[AE.Personal] When you wish upon a book...
So, while I was thinking about the relationship between imaginative play and artistic creation recently, I realized there's a very strong connection between what excites me about a new roleplaying game and my childhood imagination: I love to sit down and read a book full of different character options -- lists of character types, magic spells, superpowers, special training, unique abilities, etc. -- in exactly the same way I used to love to sit down with a toy catalogue and look at everything it had to offer, imagining what it would be like to play with, and what I could do with it.
I would do this not so much out of avarice or even wishful thinking -- like, I wouldn't have turned down the actual toys but I wasn't sitting there going, "*Sigh* If only it were real... -- but because it was fun and pleasant and entertaining to do so, in a way that was like playing with actual toys in some ways.
Looking back, I'm sure that very often, my imaginary version was superior to the actual thing in ways that are very apparent to me now as an adult and probably were more apparent to my younger self than she would have admitted.
Like, I don't know that I ever "believed" the Power Wheels brand jeep came with a grappling gun that could be used to safely lift the vehicle, its driver, and maybe a couple of small passengers up into a tree, but it was fun to imagine doing that, which made it fun to imagine it was possible.
Of course, not just any toy catalogue would do... well, no, that's an outright lie, as any toy catalogue would do.
But none of them would do as well as the annual Christmas-themed Wish Book from Sears.
Five or six hundred pages of gift ideas... of which admittedly only a fraction were given over to toys, but visually the size of the thing made quite the impression... and sometimes something from another section of the catalogue might also spark something.
An outfit. A telescope. Some cool-looking tools.
I found myself wishing I could get a hold of a copy of a 1980s Wish Book to page through for both nostalgic purposes and creative ones, and it struck me that there are probably digital copies of them online.
My brief search did not turn up any PDFs, but I did find a site that collects several years' and shares them via a webpage interface. The last dated update I've seen on the page is from 2017 and the main interface depends on Flash, but if you don't have Flash installed or enabled it dumps you into an HTML version that lets you page through one scanned page at a time, which is fine. Especially since you can jump around by changing the page number in the URL.
I picked the 1985 edition mostly because it's about the center of the era tha interests me the most and started paging through it.
I wasn't interested yet in a cover-to-cover read... I wanted to get to the good stuff, so I checked all the hundreds -- page 100, 200, 300, etc. -- until I found a vein of toys and hit paydirt on 500. Rainbow Brite was definitely one of the neighborhoods I was looking for, so I started reading forward through Care Bears, My Little Pony, a franchise called Golden Girl (no relation) and the Guardians of the Gemstone that I had absolutely no memory of, passed the hair salons for dolls, and then I found myself staring at a memory:
The exact toy kitchen we had for so long that I sometimes think its wall pattern was on the kitchen in the house I was born in.
When we lived in that house, the kitchen was in a little side room that I think must have been meant to be a pantry or storage closet of some kind. It was big enough to hold a toy kitchen, a little child-sized picnic table, a doll-sized bunk bed, and all accessories necessary for playing house.
I have many memories of that play kitchen and cramped little house-room, so much that most of them have run together.
One memory that has stayed distinct and particular involves a time when I was using the space not to play house but to play restaurant. I would have been very young at the time, but I can't say how young. I would guess around the age of kindergarten, plus or minus a year or two, but not much more than that.
I was not playing house, but restaurant. Specifically, a waffle restaurant, I think for no other reason than we had toy plastic waffles.
I didn't know how waffles were made, but I knew that cookin involved putting things into pots. And for no other reason than... oh, well, if you look in the fridge on the picture, you can see there is a little green plastic bottle, doubtlessly meant to represent a soft drink, right next to a larger white plastic milk bottle.
We had those, and so I decided they were the pancake ingredients. I knew what the milk was, but I didn't have a lot of experience with bottles that looked like that. In my world, "pop" came in cans or much bigger bottles.
What I thought that bottle looked like... well, even now I wouldn't say it makes a terrible stand-in for a wine bottle.
I didn't think it was a wine bottle. I thought it was a champagne bottle. I knew the word "champagne" from The Muppet Movie and I inferred from context that it was a fancy restaurant thing.
My mother, who was not in the room but was in earshot of it from anywhere in the house, quickly ushered me into another room and explained very firmly that I should not be playing any games with the other kids that involved saying I was giving them champagne.
It was only after I answered her question about where I'd got the idea from that it occurred to her that I didn't know what champagne actually was or why she wouldn't want any of her daycare kids going home to their parents and talking about being given food with champagne in it.
My recollection is her first attempt was to say it was a type of "booze" and then having to explain what that meant. I believe she ended up somewhere like, "Look, it's bad for kids and would make them sick."
I came across another old familiar sight in the Fisher Price section:
I used to have that Fisher Price houseboat. I used it as a bathtub toy until it went the way of all carelessly-treated bathtub toys: water got in around the seams and turned nasty, and eventually the boat would emit little black flakes when it was in the water.
But I loved it, and I think part of it was the simple joy of having a toy boat that was big enough to actually enact scenarios on the boat, not just involving it.
Another part of it might have been the limited scope it enforced. It was the only playset I had that could go in the bathtub, and so when I played with it, I was playing with just it. I might have brought other toys than the little people it came with, but the venue was limited.
I think that kind of situation can be a very powerful enabler of play, when there's a structure that provides both opportunities and limitations.
I'm going to be spending more time with this catalogue archive for sure. It's really helping me pull some of my thoughts together on new approaches to writing, roleplaying, and game design.