Interactive Toy

For this assignment I took a little trip down to Toys R Us. There were a lot of interesting toys displayed and I stopped to considered what I would have found appealing when I was a child. After ten or fifteen minutes of perusing I decided to evaluate The Hot Wheels Tech Track Set.

There are some interesting aspects about this particular toy but one stands out in my mind, and that is customization. It seems that all the hot wheels sets can be interlocked to form giant complex tracks in which there can be multiple loops, jumps or track crossings where the cars could possibly come to a crashing end. As a college student I have been exposed to a sub-culture of car enthusiasts who enjoy “tricking out” their rides. The same idea crosses over into the Hot Wheels arena. Hot Wheels replicates many of the latest model luxury cars such as Ferrari, Lamborghini, even The H2 Hummer. I do feel that this line of toys has little emphasis on the narrative. I have seen many Hot Wheels commercials and the advertisers throw some story behind the each new track set but it’s emphasis is soon lost when actually playing with each set. But, I don’t feel that this is a bad thing in this case because this set of toys leans more towards hands on interaction. Often time I found it to be more fun to remove sections of the track so the cars would crash. This leads me to think that when a narrative is vague or not present children would use their imaginations to create their own story.

Narration is an important part of play. Toys inspire children to imagine stories. Narrative control can turn a normal child's play set into a fantasyland where children can sense of their world in ways that were not feasible up to date. But absence of narrative can lead children to develop their own stories outside of the bounds of the toys that hey were given.