One of the characters was buying lots of stuff to make a meal for their friends. They went in and set up a scene in the shop. I was not creating my own narrative or story. Whilst at an intellectual level I understood this, what I was missing was the imagination to create the next key part of playing in this sort of environment. It is frame for play, a playground that is filled with toys. You see, I was looking for a game and this isn’t a game. Then my daughters showed me how to play with it! The characters did nothing by themselves and whilst it was fun to find some of the secrets, it just didn’t click. When I tried it, I just didn’t see the point. Chilling in the apartmentįor most adults, this does not really sound all that fun. You can combine foods to make meals, cook marshmallows on the camp fire and so much more – it makes my head spin. There are also lots and lots of secrets to find. In the apparent you can watch TV, type on the laptop, use the toilet and anything else you can think of really. You can eat things, get toys from the vending machine and so on. In the shop you can fill your basket with goods, scan them and leave. Each area has things that the player can mess around with. It gives you a small vibrant town, with a shop, an apartment, a park and lots more. Toca Town is a sandbox game, a playground.
If you have kids and have an Android or Apple device, look for Toca Boca – their games are amazing! One of their favourite games is Toca Town. This expansion described a frame as a set of unspoken, implicit rules that surround the fantasy world – refereed to as metacommunication.Īnyway, back to the kids. There are many variations on this idea, most famous probably being Frames from Gregory Bateson (later expanded on by Erving Goffman).
It was also Huizinga who gave us the concept of the Magic Circle – the boundary between reality and play. In this sort of description, play is an activity – it follows a similar line of thought to that proposed by Johan Huizinga in Homo Ludens. I offered some of my thoughts in a recent post, that play is a free form activity that is undertaken almost just because it can be and it brings fun and joy. There are lots of views of play out there. It is not as easy as it would first seem either. Continuing my investigations into play, I wanted to talk about a few things my kids have been teaching me about just letting go and giving in to the fantasy and the lack of imaginative boundaries that real play demands.
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