Play

Play is an intangible and crucial part of human development. Having recently read Chris Crawford’s On Game Design I have latched onto his preferred definition of “play” – “A voluntary activity or occupation executed within certain fixed limits of time and place, according to rules freely accepted but absolutely binding, having its aim in itself and accompanied by a feeling of tension, joy, and the consciousness that it is ‘different’ from ‘ordinary life.’” According to this book, play is metaphorical, play needs to be safe, and play need not be exotic.

I played Disney Infinity on my own after we played it in class. I thought that the possibility for construction, destruction, racing, fighting, narrative, and goal-achieving was a really interesting approach. It made the videogame in an exercise of non-prescriptivist play. It allowed for multiplicity and variety. But mostly, I found it difficult to wield, and I do not know if that is an indication of my personal naïveté with videogames or an indication of less-than-ideal game design. I found the “endless possibilities” of the ToyBox feature very exciting, but ultimately a bit misleading. It was fun and funny to be able to mix and match so many specific pieces of the Disney world, but there was not very much of a difference between riding a racecar and riding a hover board and riding an elephant, for instance. I wanted to do things that the game actually didn’t allow. I wanted to be able to chop up the set with an axe, to paint things, to tie things together. I wanted more chaos, but the game would not allow me to stretch it very far beyond giving me a lot of options within the same few functions. Disney Infinity seemed to promise much more than it could deliver. I could not quite figure out the advantage of playing this videogame over playing with toys and friends, a profoundly intertextual space without any limitations at all.

The most significant conclusion I drew from our discussions of and experiences with play and playing is that the best kinds of game and the best kinds of media are sincerely interested in how children think and function, and then act accordingly. When adults’ formal and aesthetic decisions for designing children’s things make assumptions that children have less sophisticated taste than them, I think the piece itself sufferings inherently. This goes for game mechanics and structures. Challenge and rules are important; a game of Operation with “Bigger holes! Easier to grab pieces!” is making negative assumptions about children’s attention spans and perseverance.

Media that allows for childlike inclinations and their non-adult characteristics is obviously very important. But there is a balance that needs to be struck.