Foreign Narratives

The boys were in the bath the other day - Primus playing a complicated game, and Secundus watching and learning avidly. I was dressing Tertia, who was finished in the bath, but was listening into Primus' play narrative as he explained it to me in a rapid-fire train of thought:

"...and Mr. Blucky [the blue plastic hippo] jumps on this [a foam toy with a face cloth draped over it floating in the bath, like a boat or island] and then he has to jump off to get to the wormhole [the foam/cloth platform is being moved back and forth across the bathtub] but the baddy is there and he has to get the gun and fight the baddy to get to the next level when he goes through the wormhole and if he jumps off here or here or here [he indicates various spots on the foam/cloth's path] then he falls in the lava and dies and when he gets to the next level he loses his weapons but he can get the bow and arrow and fight the next baddy [he rearranges the baddy, which is a toy boat with some plastic tubing next to it] but the baddy on the next level is more dangerous but then he can go through the next wormhole and get to the next level and..."

The kid is in a bath, playing with plastic bath toys, but he's playing a platform game! Like flippin' Prince of flippin' Persia! I've noticed it a bit before - a lot of their games seem to be computer games transliterated in to real life. It's standard terminology among his peer group and other kids his age to "Pause" and "Unpause" a game. All the games they play seem to be strongly influenced by playstation and computer games.

I know I'm going to sound like a crotchety old man, but I find it weird. They're into the same aliens and robots and monsters and swashbuckling derring-do that I was into as a kid - even Star Wars, the formative mythology of my own childhood, has come back. But they've got a different narrative structure to anything I remember from my childhood, and a different language for controlling their games. I suppose that we did this to our parents as well, and Primus's kids will also bewilder him with the way they play.