It’s The Toy Box Of Life – Dispatches From Infini-Dad
Before I ever had a child, my idealized vision of father/son bonding involved hurling a baseball back and forth under a noon sun.
Well, I got the hurling part correct — except instead of a game of catch, it’s me being thrown off the top of Avenger’s Tower courtesy of Iron Man.
Nor did my idealized visions of Great Moments with Dad and Son include scoping out every Target, Walmart, and Gamestop in a fifty mile radius for product, or debating the pros and cons of whether Mickey Mouse is a better figure forged in plastic or crystal.
Since giving my son a Disney Infinity starter pack last Christmas, a mania has come over our family (and I do mean mania: how else do you describe a grown man feeling up power disc packages to ascertain their contents?). And honestly, I might even have the worst (or best) case of it.
I’ve been transported to a level of fun I haven’t felt since my own childhood obsession with Star Wars … waiting for the new movies to arrive, enjoying them on video, playing with the toys, giving unlucky Speeder Gunner Dack a new action figure lease on life. The almost-so-close-it’s-a-fact that Star Wars will feature in Disney Infinity makes this all the more sweeter.
It’s not like my son and I had a weak relationship before DI. Far from it. We talk all the time, and I essentially enjoy the same things he’s into. Hell, it’s not really that different from the interests I had as a kid: Star Wars, Legos, Comic Books, Movies. We’ve played video games together before– the Lego games being particular favorites–but Disney Infinity has been different.
It’s become the deepest shared experience I’ve had with my eight year old son… period.
Honestly, part of me felt a little silly that it was indeed “just” a video game that inspired this level of camaraderie and not of the more classic Father/Son experiences like playing catch, trout fishing or God knows what. But hey times change, and it doesn’t matter what motivates the harmony, as long as the harmony exists.
For me, it’s really the breadth of the game I enjoy as it ticks off all my fanboy boxes… cool, cherished Disney and Marvel characters to hunt down in the stores and cherish upon discovery, traditional video game play with the playsets, creating new environments in the Toy Box from the vast Disney patina.
For my son, it’s much of the same with a large part of his joy stemming from the Toy Box where he loves building various interactivity with the templates and creati-toys – he truly kicks my ass in this realm. And most important, we both just enjoy the time we get to spend together whether playing or talking about Disney Infinity.
As I look over our ever growing DI collection on our entertainment center anticipating what scenarios both in game and out of game 3.0 has to offer, I get downright giddy. Like a little boy. And to see things with that kind of wonder is just one of the many, many aspects of this game I cherish.
In future columns, I will spotlight various aspects of Disney Infinity from a parent and child perspective: the building excitement for whats to come in future versions, what does Lego DImensions mean to my ever shrinking wallet, and how much longer I can respect myself rubbing sealed power disc packages in the hopes of snagging that ever allusive rare.
Keep your eyes and face front, True Believers!