Do you remember toys?

Remember how as a little kid, the only thing you needed to have fun were little blocks? What did you do with them? Stack em on top of each other? Stick em into boxes or other things?

I really liked building castles out of blocks and I would make it my mission to use every single piece to create the coolest looking castle possible. Of course, there were instructions to build a castle on the box, but I didn’t care. I did that once maybe.

I also liked stuffed animals. Wait, let me correct myself, I liked stuffed bears. The earliest one I remember having was a white one, which I named What. There was a smaller pink one which I named Who. You can probably guess where I got that idea from.

What happened next? I got into action figures. I had so many ninja turtle action figures. I was so into them. I would draw them whenever I got the chance. I failed horribly of course, but I didn’t know that at the time. It just felt good trying my best.

What happened next? Super Nintendo. Actually, I liked genesis better at the time, because of sonic. I thought sonic was waaay better than mario. However, my brother got a super nintendo, and street fighter, and he would own me every chance he got. And that’s how I grew into a very bitter man. Just kidding…partially.

Somewhere along the line, I was given a laptop. It had “high 64k ram”. I don’t think I could do anything on it besides qbasic, so that’s what I did. I would be all “Hey check out what I made!” and my friends would be all “cool”. You know, the kind of cool you just say out of reflex without meaning it. But I didn’t care at all, because I could make my own games!

You ever go to any flash game development forums these days? No? Probably not, but if you go to one, you will see a lot of people asking how to make an RPG, and everyone will always say to make pong first. Flash back to when I was just starting out programming. What did I want to make? An RPG. And no, I did not start with pong at all. Pong wasn’t even in my mind at all at the time. I went straight into RPG mode and started programming the battle system, which I successfully completed and then said, “Screw RPGs! This battle system is awesome!” I then proceeded to create even better versions of it and on and on until I got to the point where I would make an overworld screen that would transition into the battle screen. While I managed to make an overworld, I didn’t manage to get to the random battle part. And this was all self taught using just the help file. My brother once taught me how to find pi using qbasic. I don’t even remember how to find pi now, but I still remember how to make tilebased worlds and battle systems because that was what I wanted to do.

At this point, my world of fun split in two, and on one side were toys, and on the other side were games. Toys and games, is the difference? To me, the difference is that games are fun presented to you, where as toys are fun you make for yourself. A rock is a rock, until you find something fun to do with it, then it becomes a toy, unless the fun involves other people and trajectory leading to them, then it becomes a weapon.

Anyway, a lot of people lose interest in toys when they transition into more mature phases. This happens so much that we’ve basically accepted that toys are for kids, and even I accepted this until just recently. I’m trying to become an independent developer in the most suicidal way possible, so it’s highly important for me to understand fun in every possible way, and here I am going back to basics. Why do adults no longer find toys fun? Is it because they’ve figured it out? Found everything there is to do with them? Throwing rocks at people may be fun, but once you figure out that they’re either going to get hurt, or get angry, or die, then that’s it, the fun’s over. You’re always going to get the same results doing the same things, so what’s the point anymore? It may be fun seeing the same endings a few times, but it will get old quickly.

I think not having fun is something you learn rather than something that naturally occurs. Why? Because let’s look at what adults find fun. Bowling? Billiards? Poker? These are still simple games, yet they’re fun. Why? I don’t know. Maybe it’s just more socially acceptable for adults to find those things fun rather than action figures. There are still adults out there that find action figures fun. It’s not like those kinds of people don’t exist, it’s just a question of why there are so few of them.

Well, let’s get introspective. I don’t find action figures fun anymore. Why? Because the kind of entertainment I got from them can now be found in computer games. I used to throw my ninja turtles around and make them fight and whatever, but now you can get that same action on the computer with as many characters as want, and you don’t have to clean up afterwards. If fun was put into a needle and directly injected into your veins, this would be it. Yet, there’s something missing with getting fun this way. One is that it’s less physical, which makes it more predictable, and thus less mentally challenging. It’s more about the fun than about yourself and how you interact with it.

Just recently, I made this touhou toy. Yes, I call it a toy. Why? Because there is no overall objective, unless you count collecting all the achievements. A lot of people do, so they consider it a game, and thus they get frustrated if they can’t get a certain achievement. For me? I don’t get frustrated at all interacting with this toy. I myself haven’t gotten all the achievements yet, because the achievements are just extra for me. Now, I don’t spend hours at a time just flinging the rock around, but whenever it’s there loaded on the page, I can’t help just taking the rock and flinging it at least once. This is a toy. I interact with it, because it’s fun. It forces no goals upon you. There is no end game. It’s just you doing the same things with it over and over again. Maybe eventually I’ll get bored of it and stop doing it, but that doesn’t change the fact that it’s fun.

Never forget that all the toys and stuff you find boring now are fun. This train of thought has reached it’s destination.