This post is an article by guest writer David Smith, who edits the Toy Talk site. His blog is full of great toy news and reviews, and there are toy giveaways as well. I highly encourage you all to check it out! David and I are going to be exchanging articles regularly to give our readers some fresh content, so this is the first of what will hopefully be many foreign exchange blogs. And now, without further ado, I give you David’s article, which flew all the way across the Atlantic to make it into my inbox. Enjoy!
I love toys. That’s not too surprising coming from someone who runs a toy news website. It’s not even that surprising coming from a 40-year-old man – I have two young boys aged three and five who have opened my eyes once more to the simple pleasure a well-made toy can bring.
And I’m only just 40…
But my love is not unconditional, and I’m seeing some unwelcome trends in the toy industry at the moment. The first is the rush to brand toys as ‘interactive,’ whatever that means. The second is the seemingly insatiable desire to tack internet access on as some sort of bonus feature, whether it adds anything or not.
I’ll admit up front to being a bit sceptical of the role computers and computer games should play in a child’s life. This is perhaps hypocritical, because I grew up in the great computer games explosion of the 1980s and you couldn’t get me off the darn things! Even now the titles of some of the games I laboriously loaded (using audio tape!) onto my ZX Spectrum are enough to bring a nostalgic gleam to my eye. They just don’t make them like Jetpac anymore.
But that’s not the point. I was a teenager when I couldn’t be prised away from my computer. Now, even cuddly toys are routinely offered with the chance to ‘register online for great added features!’ The added features often turn out to be disappointing. You get to ‘chat’ with fellow cuddly toy owners, officially name your toy or print out colour-in sheets.
There’s nothing especially wrong with any of this, but wouldn’t it be more fun to just cuddle the thing? And perhaps make up adventures, or just drag it along with you everywhere you go as an irreplaceable friend and companion? That’s what I used to do with my cuddly toys, anyway.
You can just ignore these web add-ons, of course, and you’ve still got a perfectly good cuddly toy. My ire is really stoked when the online features are actually the main selling point of a product… and they still don’t add anything worthwhile. The ‘interactive’ toy Test Tube Aliens falls into this category.
Heavily advertised on TV in the UK, these alien eggs have a good sci-fi storyline behind them – the aliens have fled their home planet and need kindly humans to look after them. You hatch them out by soaking them in water and then have to feed them alien food to make them grow.
This all sounds like good fun, but the fact is that keeping the aliens topped up with water in their test tubes is all you can actually do with them, and we all know that it’s the parents who will soon be doing this as the kids move on to toys they can, you know… play with. I think parents are resigned to taking over the chores with hamsters, rabbits and guinea pigs, but surely we should draw the line at toys?
And the online functions? If you are brave enough to put this water-and-alien-gunk-filled test tube anywhere near your PC, it can ‘read’ signals from the Test Tube Aliens website and allow you to input data. This data is then used to accuse you of not looking after the darn thing properly. You’ve overfed it, underfed it, kept it in the dark for too long, exposed it to too much light…
While you are being berated by this ungrateful little critter, your kids are running around in the garden pretending to be superheroes or cops and robbers, or even aliens. Kids instinctively know what’s fun and what isn’t, and during our intensive review of the Test Tube Aliens the interest levels of our subjects fell after about half an hour, when the ‘hatching’ process had finished and they realised there really wasn’t anything else to do.
Six weeks later, the Test Tube Alien, still very much ‘alive’ and bleating about its mistreatment, was placed unceremoniously in the rubbish. I didn’t feel in the least bit guilty.
I know I sound like a curmudgeon who just doesn’t like new technology, but this isn’t the case. I actually have written extensively about new technology in other jobs, and I generally love it.
It simply rankles with me when toy companies pack interactivity into a toy without having any appreciation of what interactivity actually means. A one-way stream of bland data, a numbingly dull exchange of trivial details or a simple and baffling attempt to get kids to put their toys down and plug themselves into the Matrix instead does not cut it as far as I’m concerned.
And it isn’t just this 40-year-old who thinks this. Kids may be attracted to the fancy techno add-ons that are festooning many of our toys today but, like junk food and sugary drinks, they don’t satisfy them, often leaving them cranky without really knowing why.
Give me a boxful of LEGO any day. And, I’m very happy to say, my boys agree.
Read David’s daily blog at http://www.toytalk.co.uk.
