Matt McFarland, a game designer, was inspired by the memories of his father to build interactive games and books for kids.
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I miss my father.
Dad died in 2009, not long before his 77th birthday. By the time he died, ill health and Alzheimer’s had reduced him to a pale reflection of who he was. My mother, my then-wife, and I took care of him through the worst of it, and he died at home, warm and safe. I could wax poetic about how we’re just a few brain-chemical shortages away from being just as helpless as adults as we were as infants, but I don’t want to do that. For one thing, it’s depressing. And for another, it’s not an appropriate testimony to the man and the way he raised me. I have another focus in mind.
My parents moved a lot in the first few years of my life, and so when I say “I grew up near Toledo, Ohio,” what I mean is that I lived at the southern end of Michigan for several years before we finally moved into Toledo proper. It was, as Dad would have said, close enough for government work. We lived in a circular neighborhood, surrounded by woods, with a local ice cream place down the street and a comfortable drive from the Toledo Zoo. And it was there that Dad and spent our Saturdays.
When I was four years old, that was our ritual, over the summer. Saturday came around, and Dad and I would go to the zoo. I’m sure we probably had a particular order in which we walked the grounds — I seem to remember we went through the aquarium first, and I know we always went through the big cat house, the reptile house, and visited the sea lions. I have no idea, in retrospect, whether Dad was bored by the repetition, but I rather suspect he wasn’t. Dad liked being around people. He could strike up a conversation with whoever was nearby, and he was quiet, genial, and respectful. Dad wasn’t afraid of people, he embraced them. He would later take a job as a recruiter, and his skills in putting people at ease served him well.
I did not realize, at the time, how profoundly those days at the zoo would affect the man that I would become. I didn’t know, as young boy covering his ears when a lion roared, that decades later I would be looking for ways to take my own children out into the world. We go to the zoo—maybe not every week, but often—and I strive to find ways to help them interact with the world around them. In an age when so much attention is devoted to fearing each other, to “stranger danger” and the thought that any given person might be a predator, I take my children to the Cleveland Zoo and wear my “FREE HUGS” t-shirt. I want them to know that people are, mostly, decent. Yes, safety is a valid concern, but that’s why I’m there. They will not learn about the world and their own place in it if I keep them locked away and “safe.”
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A few years back, I wanted to do something special for my children. My daughter was 7 and my son was a few months from 4, and as I was waiting in the line of cars to pick them up from school, I thought that it might be fun to go to the zoo and be out among people for a while. The weather didn’t cooperate, though. It was cold and rainy, so I had to think of a different plan. I’m a game designer and an avid role-player, and one thing that running tabletop role-playing games teaches you is how to improvise. I called my wife and asked her to call my phone and leave a message for the kids in her crazy German-ish accent (she’s done voice acting work, and does “comically sinister” very well). The message was a challenge—her alter ego, the evil Dr. Twistybread—was perpetrating pretzel-based mayhem and only my kids could stop her.
We wound up at the local mall, and I gave them a series of challenges and puzzles, clues leading them from one store to another. I was making all of this up as I went, and so the narrative wasn’t exactly seamless, but they were young enough that I had to make the clues pretty simple anyway. We eventually ended the challenge at the mall’s arcade, winning tickets from the machines, which somehow thwarted the evil pretzel-scientist’s scheme. It was all very silly, but the kids loved it, and driving home listening to them making up stories about Dr. Twistybread and who she might really be, I thought to myself, I’m on to something here.
Children have no shortage of activities designed for them. Between board games, video games, extracurricular activities and their own amazing imaginations, they have no shortage of things to do. I think, though, that one area that’s somewhat lacking is activities that encourage engaging and interacting with the world around them, and that, I think, is what our “mall adventure” did. My children had to pay attention to what was happening around them. They were with me, yes, but they had to look at the details of the world—even at a place as common as a mall—that they hadn’t ever had to consider before. I could make the clues more intricate, and I could tailor the missions to their interests.
That was two years ago, and since then we’ve had several Mall Adventures. They’ve become more elaborate, as I’ve used my experience as a game designer and my expertise as a speech-language pathologist to design challenges that use my children’s skills and push them to work together, interact with the people around them, and pay attention to the world. The Adventures ranged from helping a man who’d been magically turned into a car, finding an antidote to a weird potion that was turning the children blue, and discovering the truth behind the mastermind Troy Vigu (hint: it’s an anagram, and it led the children to dessert). I can’t do it every week—the amount of work involved in designing a Mall Adventure precludes it—but when I pick them up and hand them a letter that explains their “mission,” they both light up. This is something special. It’s designed just for them. And it gets them out, among people, interacting, paying attention.
I wanted to share that, and so I designed Mall Adventures as a book that explains how to pull together interests, skills, and a simple narrative to form a mission for the kids in your life. It’s for my kids, and for the kids of any adult that wants to put in the time, and you can see the ongoing Kickstarter for the project here.
If I’m being honest, though, the project is really for my father. Dad never really understood my fascination with gaming and roleplaying, but he did understand people and why they are valuable. That, at last, is what I want to share, both with my children, and the other Dads out there.
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photo courtesy of author