We Need More Sandboxes

I’ve discovered something in the past few days while watching my children playing the DS. It came about based on a couple different times I observed them playing and I find it fascinating. The first came when they were playing Scribblenauts. The game, if you don’t know, is about solving puzzles using just about anything you can imagine. An example I saw was this. Early in the game you have a puzzle where a cat is stuck in a tree and you are supposed to get the cat down. My daughter thought very logically to get a ladder and climb up to the cat and get him down. My 6 year old son said make an eagle fly at the cat and scare him out of the tree. Both are great solutions to the game and also completely different.

The second came later that same day when their video game allowance for the day had been used. My two youngest instead asked if they could Pictochat with each other, a very common occurrence in the house actually. They’ll sit in different rooms and talk to each other or one will draw a picture that the other will change in some way or they’ll play Tic-Tac-Toe. My oldest daughter and I sat around and played Tic-Tac-Toe with each other for a half hour last night and it was just a lot of fun.

The comparison between the two is this. Gamers, especially children, don’t always need structured game play with flowing narratives. They can just as easily be amused by a sandbox or a blank screen where they can create whatever they want. I think this is something that more game developers should look at when they’re creating games, especially children’s games. You can take a simple concept like a puzzle and give them no guidance whatsoever aside from saying you have to do this to make an item appear. From there with that one instruction you can make anything you want happen.

There’s nothing stopping someone from having an experience where they sit on the title screen of Scribblenauts and recreate the nativity by adding a few objects and creating a story based on that. Why not bring in the characters from the Wizard of Oz and just see what happens? What happens when you put a dog, a cat, a mouse and a tiger on the screen separated by walls and remove those barriers? Well it’s an all out battle for survival that’s what. It just shows that sometimes simpler is better.

I think you’re starting to see that more and more often. You’re getting these games or applications that allow you to do whatever you want. The DS is becoming more and more than platform of choice as well. You have games like Scribblenauts, Pictochat function, or Flipnote Studios. People are taking these things and spending hours just having fun. They’re not following complex storylines with hours of sometimes repetitive gameplay. They’re not scouring huge levels to find 6 million gems that are hidden in obscure places. Those elements have their place. Let gamers, especially kids have free reign to do almost whatever they want. They’ll probably like your game more and you’ll sell more and more units of that software.