Portal 2 is Valve's charming addition to their acclaimed Portal series. In it, you play as a robot who solves a variety of puzzles by creating portals that you shoot out of your arm. Portal 2's largest leap forward when compared to its predecessor is the game's inclusion of a multiplayer mode.

In multiplayer, you and a friend play as the charmingly curious and awkward robots Atlas (a blue mech with a globe-shaped head and squat limbs) and P-Body (a yellow mech with an egg-shaped head and lanky limbs). You start out in a training area. An automated voice feeds you directions as you get to know your new portal powers - make sure to have your volume on, as the early voice prompts are important cues for not getting bogged down.

When I played Portal 2 multiplayer for the first time, I didn't have my volume on. I was on a phone call with my dad. We were trying to play together and the game was crashing. Once, twice. If there was a third time, I would have bagged it and gone back to Hollow Knight, but the third time was - in fact - the charm, and we were able to drop into our pods and eventually make it to the training area after I spent a few minutes searching Reddit to instruct my dad how to emote.

He was P-Body. I'm not sure how my rendition of Atlas looked since the game is in first-person, but Portal 2's masterful grasp of comedy shone through within our first seconds in its lanky yellow robot's gate. Whenever my dad would move around the screen, it looked like a futuristic Tim Burton character was for some reason tip-toeing his way over a maze of molten marbles. P-Body's walk brought a smile to my face. So did helping my dad play a video game.

My dad is the most tech-savvy person in our family. With a masters in computer science from Johns Hopkins and almost forty years working in technology, he puts his humanities loving wife and children to shame when it comes to installing, uploading, coding, research, etc. Dad grew up loving video games in the seventies and eighties. We still like to set up an old Intellivision in the basement sometimes and play his favorite games from when he was a kid. But the first-person shooter revolution in the 90s with games like Wolfenstein 3D and Doom did not appeal to him. Their gratuitous violence and motion sickness-inducing controls were enough to turn him off from the genre to this day.

To think of Portal 2 as a work that draws heavily from the precedent set by these titles is comical but true. The game's controls for first-person portal generation grew out of the precedent set by id Software and the passionate community of 90s deathmatchers, just as all modern 3D games that use a first-person viewpoint have. It's no wonder my dad had to figure out how to aim.

I, on the other hand, am a product of a modern gaming landscape where the majority of AAA titles are shooters, a trend that's only growing as cash-strapped studios look to pump out games at a furious clip. Nothing sells like violence.

We had a Playstation 3 growing up, and I played Call of Duty: Black Ops for hours. So many hours, in fact, that my parents made me set up in our living room so that they could monitor my vital signs and so that I - in their words - "wouldn't crawl into the basement and shut myself off from the world." I was so into the game that my mom at one point threatened to cry if I played any more. Needless to say my first-person shooter addiction ended that day.

For the rest of my young adult life, I looked back on my time with COD as a complete waste of time. All it did was make me feel intense, feel shame for not being as good as my friends at Team Deathmatch, experience fleeting pride for earning a new skin for a gun or gaining a rank of prestige. These were trivial and negative things that I wanted to leave as far behind my reflective, tree-hugging, writer ass as I possibly could.

But getting back into gaming nowadays makes me feel gratitude for my video game heritage. Because boy did those first-person shooters teach me how to use an analog stick. Two analog sticks at once, actually. One to move my character around and one to manipulate the camera angle. This is a skill that I took for granted, like the millions of folks in my generation who grew up with video games probably do. I took it for granted, that is, until I watched my dad try to play Return of the Obra Dinn with a bluetooth controller on my computer.

Obra Dinn is a first-person detective game. You control the camera and movement with a controller's analog sticks (but don't do any shooting). My dad spent fifteen minutes walking into walls he couldn't see before he called it a day and said he'd read my review on the game to experience it.

I hope I wrote a decent review. This moment made me sad and grateful. Sad that entire generations of gamers are at risk of feeling shut-out from their younger counterparts as gaming tech continues its feverish pace of progress. Grateful that COD - a game that I now, for the most part, detest - taught me how to play.

And that brings us back to Portal 2. My dad and I are on the phone. He's being patient with me. I realize that I'm ordering him around. I try to modulate my tone but, admittedly, still do most of the talking.

The puzzles are dazzling. Their variety, encouragement of discovery, and utilization of Portal's signature first-person portal creation mechanics make them some of the most entertaining puzzles I've ever had the honor of grappling with.

And I got to do it alongside P-Body, my father and fellow robot adventurer. My friend. And even though I'm better at first-person games than he is, he's the reason why I feel enough confidence to spend time playing or writing about video games at all in the first place. He helps me see that passion is reason enough, that aims and goals don't have to feel lofty if they can feel lived-in. That loving video games transcends controllers and the nostalgic titles that we'll always love, if only because we played them growing up. And he made Portal 2 fun.