Perspective

Mario’s Perspective, that’s what we need to have. Dylan has been playing a game on the Wii called Super Paper Mario lately. Video games have become so complex, so clever, and so capable of stealing hours and hours of time if you let it. But I digress. I’ve never been a fan of video games but my son is. I’m obliged to watch and listen to his beautiful little voice describe what he’s doing as he maneuvers various levels and bad guys and endless chattering dialog. I’m always impressed at how good he is at these sorts of things. On this particular game, the Mario character has the ability to switch between 2D and 3D views of the game like this:

Here is the traditional video game view.

And here is the same view when he changes his perspective.

It’s so amazing to me how changing perspective can sometimes make the game so much easier to play.
All of a sudden obstacles that were impossible become easily avoidable like this:

When viewed from the standard view, these thwomps form an impassable barrier, change perspectives and voila! You can just walk back behind the thin things and you’re past them in a blink.

This has been a rather long way of saying that really, point of view is the difference between a “major and completely impossible” problem and an opportunity to do some creative problem solving. Pretty smart, I like it.

Maybe video games aren’t all that bad… sometimes.