Stand aside Miyamoto. Move Along Kojima. Bow down Levine. There is a new game designer in town, one that is shaping the future of games in the most unique way, one that none of you envisaged. That designer? Why, none other than my very own daughter, baby Danarkage (names have been changed, I am not a monster!).
At four years old my daughter is really coming into her own, she is smart, surprisingly articulate and lots and lots of fun. Tiring is another thing she is, but I cannot deny it is an absolute blast to watch her grow. In the last few months, mainly since starting school, she has started to say the following when she wants to play: “Now we are gonna play a game…” I smile each time because I know what's coming.
For example, it was followed the other day by “It’s called Mummy’s, Daddy’s, Brothers, Sisters and schools.” She doesn’t do names. This game made the kitchen the school, me the Daddy AND the teacher, a name change for the little one, two dolls, show and tell and the living room our house. I was not allowed to open the kitchen door until it was time to open the school. A time I kept getting wrong, which resulted in a swift “No Daddy it’s not time yet!” and the door being shut on me. The rules were more complex than I first thought.
It’s a lot like those hokey video games you get from itch.io. There are some standard rules for games design in all its forms, but that doesn’t mean you have to follow them, you could just try to redefine. I chose to believe that's what my daughter is doing, taking standard game design ideas and deciding she can do better. To be fair, at four, this might be me overthinking it. Shut up.
I played a game called ‘vets’ the other day. For three hours. We both swapped between being the person with the pets and the vet and had to make up illnesses for the pets. Except when swapping, we weren’t allowed to make up new illnesses, oh no, we had to use the same ones as the previous go. I had to battle with her to allow us to make up new ones, and surprisingly my ideas of “This is Roxy the dog and she has green poop”, while getting a hearty laugh, were not the weirdest ideas to appear.
That particular accolade goes to the ‘sleep walking the baby’ thorn that had been stuck in a couple of dogs legs. Second place goes to the ‘only eats lettuce’ thorn. Not gonna lie, kinda wish the daughter had that one for real. She doesn’t do vegetables.
Maybe ‘Vets’ is an exercise in the circular nature of life, how things go round and round in an infinite circle, the snake eating its own tail. Or maybe it is the machinations of a nubile new mind just trying to find out how the world works. There is a part of me that wants to believe, somewhat naively and with massive bias, that the first one is true. That my daughter is some kind of genius, a game design savant. The rest says she is bloody four you idiot.
The rules of these games are fluid, changing over time and make sense to one person and one person only: her. If a new one comes to her, it is incorporated into the game there and then. It’s like a compressed version of a video introducing new rules and mechanics over the course of the first few hours, steadily giving you the tools to beat the game. The twist here though is that you can’t actually beat the game, there is no end state, you play and it evolves to the point where its creator is bored and moves on.
It’s a bit like those old comedy shows that had the eccentric artist that is all over exaggerated arm movements, crazy voices and nonsense words, who then just leaves for no reason. It leaves you confused as to what just happened, desperately trying to piece together sense out of something you can’t possibly understand because years of ‘the rules’ have stymied you into what you think a game should be.
Obstacle courses are her domain too, changed almost beyond recognition. These involve blu-tack stuck around the room and running round as fast as possible collecting them all, or running around flowers in the garden. What's the point? Well, there isn’t one, and maybe that is the point. Maybe it's a reflection on just how futile the effort put into more complex courses really is, and how people don’t actually get anything out of things like tough mudder other than bragging rights. Or maybe, she just doesn’t understand what an obstacle course actually is.
I plan to encourage this, let her come up with as many games and courses as possible and eventually I am going to start asking her questions, teaching her those basic rules but letting her play with them. She might give up on it, then again she might grow up to find that game design is her calling and something she loves. I hope the second is the case, and I can live my designer fantasy vicariously through her, though realistically she is just gonna give up on it.
Either way, so long as she is happy, then so am I.