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I had a thought after last class and decided to try and condense it here before I forget. Could adapt this into one of the class essays later, but I think I'd rather do something else for that. | |
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< | In 1970, a made-for-TV-movie was produced called Santa Claus Is Comin' To Town. It played on the anxiety in children that evil adults will take away their toys. 48 years later, Toys'R'Us, an unassailable retail giant in the 90s, is on the verge of bankruptcy and is considering closing all of their stores.{{At least one person has asserted this is primarily because big-box retailers are all failing due to Jeff Bezos and the Walton family. While that is likely the efficient cause of this particular bankruptcy, the formal cause decline of the toy industry is also real and is still worth examining.]] If we are going to take seriously and accept the duty to teach children about what is happening to their world, we owe it to them to explain that children were once very afraid the adults would take away all their toys, and soon there will be no toys left. I am responsible. I helped kill them.
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> | In 1970, a made-for-TV-movie was produced called Santa Claus Is Comin' To Town. It played on the anxiety in children that evil adults will take away their toys. 48 years later, Toys'R'Us, an unassailable retail giant in the 90s, is on the verge of bankruptcy and is considering closing all of their stores. If we are going to take seriously and accept the duty to teach children about what is happening to their world, we owe it to them to explain that children were once very afraid the adults would take away all their toys, and soon there will be no toys left. I am responsible. I helped kill them.
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< | The toys in Santa Claus Is Comin' To Town are rigid, physical objects. Many are child-size replicas of entities in the adult world, a China doll or a model train, which engage the imaginative capacities of the toy's users as they play out roles and situations existing in the world. Two potential villains are redeemed when given toys as this role-playing awakens their basic human kindness - one plays out motherhood with a doll, the other plays out being a conductor with a train. Other toys exist as vehicles for mastering one's own physicality - a yo-yo is the most salient example. But all of these toys are completely inert on their own, and are entirely subject to the imagination and desires of the user. The doll does not cry out of hunger unless you imagine it. The yo-yo can be a weapon, but only if you choose to employ it that way. In 1970, when the movie was filmed, the most advanced children's toys were probably the Chatty Cathy and its derivatives, dolls containing a phonograph record which spoke a random series of phrases when a string was pulled. The toys in Santa Claus Is Comin' To Town are rigid, physical objects. Many are child-size replicas of entities in the adult world, a China doll or a model train, which engage the imaginative capacities of the toy's users as they play out roles and situations existing in the world. Two potential villains are redeemed when given toys as this role-playing awakens their basic human kindness - one plays out motherhood with a doll, the other plays out being a conductor with a train.
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> | The toys in Santa Claus Is Comin' To Town are rigid, physical objects. Many are child-size replicas of entities in the adult world, a China doll or a model train, which engage the imaginative capacities of the toy's users as they play out roles and situations existing in the world. Two potential villains are redeemed when given toys as this role-playing awakens their basic human kindness - one plays out motherhood with a doll, the other plays out being a conductor with a train. Other toys exist as vehicles for mastering one's own physicality - a yo-yo is the most salient example. But all of these toys are completely inert on their own, and are entirely subject to the imagination and desires of the user. The doll does not cry out of hunger unless you imagine it. The yo-yo can be a weapon, but only if you choose to employ it that way. In 1970, when the movie was filmed, the most advanced children's toys were probably the Chatty Cathy and its derivatives, dolls containing a phonograph record which spoke a random series of phrases when a string was pulled. | | | | |
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< | Six years later, with the release of the Atari 2600 and the Dungeons and Dragons Basic Set, the toy as a physical object began to face its first serious challenges. Both the Atari 2600 and the D&D Basic Set provided the user with elaborate rules for their imaginative play. The D&D Basic Set, though, with no electronic components, did not enforce these rules, and in fact required substantial imaginative play to do much of anything. But the Atari 2600 strictly enforced its rules on imaginative play using software, and there was no way for the user to edit the code and make the game play out differently. You cannot create additional rooms of the Adventure castle, nor can you engage in diplomatic negotiations with the Space Invaders. For the first time, the operative rules of the imaginative world are set out and enforced by the toymaker, rather than the user. | >
> | Six years later, with the release of the Atari 2600 and the Dungeons and Dragons Basic Set, the toy as a physical object began to face its first serious challenges. Both the Atari 2600 and the D&D Basic Set provided the user with elaborate rules for their imaginative play. The D&D Basic Set, though, with no electronic components, did not enforce these rules, and in fact required substantial imaginative play to do much of anything. But the Atari 2600 strictly enforced its rules on imaginative play using software, and there was no way for the user to edit the code and make the game play out differently. You cannot create additional rooms of the Adventure castle, nor can you engage in diplomatic negotiations with the Space Invaders. For the first time, the operative rules of the imaginative world are set out and enforced by the toymaker, rather than the user.
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| | | Video games enjoyed a stratospheric rise throughout the next few decades. I was born in December 1989. At that time, video games had already eclipsed the movie industry as the biggest produced entertainment business in the United States, but most adults did not realize it. The most popular Christmas presents requested by boys of my age in an upper-middle class suburb were products of Sega, Nintendo, and Sony. Girls were discouraged from liking them on the basis of gender, and both genders realized they had the patina of nerdiness about them, but in my neighborhood, almost none of the boys really abstained. Some parents obliged more than others, and when they realized we congregated at the houses of the boys whose parents most obliged, some parents obliged more. But at Christmas, everyone's parents seemed to insist on buying them some of the old kind of toys. Sometimes they got tried for a day or two and then ignored, and sometimes they were never even opened. This made our parents sad. We didn't understand why - what was wrong with what we liked?
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