So, Rose (and also my mom & my aunt) and I are addicted to this game for the iPad called Pocket Frogs. And yesterday I was watching her play it, and she was hopping the frogs from lily pad to lily pad and eating the dragonflies, making the frogs happy as the game creators intended. But as she was doing it, she was creating this little narrative about the frog’s life and the other frogs she encountered in the pond.
She likes to play the baby frogs, because they are tiny and really cute (though there is no in-game advantage to playing with them, really). And she tells a story about their lives as she travels.
While I was watching her, I thought “I wonder if this is why girls don’t play video games as much as boys – because they don’t really get what they want from the games?” And then I realized that I was being kind of sexist and walking a slippery slope there. And I remembered that D used to have these really long games when he was six or seven with his matchbox cars, creating these long sagas of racing and crashing and personalities for the cars. So it is probably just that she’s in this imaginative play stage and not her gender, but it is incredibly cute nonetheless.