I recently had a thought. (I know, right?)

This thought was about very young kids who played games. Have you watched a young child play a game? To many of them, it’s not about meeting a set objective– rather, it’s about making your own objectives, learning, and exploring.

One of the very first games I played was Dig-Dug. To this day, I still have a soft spot for it. Dig-Dug, in case you haven’t played it, is a game about digging your way to monsters and blowing them up. Did I play it that way, way back when I was clutching the joystick with pudgy, much-too-small hands? I’m sure I did. But I also recall trying to clear all the dirt from the screen for no other reason than, well, wanting to clear all the dirt from the screen. It didn’t accomplish any in-game objectives, it was just something that Baby Me found fun. I was moving the character around because of the sheer joy of moving my character around.

I can think of other examples, too. We had a game called Fidgets, for example, which was some sort of proto-typing game. All of the letters were represented by a crude image of a singing bird and you had to type the correct letter to shut the bird up. If you typed the wrong letter, that letter’s bird got all scrunched up to indicate that you were incorrect. I thought the scrunched up bird was hilarious and and whiled away many, many long minutes carefully scrunching up all the birds, while driving my parents crazy with the one correct bird that continued to sing one note.

Back then, you see, I made up my own game objectives.

Kids today still do this when they play modern games. If you haven’t seen Child vs. Skyrim, you probably should:

This girl is gleefully exploring, making up her own objectives, going through with them, and then, well… learning that perhaps her objectives aren’t the best way to go about things.

There is a certain nostalgia for this simplicity and I think that’s where the much-bandied about idea of “nostalgia goggles” comes from. People pine for Vanilla WoW because they were exploring and learning about a new world before they “grew up” and got their big adult raiding job. Perhaps people pine for the games of their childhood for similar reasons.

Some game devs are trying to latch on to this and design new games with no rules, but I sort of think that what the particular game is doesn’t matter as much as what the game does for you: my Dig-Dug is the little girl’s Skyrim.

Playing a game vs. playing inside the game… an interesting idea, don’t you think?

Alright, I’ve rambled on about this for much too long. Here, have a Fluttersquid: