Adam Greenbrier said:
Rated E for Everywhere
The worlds created in children's games are as rich as those in adult games, but adult players don't always see that richness.
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I think the principal mistake they are making is calling these "games intended for children." The "E for Everyone" is an attempt to fix that, but they just can't seem to get past the notion of it being a "kid game."
In Western culture, anything that requires or speaks to imagination is for kids. Imagination itself is treated as a childish luxury. Adults have forgotten how to imagine, and thus have forgotten that it is
not a luxury, but an
essential life skill. It's like chopping off your fingers because they don't
seem as useful as the thumb...
Take some random stranger as an example. Let's say this guy is successful at his job, he pays his bills on time, he loves his wife and kids and spends good quality time with them, and is a fine upstanding member of his community...
...and in the evenings, to relax, he plays with action figures. Oh, now he's a weirdo! There's something wrong with him! He's doing something that requires imagination (and is thus "for kids"), so we look at him slantwise.
Even I do it. Like right now, I feel a compelling need to qualify this statement by saying I do not play with action figures at 28 years old. Because I do not want people to be under the impression that I'm "that guy." I feel it, too, even though I can't pinpoint anything in particular that is wrong with "that guy." We shun imaginative people as childish, regardless of the evidence.
What makes a guy that goes to a sporting event wearing his favorite player's jersey and shoes, cheering the team and yelling, "WE won, WE won!" any different from the guy that goes to a Star Wars premiere dressed as a Wookiee? The usual answer--one is imitating a real person that makes real money, and the other is imitating an imaginary character. Okay, what makes sports so important? It's entertainment. A game. It serves no functional purpose in society, so it's just as frivolous as a movie. It's just that it doesn't require imagination (and you can bet money on it), so it's "grown up."
Imagination is a critical thinking skill. Without imagination, it's a lot harder to solve complex problems. How can you solve a word problem if you're not able to
imagine the situation the word problem describes? How can you develop spatial reasoning skills for geometry-heavy jobs (like carpentry) without the ability to
imagine complex three-dimensional figures and perform operations on them in your head. Yeah, it's possible, but it's a
lot slower. Lacking imagination robs you of that mental flexibility.
How can you
empathize with someone without being able to
imagine yourself in the same situation and decide how you'd feel? How can you effectively communicate with someone if you're not able to do that? Wonder why so many people are so awful at communicating or arguing in any reasonable way? That's why--they are fundamentally incapable of imagining themselves on the other side, dealing with
any abstraction.
This same logic applies to video games. For some reason, those that imitate real life in some way (and space marines are still imitations of real life, so most sci-fi games are in this boat) are considered more valid, more grown-up. Games that are more abstract and imaginative (look at
Limbo for a quick example of an imaginative game
clearly not meant for little kids) are written off as "kid games" or "casual games," or some other title that indicates they're just junk food without any real meat.
As we forget how to imagine (as a culture), we'll be less accepting of these imagination-based games. And as a result, the obedient market will make less of them, further leading us to forget. This downward spiral in an unfortunate product of a culture that forgets that the currency of the world isn't the dollar (or pound or Euro, to be fair)--it's the
idea.
Teach kids how to manipulate money, and the world becomes the machine world of the Matrix without even having to make the machines. Teach kids how to work in
ideas, and the world can improve. After all, how do you create a better world if you can't even
imagine what that better world would look like?