Bringing It Home

Over the duration of the semester we've discovered a correlation between games that emulate real life experience with the progression of time. The first games were original thoughts of fun that differed greatly from the monotonous daily choirs children had in the 1700's. Today, games have a tendency to capture a strong essence of real-life activities. 

As a conclusive evaluation of this discovery I thought it would be interesting to jump from the 1940's to  2013. 

Three of the most popular Christmas toys for 2013 are the LeapFrog LeapPad Learning Tablet, the Zoomer Robot Dog, and the Nerf Rebelle Heartbreaker Bow and Arrow. 

It used to be that as mom or dad whipped up a batch of cookies, little Sally would be pushing tins of dough through her Easy Bake Oven. This year as mom or dad swipe their iPad, so does Sally on her tablet. The Leapfrog LeapPad Learning Tablet is basically an iPad for children. It has the ability to connect to Wi-Fi, hold 8 GB of information, and host over 800+ apps. 


 The Zoomer Robot Dog captures the essence of Spot. The robot dog runs, sniffs, wags his tail, sings, barks, responds to his name, lifts his leg to pee and has the ability to learn tricks such as "sit down" and "roll over".

Finally, the Nerf Relle Heartbreaker is a target gift this year. A bow and arrow would capture the essence of hunting but this gift is probably popular this year because it captures the essence of the Hunger Games.  Katniss, the main character, is a beautiful, strong young woman who unintentionally becomes a revolutionary idol for hope. What girl wouldn't want to be like her? Although the movie is fictional the essence captured is of a reality fans will to be real.  

This has been a fun little study. It would be interesting to see if this correlation will continue throughout time or make a rapid reversion back to a kind of 'original fun'.