Toddler gaming part 2—commercial games for the very young
A wave of toys washes across the floors of several rooms in our house when, at high toy-tide, our daughter diligently unpacks the chests and shelves filled with her favorite things. At first glance, these waves may seem chaotic, but look closer. S— has arranged her “people” (mostly Fischer-Price Little People, with a couple of Weebles and her beloved Purple Man DDR figure mixed in) in a graceful fractal arcing from one corner of the coffee table to another. Each is facing the same way, and they’re all “watching” a pile of toy birds “sleeping” on the sofa in a pile that alternates bird and blanket, a sort of impromptu toy napoleon.
On the other side of the room, I pick up a discarded toy cow—or maybe it’s not discarded. “No!” wails my toddler, “It’s talking to the otter!” I look down. Sure enough, the cow was positioned face-to-face with a toy otter. I was unwise to interrupt their conversation.
When S— goes to sleep, the toy-tide recedes. Plastic teacups go back on shelves in the toy kitchen, stuffed animals assemble in the toy chest, and the sofa transforms once again into a place to sit rather than a stage.
Among all these toys, though, there aren’t any that qualify as “games.” Oh, she plays games of pretend with them, and as I posted in the first part of this series, I hope this will lead to a lifetime love of roleplaying games. But she doesn’t have any games proper.
For the most part, manufacturers don’t make too many games for toddlers. Crazed parents will hand over thousands of hard-earned dollars for toys stamped “educational” on their packaging, but the littlest kids just don’t play games. Only after about a year of life to do they even have enough perception, language, and motor skills to start imitating what they see their parents and friends do for fun.
But on one rainy day on my recent vacation, I got to see four kids aged two to four (my daughter on the young end) playing actual, commercial games. These games are actually targeted at older kids, and in fact not one was played strictly according to the Rules. But then, what game ever is?
The three games they played were:
The fishing game—purchased by the parents of one kid because the nearby pond permitted fishing, so they thought they’d bring the fun indoors—proved thoroghly entertaining. On, only one kid (the youngest) had anything approaching the motor skills to actually catch a fish by the official method, but all of them (even the skilled one) had a grand time carefully inserting the hook into the mouths of fish as they passed. Or simply grabbing a fish of an appealing color. In the end, though, they treated the game more as a toy which had a skill element than a real game.
The homemade fishing game that I brought over—which my wife made from wooden dowels, rare earth magnets, string, paper, and paperclips—proved much more popular. Sure, we had only two rods, and the “fish” were pictures and bits of greeting cards. But the fun of fishing for a picture of my daughter or a reindeer with a magnet dangling from a string was something the girls were better able to do, was more relaxing, and was much more rewarding (”I got a horse!” “I got S—!”)
They treated the Peanut Butter & Jelly card game as a toy instead of a game, too. Instead of trying to build a particular sandwich, the kids just shouted out when one dad would call, “Who wants peanut butter?” or “Who wants bacon?” The littlest kid wanted them all, of course, but in the end the girls assembled some remarkable sandwiches. My daughter decided to treat her sandwich (meticulously free of meat products, coincidentally; maybe she’s picked up on our family’s vegetarianism without understanding it) as a toy and pretended to eat it for several minutes after the other girls put theirs away.
Zingo! came the closest to being played as a game. Basically “bingo with pictures,” the game drops two sturdy tiles with images that may match the squares on each kids cards. The girls each took one card for themselves and one for their dolls, and they happily laid matching tiles on pictures as they showed up. The precocious youngest girl quickly memorized both sides of her cards (the green side apparently leads to less “competition,” but both sides have images), and we laughed as she flipped each card over whenever a chip with a picture she remembered on the other side came up, dumping any that she’d placed on the front.
None of the girls played to win. None of them felt the slightest bit of competitiveness (which,
really, is a fine thing; toddler competitiveness can get ugly fast and is expressed mostly through
whining). But they did sort of play to fill their cards.
The youngest recommended age for these three games is four, and the girls definitely weren’t ready to play them as proper games. But as a gamer myself, and a doting father, I had a grand time watching them experiment with the beginnings of gaming.
After the last sandwich card and Zingo! tile was put away, they reverted to their favorite kind of game: roleplaying games. The oldest decided she was a teacher, and the other three—and their dolls—happily assembled as pupils and did what she told them. Or did something else. No one really minded, as everyone was having fun.
3 comments September 7th, 2007
