down for the unitiated (I freaking love it when I have to start with the glossary just for my readers to be on the same page). Yeeps Hide and Seek is a VR game where you play as a cartoonish avatar in a digital playground. The goal? I have no fucking idea, I just know you need to collect buttcoins, virtual in-game currency that lets you do additional stuff I don’t understand.

A steak is a streak, which is a measure of how long you’ve been continuously logging in on a daily basis. This was familiar to me as I’ve been doing the same thing in 9Gag for years.

Bottom line is that the kid needed me to log in daily while he’s gone and press a button on an in-game computer to claim some coins. That’s all. Just keep the streak going. Easy, right? Like I’m the Desmond of this ridiculous digital hatch, pressing a button on schedule so the virtual world doesn’t implode - or, worse, so he doesn’t lose his leaderboard status. I half expected ominous beeping to start if I took too long.

What I missed though is that in this game, walking means using your hands. Like some kind of deranged toddler centaur, you slap the ground in VR to move. This is not something you learn overnight. It’s not intuitive, it’s just heavily exercised muscle memory and dexterity, two things that I simply do not have in this realm. The game is designed for kids who have grown up with VR and AR, so it’s like trying to teach a toddler how to use a rotary phone.

You don’t use a D-Pad to move around. You don’t press a button. You walk on your hands. That’s right. You move around by slamming your virtual palms against the floor. I’m 42. My wrists have seen some things: typing, wrenching cables out of switch racks, lifting toddlers, fixing IKEA disasters. What they haven’t trained for is virtual hand parkour just to move ten feet in a digital playground filled with cartoon avatars screaming memes, all in my personal space ALL THE TIME. And me wearing a silly plastic toaster with speakers and pancake lens on my head.

And then there’s the rest of the game. Yeeps isn’t just a hide-and-seek simulator. It’s an ecosystem. You interact with other players in what can only be described as a highly evolved meme jungle. The players? Kids. Pre-teens and teenagers. Gen Alphas. They don’t talk the way we do, nor do they have our concept of personal space. They speak a dialect that’s been hyper-optimized for irony, reaction speed, and phrases that I can’t simply comprehend.

As I was just getting into the lobby, someone in the crowd gathering around me yelled “this is lowkey sigma, bro.” I wasn’t sure if I was being insulted or knighted.

Another shouted “Skibidi!” like it was a call to arms. What does that mean? Is it a greeting? A threat? A brand of deodorant?

I wasn’t even trying to understand. I just needed to reach the in-game computer and push the streak button. But you can’t just do things in Yeeps without prior practice - you need to exist in a way that makes sense to these advanced digital citizens. They zip around the map like caffeinated monkeys, casually navigating 3D space with the confidence of someone who grew up doing this. Because they did.

I used to be good at this stuff. I wrote complex code in Assembler back in the day when the only alternative to that was to go outside and play with a half-deflated ball or roam into construction sites. I used to root my Android and flash third party firmware on it just for fun. We enjoyed countless hours of Nyan Cat and Badger, Badger and all sorts of brainrot too. Now I’m trying to figure out how to open a menu in VR while a 9-year-old in a wizard costume does backflips over my head shouting “rizzless NPC.”

And you know what? I don’t blame them. These kids aren’t broken. They’re not “addicted” or “weird” or “on their phones too much.” They’re just not us. They’re born into this strange, post-literate internet. They learn physics through VR games and social skills through Discord. They don’t read manuals - they are the manual.

I don’t resent them. I envy them.

Because once, not that long ago, I got the references. I could meme fluently. I was early to platforms, fast to pick up trends, smugly in the know. Now? I’m the guy who has to ask his son how to craft a barrel in Minecraft. And if you haven’t felt that particular sting of obsolescence, just wait. It’s coming for all of us.

So here I am. Logging in every day. Virtually crab-walking my way to the coin terminal like some janitor from a forgotten timeline. Not because I want to play. But because my kid asked me to help.

And honestly? That still feels like a win.