Chad Sapieha wants his daughter to see some positive female role models in the video game universe.

Since we’re professionals at the discourse on gender, we can all agree that the representation and design of female video game characters since the industry started has been – well, unreal. Helpless princesses and schoolgirly fighters are the norm, and until recently, the only female a gal could look up to in the video game world was Metroid‘s Samus Aran (though fans may mention the weird strip-tease endings).

Sapieha notes that he didn’t give much thought to female video game characters until his daughter was born. Now that he’s having conversations about gaming with his daughter, he made a list of ten female game characters that he’s not ashamed to show his daughter.

A dad living in Charlotte, North Carolina just scored major points with both his kid and the video game community after a simple DIY project that’s sure to please any video game-loving kid.

Andy, who spent a good part of the last 10 years in the event production and signage business, took his skills (and massive printer) and made canvas prints of video game characters to put on his 11 year old son’s wall. Awesome!

Andy first shared his DIY project with Reddit, where commenters were so wowed, that some actually offered to pay for Andy to make a reprint/reframe for them. We had to get a hold of Andy and have him tell us a little more about what he did and why he did it.

It took Phil Villarreal “about 50 times” to beat Ganon in 1986′s The Legend of Zelda on the NES when he was eight years old. Phil’s five year old son, Luke, just beat him in three tries. The rest of Villareal’s story is told on Kotaku, at the link below.

It’s awesome to see fathers sharing old gaming franchises with their kids – but even better when they share the actual old games with them! Villarreal says he and his son played The Legend of Zelda on their Nintendo 3DS, and he still had to commandeer the game from his son to beat the hard parts…which is totally cool because those Wizzrobes were total buttholes in the later levels.

In the end, Villarreal had a great time with Luke, and that’s what gaming with your kid’s all about. Despite his feeling like he helped Luke out too much, Villarreal did incredibly powerful things with his kid: spent time with him, shared a hobby, made the kid feel important and powerful, and yeah, defeated Ganon.

Kotaku also kept the dad and Zelda theme going with another post yesterday…check it out.

(Thanks to Brandon Burchfiel for pointing us in the direction of this story)

Very soon, I’ll be returning home from Afghanistan, where I’ve been deployed away from my family for nearly a year. Let me tell you that I am absolutely thrilled to see my wife and kiddos, and I bet they are stoked to have me home as well.

I’m fortunate that this is only my first deployment, and also that it will likely be my last for some time. For a lot of American military families, this is not the case, and some military members with multiple deployments have been away for three, four, even FIVE years of their childrens’ lives.

The sweetest part of a military deployment is probably the homecoming, where we reunite with the people in our lives that we love most. Amidst the countdowns and preparations, a lot is built up around having the family intact again. Military parents make plans just as much as I am sure the children do. I’ve got some plans of my own that I thought I would like to share at 8BD. So here’s a list of the 5 things I can’t wait to do with my kids once I get home from Afghanistan.

You may not have ever heard of Jordan Mechner. But you’ve heard of the game he made – Prince of Persia. Back in 1989, Brøderbund published Mechner’s Prince of Persia for the Apple II. A million nerds joygasmed.

But, then the source code went missing.

Many fathers in our 8BitDad generation grew up playing video games. We were lucky enough to experience the golden age of coin-op arcades, with giant-screened Street Fighter II and NBA Jam machines. We watched arcades fall in favor of home consoles and PCs. We huddled together in rooms late night to play the Super NES and N64, Sega Genesis, Saturn and Dreamcast and the Sony PlayStation. We improvised set-ups to play serial cable-linked games of Doom II and Quake before dial-up became cable and DSL (or university T1s) and allowed us to play games over the net like Unreal Tournament and Counter-Strike. You get the picture – our generation runs deep. And if all that reminiscing didn’t bring a tear to your eye, you’re not one of us.

Somewhere along the way, we got married and had kids. But just because we’ve taken on bigger responsibilities doesn’t mean that fathers don’t still want to slap on a pair of headphones, crack open a beverage and hunker down in front of an FPS for a couple of hours. With the wives and kids safely tucked-in, and the whole night ahead of them, the [DaDs] Army became a meeting place for fathers to blow off a little steam and enjoy some mature, parents-only online gaming.

Think of it as the YMCA for dudes like us.