Not long ago I found myself stranded with family -- hanging out with my cousin's kids in Phoenix. I was reminded that day that kids love games. They don't care what kind of game. They're not snobs about developers or genres. They'll play anything because even a boring game is better than homework, getting chewed out by your parents or eating vegetables. Games are, in many cases, better than real life.
I sat down with the kids, twins (a boy and a girl aged 13), put my computer in front of them and let them guide the conversation and show me why.
Tommy wanted to see World of Warcraft, so I fired up the game and showed him Anikulapo, my priest. A character who mostly cooks nowadays. "Attack another player," Tommy instructed. "I don't do that," I said. "Oh," he said dejectedly.
To prove that I wasn't a total pacifist I flew my Shadow Priest to the dungeon Auchindoun. I poked my head through the portal and promptly attacked one of the many enemies inside. "Are you crazy?" he asked excitedly as the mobs linked up. Eventually a dozen of them bore down on me and cut me down.
After that fiasco Miranda pointed my browser towards the flash game Ice Breaker -- one of her favorites. Its an elegant puzzler with a smart Viking theme. "Now this one is really hard," Miranda warned as I sliced ice, letting stalactites fall to fill gaps in a slide. "Oh, I forgot," she said when I handily solved the puzzle. "You do this all the time." She's not kidding. After thirty years of game playing sometimes it feels like their isn't a puzzle you haven't seen.
Next, Tommy pointed my browser towards a the Cartoon Network website where he spends a ton of time playing and testing his own Clone Wars games. Tommy is "on the spectrum" and struggles with school. But he's totally engaged when it comes to crafting and playtesting these simple action games. "I made one that takes twenty minutes to beat," he bragged. "Its so hard."
I fired up Plants Vs. Zombies to see what the kids would make of my favorite casual game. "This looks too easy," Tommy scoffed as I quickly teched my plants up and demolished wave after wave of the undead. I passed the mouse over to him and he quickly changed his tune. Zombies tore through his defenses and soon ate his brains. Miranda wanted to pipe in with advice. I did too. But I reminded her how lame it is to play a game with backseat drivers.
After Tommy's first failure I gave him a pep talk and tips on build order, erecting defenses and maximizing damage. Tommy's re-play was much more successful because, on my advice, he spent more of his early game planting flowers that provided sunlight -- the primary resource in the game.
For my last test I showed Miranda the indie darling Blueberry Garden. Her eyes lit up when she saw it. "I can already tell this is my kind of game," she said. I explained that there's not a lot of hand holding in the game. You're meant to explore and figure out how things work. Miranda immediately grokked what the game was about. "Blueberry Garden is a game where you're free," she observed as she flew through the sky, looking for the next item to stack in her ever-growing tower of detritus.
Its easy to forget what its like to be a kid and having so little control over your life. Miranda and Tommy helped remind me one of the basic, primal appeals of videogames -- they let you call the shots. The feeling may be false, a contrivance, but who cares? During those moments that you're deciding which dungeon to crawl, which flower to plant or berry to grab you feel like the master of your own fate.
It was late in the evening when Tommy and Miranda's mother finally came home. The kids were curled asleep on chairs in the living room when their mother returned from the hospital. She'd been in the emergency room all day -- undergoing a battery of tests to make sure that the severe cold she was fighting wasn't interacting with any of her other pressing medical conditions. That's why we were stuck together all day. We were waiting for news.
I was glad to be there with games to offer them distraction and the momentary illusion of control.
Pretension +1 is a weekly column by Gus Mastrapa that seeks to use anecdote to explore the ways that games touch us.
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