Childlike Wonder
Do you remember your childhood?
The time when everything was unknown to us. The time when anything can be magical and surprising. The time when every experience left a lasting impression in our memories, even (or especially?) the embarrassing ones.
And then we grew up, or at least got older. We started to understand things better, we seek explanations on how everything works, and life as we know it became mundane.
Our child self see airplanes as magical ride in the sky, but our current self understand that airplanes are using the laws of physics to fly. We might be amused at the engineering required to make an airplane, but we no longer see it as a magical wonder.
For some people, this mundane world we live in our daily lives is not enough. That’s why some of us travel around the world, while some others read books, or watch movies. For some other people, like me, there is one other medium for escaping the mundane world and bringing the sense of wonder back, game.
Game is a powerful medium to bring people to wonder. Whether it is a video game or a physical game, whenever people play game, they escape their current identity and become one with the medium. They will feel like they are inside the fantasy world and live inside it.
Why can games do that?
Is it the presentation, such as visual effects? Is it the narrative story in the game? Or is it the game mechanics itself?
Not necessarily so. Remember in the 80’s when available game consoles are what we call retro such as Atari and Commodore? They do not have next-gen visual effects like we have now, and yet the players of that era still remembering fondly of those times. Those games in that era do not have enough space for long and complicated narrative like some of the games we have today. Lastly, the mechanics are so simple compared to today’s games.
To answer the question why games can bring wonder to people, let’s take a look at Dungeon and Dragons. For those who did not know that name, that is a household name for the standard of tabletop fantasy game. Player of Dungeons and Dragons will spent hours together around a table, aided by (sometimes) home-made fantasy maps, and tell stories about their journey in the fantasy world. It is a game best enjoyed by people with good imagination.
The keyword of that story is imagination. It is what makes people so invested in their games.
We as a game creator have the hardest task of triggering people’s imagination when playing a game. Sure, making great story or creating amazing visuals are hard, but they won’t matter if we cannot pull the player into our game. Finding the right combination of every component in a game is not a trivial matter. It is what makes a game alive.
