Welcome to the Enderman Clothing Emporium
As I’ve noted here before, we play a lot of board games in my family. Not so much the classic board games, like Candy Land and Chutes & Ladders, since those games don’t really involve any decisions, just random movements around a game board. We play more recent additions to the family board game genre, like Sleeping Queens and Ticket to Ride, that involve a little bit of strategy. That’s why I was initially disheartened to learn that Hannah, my eleven-year-old, is a huge fan of the board game LIFE.
Remember LIFE? You spin the wheel and move your little car along the path to complete your education, find a job, earn money, buy insurance, find a spouse, maybe have kids, maybe have lots of kids, eventually retire. If you played it as a kid like I did, I bet you can recall the sound of that spinner even now. I have fond memories of playing LIFE at my grandparents’ house, but as a game-playing experience, it’s a bit lacking. As you move your car along the path, you’re occasionally presented with a choice to make, but mostly you’re just moving along as the spinner dictates. All luck, no strategy. It’s currently ranked #1260 on BoardGameGeek’s list of family games for that reason.
And yet, Hannah loves it.
Why? It’s not the mechanics, it’s the theme. Hannah is eleven. She’s starting to think about her future, beyond the usual “What do you want to be when you grow up?” question. Middle school is just on the horizon, and, beyond that, high school and college. She’s a far more social person than she was even a year ago. Education, job, finances, marriage, kids, these are the elements of LIFE (and of life) that are starting to interest her. The game of LIFE gives her a chance to start trying these elements on in different ways. She might fail out of college, get married, and have four kids, then play again, never getting married and becoming a millionaire. It’s all play, not serious at all, but a kind of play she enjoys right now, especially with her friends.
LIFE provides Hannah a chance for this kind of play. So does the computer game Minecraft. More precisely, the plush Enderman figures derived from the computer game Minecraft. Enderman is one of the characters in the game, a bad guy character I think. He’s tall, all black, with purple eyes and no other facial features, and long, skinny arms and legs. Creepy, if you ask me. But Hannah and several of her friends have seven-inch plush Enderman figures, and they think they’re adorable.
Endermen are genderless, but Hannah and her friends make clothes for their Endermen, turning some of them into boys and some into girls. Hannah cuts, glues, and sometimes sews fabric to create designs of her own, sometimes getting inspiration from various crafty YouTube videos she finds. She usually raids our pile of scrap fabric, but just the other day, she tried to convince me that one of her socks doesn’t fit anymore (it totally fits) because she liked the pattern on the sock and wanted it for an Enderman t-shirt!
Once the Endermen are clothed, Hannah and her friends make up rather complicated social lives for the creatures, playing out multi-character stories over days and weeks at school during lunch and recess. The latest story culminated Friday in a marriage between Lily’s boy Enderman (yes, Lily has gotten in on the action) and a friend’s girl Enderman. Both were dressed in appropriate wedding attire, with the girl in a rather impressive wedding dress. No sock this time — Hannah had a kit for a doll’s dress that she adapted for the occasion. Hannah printed up invitations at home to give to her friends at school. The happy couple honeymooned at my house over the weekend before returning to school this week.
I think that the Enderman’s lack of human features allows Hannah and her friends to project onto their plush figures whatever character or identity they wish. This gives them a chance to role play elements of life (and of LIFE) with the Endermen. And it’s these elements that she likes playing with at this stage in her development. She likes other kinds of play, too — building roller coasters in Minecraft and figuring out strategy in Settlers of Catan — but she’s definitely drawn these days to role playing.
I share all this as an observation, really. I’m not sure there’s anything for me as a parent to do here, other than encourage her as she plays. I have stopped mentioning to her the flaws in LIFE’s game mechanics! I tell her I’m happy she enjoys playing the game so much. I’m sure her experiments with identity will confuse me more and more as she goes through her teenage years, so I’m thankful right now for LIFE and Endermen!
Image: “Life,” Will Folsom, Flickr (CC-BY)