Play and Disney Infinity

On paper, Disney Infinity nails a lot of the ideas we discussed last week. It is a literal manifestation of the malleability in children’s play, with canons and universes mattering less than the toys that are available.  A kid will mash up Batman and Spider-Man with abandon — the bounds of the DC and Marvel universes mean nothing to her, and The Lego Movie is proof of as much. Infinity allows a kid to throw any idea into a sandbox toybox, which ought to create an infinite sense of play.

But there’s something problematic about the way Infinity operates in practice, both as a video game and as an expansion of playroom exploration. A group of 20 year-olds struggled pretty mightily to navigate the menu system and get into the game. I was able to manage the game’s world solely because I have experience with the cues of video game level design, particularly that of first-person shooters, the HUDs of which Infinity cribs liberally. That’s a problem, though – my knowledge of adult games should not make me more intuitive towards a child’s game. We were directed to an extensive tutorial repeatedly (by Benjamin, not the game), which begs me to ask whether the game is articulate enough in explaining itself.

A game ought to make clear its rules and structures as succinctly and unobtrusively as possible. I think of Super Mario Bros. and the manner in which it teaches players. The YouTube series Extra Credits made an excellent video explaining Mario’s first level and the way it carefully designs an experience that teaches a player all she needs to know through the environment. Infinity’s dialogue-and-text-box heavy aesthetic nerf the player’s ability to figure these concepts out on her own, and in effect pull exploration, or even much feeling, out of her experience.

Moreover, as a kid begins to explore the toybox mode in Infinity, she will shortly discover that she can reach the boundaries of what the game can offer. She will have exhausted all the tools and will be left with the box she has created. In one way, this is not dissimilar to the way Legos or other constructible toys operate — one can only build with the tools available, and must compensate for those gaps with imagination. However, I think there’s a small but important difference between the physical and digital spaces in this regard. Where Legos are tactile, present creations that force a kid to inject shape and meaning, a video game operates like a movie: it is on the screen, and it has been created in front of the player, o naturally it must be at least a facsimile of real.

It is much more difficult to use imagination when the objects are literally created for a player. Minecraft gets away with this because it functions almost exclusively as a tool for construction and building — and the tools allow for a child to create things that resemble her reality. Infinity is neither flexible enough to operate in that manner, nor rigid enough to tell a traditional narrative-based story. Infinity limits the player and forces her to subscribe to its mode of play, with its visible boundaries and rules. By its sheer nature as a video game, the constructs already exist and are much more difficult to break down in an imaginative way, like we saw with board games. As it stands, Infinity functions as an uncomfortable middle ground where children are able to input their imaginations to a very small extent, but are unable to engage and play in a meaningful, productive way.