Is Sci-fi Fantasy Imaginative Play the Natural Outlet for Kids?

This summer, we got the first in a line of fantasy franchised Legos. The Lord of the Rings themed Legos are not quite making the splash that the Star Wars sets did, but it has certainly opened the doors for more fantasy franchises to make their way onto the toy shelves. Lego has long been the building block of choice for imaginative kiddos. Thanks to their franchise work, the company has added the concept of aiding imaginative play with structured storytelling. The bottom line is that seeing favorite characters adapted into Legos is fun even for fans with less imagination.

With lines like NinjaGo, Alien Conquest, Monster Hunters, and now the Lord of the Rings, it’s clear that Lego is appealing to the scifi fantasy crowd. They make most of their money from the Star Wars, Harry Potter, and Super Heroes sets, but even their non-franchise lines suggest that imaginative play falls primarily into the scifi and fantasy genres.

Think for a moment when the last time was that you saw a little girl play house? When have you ever seen a little boy play cops and robbers? As the father of three children, I can attest that kids are much more likely to turn their imaginative play into something scifi or fancy related. Even without my suggestions that Batman is better than Iron Man, my son can start an entire game about superheroes fighting off giant monsters that are attacking the city. It’s adorable, sure, but it also raises the question of whether or not we are hard wired to pull towards the world of science fiction or not.

The toy market is a great place to get a baseline for how close we as a culture are to scifi as opposed to other genres. It’s where we as consumers make the decisions about what it’s okay for our kids to use to boost their imaginations during their free time. Look up and down the action figures aisle at your local store. Even without walking down the aisle, you can see separators that help identify the sections for shopping convenience. Batman. Spider-man. Star Wars. Power Rangers Samurai. Transformers.

Even the girls’ toy aisle has these same kind of indications. I saw amongst the standard dress-up dolls more vampire and horror-themed dolls (albeit cutesy and made age-appropriate) than standard Barbies.

When we play, are we automatically entering the world of scifi and fantasy? It would appear so. And this seems to suggest that we are spending more time creating a world to inhabit than we realize. So much so that we are training our children to do the same thing. Rather than developing play habits that mirror life skills that we all need (you all remember those play kitchens that we had — and usually used as cover when our older siblings broke out the Nerf guns), we are encouraging play habits that create new worlds and environments in which to play.

Don’t get me wrong, I’m not saying that this is a bad thing. I am simply impressed that the scifi world has become so accepted. When toys like Tranformers and Thundercats were new, I almost felt like I had to keep them hidden for fear of being shunned. Now it would appear that I should be encouraging my own kids to pick out their favorites. Scifi and fantasy no longer seem to be the genres of the outcast but the exploratory field of our youths’ emerging minds. So if we keep playing in the scifi worlds that we create to the point that scifi and fantasy become the mainstream, the implication is that it won’t be much  longer before science fiction becomes science fact.

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