I remember sitting up way past bedtime playing King’s Quest when it originally released. I was just starting high school and it was one of the first actual graphics based computer games that I played. I played the game far into the night (many nights) trying to figure out where to go and what items were needed to solve which puzzles. That was more than 30 years ago and I can’t remember if I ever finished that game, but I do remember the later game King’s Quest III: To Heir is Human that came installed on my Tandy computer a few years later when I was just starting college. Again I remember long sleepless nights and I remember the sense of accomplishment I felt when I finished it.
When the new King’s Quest episodic game by Sierra launched I downloaded it without a second thought. Now I was going to get to play the game with characters that actually moved rather than doing a staggered jump step to simulate movement. And most of all I wanted to share the game with my daughter. I have explained to her many times what games were like when I was her age and what my first computer games looked like and what I also told her about was the stories. The things that made me stick with games where the puzzles sometimes made no sense at all and no matter what you did you were sure to be eaten by a grue were the stories and this was my chance to introduce those stories to my own daughter.
The first time we played the game she wasn’t quite sure that she wanted to touch it. I kind of walked around and showed her how the mechanics worked while telling her more about my original experiences with this particular series. As we walked around and there were dragons and skeletons to draw her in she became more and more interested in telling me where to go and where to look (all important things if you are going to try to remember where to go back to when NPCs ask you to do fetch quests). And then it happened, the story drew her in between watching the story unfold on the screen and listening to Graham (the knight) as an elderly man frame the story for his granddaughter, who aims to have adventures of her own, Pea was hooked. And then came the question.
“Can I make a video of me playing this game, like Stampy Cat?” Alisha and I have talked about our kids and their desires to stream and how we felt about letting them post videos on YouTube to share with friends and family. Up until this point Pea was happy with just playing the games and not streaming, but this was a game that she wanted to talk to folks about. So after some major procrastination on my part I left her stream her gameplay (but not her face) and talking to the “people online” about playing the game. Let me just say, it was phenomenal! It was fun to watch her explain her decision making and talk about the way that she understood the game to her perceived audience.
These are things that she and I talk about all of the time while we play games together, but when we do she always assumes that I know more than she does about the game (no matter how many times I tell her that this is not necessarily the case). This time she was talking as the expert and it was the cutest damned thing in the universe! This gave her a chance to articulate her problem solving processes and she was having a blast all at the same time! And if there was any down side to it, it was that it took us a REALLY long time to finish chapter one of the game (just kidding!), but it has definitely been worth it.
At this point I suppose that there is no turning back. We are going to be making more videos (from the archived streams) to share with our friends and family (because Mama is still a little antsy for now) because there is lots of good stuff going on outside of the gaming and spending time together here.
