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This Disney Video Game Managed To Renew My Love Of Video Games In An Unexpected Way
I have been playing video games almost my entire life, and, as a result, I’ve grown incredibly familiar with almost every facet of them. In fact, I’m so entrenched in the medium that I’ve made writing about it my literal living. What was once a mere fancy, a hobby I dabbled in during the blissful ignorance of my childhood, has become an all-consuming part of my very being. Naturally, this has led to many periods of burnout and the occasional worry that my love for video games, the culture surrounding them, and the industry that produces them is unsustainable and will, eventually, wane.
Most recently, I found myself undergoing a rather serious bout of depression, something that more or less renders any interest I have in hobbies, gaming included, null and void. When this happens, I find it increasingly difficult to remain invested in any game, let alone the 100+ JRPGs I typically play, and so I tend to avoid them while I attempt to address my emotional well-being. During this recent spell, I found it harder than ever before to connect with video games on a meaningful level, and I felt catastrophically gloomy about the whole affair. Fortunately, a Disney video game, one I have never shown an ounce of interest in at any point in my life, came along and restored my love of video games. That game was Disney Dreamlight Valley, and its solution to filling my heart with a little bit of joy came in a very unexpected way.
Disney Dreamlight Valley Reminded Me Of Why I Love Video Games
One evening, after a long day spent lamenting my fading love of video games, my wife decided it was finally time to play Disney Dreamlight Valley, a game I had bought for her on the Nintendo Switch months prior. Her limited experience with video games extends to a deep love of The Sims 3 when she was younger, a few rounds of Blood Bowl 2 with me, inexplicably, and a brief flirtation with Don’t Starve. Her eclectic taste in video games, as bizarre and varied as they may be, never included any of what I’d refer to as traditional video games, ones in which a general understanding of basic video game conventions is required.
She had never had to deal with both moving a character around and simultaneously controlling the camera, nor understood what grind meant, why fetch quests were regarded as tedious, or any number of rules that I now take for granted. Naturally, I was excited for her to finally give the game a go, and so I handed her the Switch and offered to hang around in case she needed any help. I promise I wasn’t attempting to mansplain Disney Dreamlight Valley to her, but rather was curious as to how she’d acclimate to those aforementioned gaming conventions.
What unfolded before me over the next hour or so was miraculous. Her exploration of the many facets of video games, of the concepts, ideas, mechanics, and spectacle that I have become numb to, was filled with unbridled joy, curiosity, and excitement. She questioned everything, found some things frustrating, only to overcome her qualms and come to terms with what the game required of her, enjoyed so much more, and found value in the simple things. The short track that played whenever she accomplished something brought a smile to her face; meeting the various characters and discovering their varied behavioural patterns was mesmerising to her; even the way the game looked, running the original Switch, immersed her in a whole new way.
I left her to it after a short while and returned to playing my own game, something I had been growing weary of ever since having started it. A few hours later, she came into the room and gleefully showcased everything she had discovered, declaring Disney Dreamlight Valley to be the very best cozy game ever made, and eager to go back and play more. It was a refreshing sight to behold such joy, an emotion untainted by the burdens of modern gaming, the despairing news coming out of the industry, and the expectations established after years of continuous engagement with the same medium. Her experience filled me with a renewed sense of vigor and a passion to rediscover why I fell in love with video games in the first place.
It Is Important To Remind Ourselves Of Why Games Are So Great
I remember when video games brought me that level of joy. When I was very young, and my parents had announced we’d be getting an Xbox 360 for Christmas, years after it had released, my sibling and I watched endless gameplay clips of Skyrim on YouTube in preparation. The feature that stood out above all else wasn’t the ridiculously immersive open-world, the strikingly beautiful visuals, the exciting combat, or the varied customization. It was the ability to spin a 3D model around while the game loaded the next location. That genuinely blew my mind, and, until my wife played Disney Dreamlight Valley, I had forgotten why.
There is a beauty in the deceptively simple aspects of video games. The way the camera glides around your character, the sounds of footsteps crunching in the snow as you climb a mountain, the swaying of trees, the satisfying sounds of a well-designed UI, the chirping of birds as you venture through a forest, the clever and intuative placement of buttons on a PlayStation 5 controller, the ability to spin a 3D model around in a loading screen. We often take it all for granted, and that’s a problem. Forgetting about why the little things used to impress us establishes higher and higher expectations that are harder to achieve.
Nowadays, it simply isn’t enough to be good. Everything has to be great, everything has to be innovative, it has to make us feel deeply one way or another, to inspire us. It is exhausting expecting everything to be the best game ever made simply because I have lost touch with the value in the simple, in the basic, in the very things that years ago impressed a much younger and happier version of me. Seeing just how much joy those simple aspects of gaming brought my wife, how excited she got when I told her Disney Dreamlight Valley’s Switch 2 version was launching soon, reminded me that I desperately need to break out of this cycle.
I have, in the past, been inspired by life-changing games, but this random Disney game somehow managed to fix something that was fundamentally broken inside of me. I won’t lie and say that whenever I play a video game now, I sit in awe as I move my character and camera at the same time. However, I do, every so often, find myself reveling in the little details, reminded of that day my wife first played Disney Dreamlight Valley. I find myself appreciating the hobby more, approaching it from a place of kindness, of acceptance, of a desire to try something new, even if it ends up being just okay. Because, at the end of the day, even the most average experiences have little moments of joy worth unpacking.
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