The Young & The Scoreless
Toddlers step out into the world of consoles
By Ryan Bradley
We enter this world a wondrous bundle, 100 billion neurons strong and bearing more synapses—those flashpoints of memory and sensation—than the adults we will become. As we grow older, get responsible, go to the supermarket, learn to drive, get a job, pay taxes, get married, and maybe even have kids of our own, we kill off these synapses. By this measure, when we are born we are more conscious of our world than we will ever be. This is why neuroscientists who study babies call their subjects “little Buddhas.”
We’re born blindingly conscious but grasping, handling more raw data than we’ll ever deal with again. Our pre-frontal lobes aren’t yet fully formed, and they’re what sorts everything around us, focusing our senses. Maturing, then, is just a way of figuring out how to block external stimuli—but our lobes aren’t finished growing and aren’t in full use until we’re 20. When we’re very young we don’t know thought, can’t connect the dots. One way to approach the mind in its early development isn’t as a singular thing, but a series of islands. In other words the brain isn’t a mind yet, it’s just a brain. But when we are born we’re more aware and learning faster than we ever will again. Researchers, comparing the brain scans of babies to adults, have found that the only grown-up experience that even approaches this awe-inspiring awareness that we feel as infants is when we watch a really, really good movie or play certain videogames. Only then is the back of our mind lit up like a child’s. Only then are we so fully immersed in a world that isn’t really real.
So, if playing a videogame is a glimpse into our own infancy, what is it like for an infant to game?
In the last 10 years we—and by “we” I mean scientists and academics—have made a fundamental shift in how we think about babies. Parents have known for a while that infants lead inner lives so mysterious that we can only guess at their complexity. But back in what psychology professor Alison Gopnik calls “the bad old days,” the assumption “that newborn babies were crying carrots, vegetables with few reflexes” was the norm. In the past 10 years, Gopnik continues, “we’ve not only discovered that children have these imaginative powers—we’ve actually begun to understand how these powers are possible. We are developing a science of the imagination.”
As psychologists, neuroscientists, philosophers, and the rest of academe were changing their approach to young kids, the kids who had grown up with videogames hit their late 20s and early 30s. Some got jobs as game designers, and some had kids of their own. Some of these designers began building games for their kids. Eric Jorgensen is one.
Jorgensen, the lead developer for Microsoft Windows AdCenter, is a father of six. Almost 15 years ago, when his two oldest sons still liked climbing onto his lap while he worked, Jorgensen created a videogame for them. “It was entertaining, that was the main goal,” he says. “Really,” he adds “it was a keyboard banger.”
The program was called Flabbergasted! and it was a drawing platform—kind of. Some pictures moved, and some of the keys launched fireworks. Punch other keys and a swarm of bees would move across the screen, hit more, and everything would melt into psychedelia. There weren’t points, goals, or any definitive end. It was, like a lot of games for the very young, fairly difficult to describe. In its colorful randomness, Flabbergasted! predicted the shape of things to come.
Keita Takahashi is holding a scarf aloft, triumphantly. “This is Boy,” he declares. Cameras flash. A quiet murmur descends. Takahashi pauses for effect. He’s introducing his latest project, Noby Noby Boy, at the Game Developers Conference, the industry’s annual prom held in San Francisco. It’s 2009 and the skinny 30-year-old developer, with his mop top and puffy, oversized jacket, looks childlike in this roomful of murmuring adults and flashing cameras. He grins, puts the scarf down, and explains.
In games, he says, there are carrots and sticks, rules and scores. Even in his last strange creation—the Katamari Damacy series—there were goals: Bigger was better and there was a time limit. “I wasn’t happy,” he says of Katamari. “It felt like a formula, and I felt betrayed.” Then Takahashi perks up. “I wanted to throw these rules off and start from scratch, start from the beginning. I wanted to find out what games should mean.”
Near the end of his presentation Takahashi gets to the heart of what he wishes to create—
a return to a child-like, exploratory mind.
A return to pure play.
Games mean play, and when we are young that’s pretty much all we concern ourselves with. It’s a strange thing, evolutionarily. Play, Melvin Konner writes, combines “great energy expenditure and risk with apparent pointlessness.” Konner is an anthropologist and neuroscientist at Emory and the author of The Evolution of Childhood, a mammoth text that compiles decades’ worth of research on the very young mind. Play is all kids do besides sleep and eat. All the hunting and gathering, all that nasty business of actually surviving, is being done for them by their worried parents (or worried village). Even though play may appear pointless, Konner believes that it is vital. When we play, we sharpen our motor skills, take risks, and try things we wouldn’t otherwise. In many ways, how we play is what makes us human.
Takahashi, too, is concerned with the roots of play. At GDC he describes watching children absorbed in their handheld games on the subway in Japan. “They aren’t really playing, just consuming,” he says. Takahashi hates to see these kids sitting there, not talking to their parents, just as he hates the word for people who buy his work: user. Games, he says, are meant to be played—what does that it say about us if we’re just using them? It says that game developers are not doing their job, and that games need to be better. Near the end of his presentation Takahashi gets to the heart of what he wishes to create—a return to a child-like, exploratory mind. A return to pure play. “It feels like everything is so controlled by systems. It feels like something is tying me up. The word nobynoby means to not be constrained, to be mentally and emotionally liberated.” His new game, he says, will do just that.
From where I’m sitting, Jackson Milott does not seem to like Noby Noby Boy at all. Jackson is three years old and really into fish right now. He’s staring into an iPad, his face contorted in what I can only guess might be concentration, or maybe frustration. He’s clutching a plastic clownfish, and I do not see him let go of it once. Jackson looks up at me, then back at the screen, and then slams his free hand down on it, flat. Underneath his palm is Takahashi’s creation, the boy who looks a lot like a scarf.
Noby Noby Boy is, as promised, lacking in carrots and sticks. The scarf-boy gets flung around with the flick of a finger, wrapped or bounced off strange objects (windmills, giant robots) that fall or sometimes drift into place from off-screen. That’s about it. Oh, the scarf-boy can grow longer, too. This growth is, actually, a bit of a carrot—but the complexity of growing one’s boy and unlocking worlds and linking those worlds to the worlds of other players through the internet, and in doing so expanding the Noby universe, well, it’s beyond my ken and definitely beyond Jackson’s. What’s immediately important for Takahashi and Konner and Gopnik and me is that Noby Noby Boy is failing to capture the imagination of this three-year-old. Jackson actually wants to go back to something a lot less abstract, something that would disappoint all the researchers and game developers who have spent a lot of time trying to parse the infant mind. He wants to play Monkey Lunchbox, a game that rewards, literally, with carrots. By Takahashi and Konner’s standards, it’s a game that isn’t really play at all.
So we go to Monkey Lunchbox, because Jackson is the boss. I watch him match pieces of fruit and giggle when he gets it right and giggle more when the monkey does a little monkey dance when his lunchbox is full. His father, Jon, tells me that Jackson already knows this game—that he’s played it before, in fact, on Jon’s phone. It’s the familiarity, Jon thinks, that Jackson likes. He knows he can do the things to get the monkey to do the dance. But this only lasts a short while.
We move on to something that has a bit of Jorgenson’s Flabbergasted! in it. Something that is, like any successful game for the very young an empty vessel: no carrots, no sticks. What KidArt has, beyond finger-paint and a blank slate, are stickers—of fish! There’s even one like the clownfish Jackson is still clutching. He’s into it.
When we are young
and our brain is a series of islands, minds adrift in the sea of our skull, we play to make sense of the world.
Play can be serious business, and Jackson goes quiet for awhile, adding schools of clownfish to his finger painting. When we are young and our brain is a series of islands, minds adrift in the sea of our skull, we play to make sense of the world. Sometimes, when we figure things out and unlock this new world’s secrets, we go back and repeat, just to make sure. This is probably why Jackson picked Monkey Lunchbox—he’s familiar with its rules. Gopnik takes this idea one powerful step further: We play to imagine what could be, to create rules and terms for the future. We play, in other words, to imagine and to invent. It’s play that allowed us to walk out of the Great Rift Valley and conquer the world and then some. No play, no imagination, no rocket to the moon. Because children don’t have to worry about day-to-day survival, Gopnik explains in her book, The Philosophical Baby, they “don’t choose to explore only the possibilities that might be useful—they explore all the possibilities.” Because of play, “we can consider different ways the world might be, not just the ways the world actually is.” How it is for Jackson right now is very, very fishy.
But that’s just right now. What’s important, Jorgensen likes to point out, is that the child is the creator, that the world is his own. This, then, may be why Noby Noby Boy failed for Jackson—there’s too much of Takahashi’s fertile mind in it. Maybe this is why Jackson looked so frustrated—he was peering into a world that wasn’t his, while he’s still figuring out the world around him. I’d slam my hand down upon this impostor’s imagined world, too. But I’m being a little unfair to Takahashi. His game wasn’t really created with a three-year-old in mind, and Monkey Lunchbox was. Besides, Noby Noby Boy is a hit with adults, in its own strange and cultish way.
Takahashi’s creation may be a valiant attempt at returning adult gamers to a childlike mind, but this is a nearly impossible thing. Scientists and academics who study small children, who know better than anyone the intricate mysteries of the very young, often talk about how much they would give to experience the world as their subjects do. Some say they’d give back all the awards and accolades they’ve ever received to be able to be three-years-old for just one hour. By attempting to construct a world of pure, childlike play, Takahashi was unknowingly setting out to build a sort of baby-gamer Tower of Babel.
“The more we seek out neat ideas, the worse we are at finding them,” Jorgensen says. “The classic example is taking your kids to the store and buying a cool toy, and when you bring it home, they spend all their time playing with the box it came in.” Behind Jackson, dominating the Milotts’ living room, is a refrigerator box. It’s turned on its side and cut open in places. It’s a fort, or a castle, or a house, or an empty box. “We thought he’d get sick of it eventually,” Jon tells me. “That was five months ago.”
Takahashi has, for now, given up on videogames. “I find the idea of working in the physical world far more exciting than working in a virtual one,” he recently told the BBC. “I feel like having something physical makes it easier for me to communicate what I think is fun to people.” So he’s designing a playground in Nottingham, England. “I’ve had to return to my six-year-old way of thinking,” he said.
Jorgensen, too, is moving on, but in a different sense. As a parent, “there’s still something that doesn’t quite sit right when I watch my kids staring at the screen for too long.” What excites him is the possibility of creating videogames without screens or buttons for kids to play in. Microsoft is working on its Kinect console, a controller-less environment where body and voice rule. Jorg Neumann, Kinect’s studio head, studied the gestures of three, four, and five-year-olds to come up with a universal language of motion for the system. In Kinectimals, Kinect’s flagship game for kids, Neumann (who has a nine-year-old) says that “as you move around a playroom in the game, the room changes with you. There’s no time limit, you can’t fail. Most games are so static, but this is pure physicality.” What really excites Jorgensen about Kinect, though, is that it can create soundscapes, so suddenly a living room is an instrument, the couch and the coffee table its valves and keys. Jogensen believes developers can do better, work harder, to keep up with the young mind. That it’s the kids who are the real artists, the real creators, standing in the living room conducting invisible orchestras, wide awake and dreaming. It’s us, the adults, who need to just try to keep up.