Play With Your Kids: On Parental Hard Mode

With summer break looming and with my daughter’s (Pea) recent discovery of Stampy Cat’s Terraria Let’s Plays (thanks to the research that I was doing for an earlier NYMG piece) there has been a lot of Terraria going on in my house. Oddly enough very little playing of the game has actually taken place since I first started talking about Stampy back in March. It’s only been after watching 80-odd episodes of Stampy’s Let’s Play that Pea has said that she would like to play the game in earnest. She has finally decided that Terraria is dissimilar enough from Minecraft (and its tree chopping and lava pits).

One of the things that playing games with my kid has taught me over the last couple of years is that it definitely takes planning and some preliminary legwork. I think that the depth to which it is necessary to take that planning first hit me two years ago when Pea and I decided to play Ni No Kuni together. When we started out I imagined us playing on two separate saves so that she could play her game the way that she wanted and I could play mine. In the end it ended with me playing ahead an hour at a time and not saving so that she could play through later. This also gave me the opportunity to play through and censor the parts that were inappropriate for a an almost 5 year old and to play through the parts that she declared too boring or too difficult (and instructed me what I was supposed to do before she returned to the game, i.e. beat this boss, get us to the next town, etc.).

And playing through Lego Indiana Jones I learned that if we were playing games that scaled up in difficulty based on the number of players that were playing in co-op mode that it was always going to be necessary to start off with a decreased difficulty level because, as much as she loves me in real life, my kid has a strong sense of self preservation and a belief that Mama’s job to protect extends to to video games. I also learned that if there is one pixel on any map where an avatar is unreachable by bad guys while they continue to fight other avatars in the same space my kid can find it. And once she finds it she is going to stay right there until her mama has cleared the room and she is safe again. Yeah, so in this case enemy scaling is a big old fail.

Animal Crossing? No scaleable enemies….in fact, no enemies at all, but a whole new hard mode. Once a certain little someone discovered that there was a multiplayer mode and we could visit each other’s games I was often charged with tracking down rare or expensive furniture (can you say pink lovely furniture) and paying off her house expansions.

And now with Terraria we are discovering a whole new form of parental hard mode: a game where survival is dependent on having proper shelter, tools, and weapons. After finding ourselves in the situation of getting killed over and over again by various zombies after dark I was instructed to “build us a house” after she went to bed so that we could be safe the following day. And that’s just what I did. I played for more than an hour after she skipped off to bed, building a house of stone, crafting better tools for digging up ice blocks (the only thing she wants to mine), and forging better weapons and armor for battling the “googlies” (a la Stampy Cat). This way when she returns to the game she will be able to play her way and I will be there to continue to facilitate it.

Ironically, in the same way that life often enters hard mode when children are added in the equation (and nightmare mode when they hit their teen years), our gaming lives do much the same. As a mother and a gamer I have found that with a little planning and a lot of work we can adjust the level of the game (and of our lives) to accommodate the ramping up of the difficulty level that is incurred by the inclusion and various and varying play styles of our additional little players.