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Introduction
Happy Little Dinosaurs offers a fun and engaging gameplay experience for children with its cute visuals and versatile rules. It is a social game where players get to go against friends, family or even strangers. It is defnintely a game of wits and can bring much joy among players, even strengthening bonds between them. With that, there are various aspects of Happy Little Dinosaurs that can bring pedagogical benefits to the children playing the game, enveloped with various cognitive benefits and social learning.
Object Play
While engaging and playing with objects, it is seen that children interacting and manipulating objects while playing will lead to benefits in social, physical and cognitive aspects (White, 2012). In the midst of playing and interaction with the object, children will be able to learn about the essence of objects and develop their creativity and problem-solving skills in STEM fields.
Cognitive Development
Through play, children get creative and imaginative when it comes to interacting with the objects (White, 2012). In this case, it builds a good foundation for children to learn how to deal with different situations and think of strategies for problem-solving. This is evident in Happy Little Dinosaurs as it heavily imposes potential for critical thinking. As players are required to deal cards and prevent themselves from "disasters", risk assessment, predictions and strategic planning is involved in the game. With that, children gets to understand the relationships between cards, and manipulating their decisions based on their situation to gain an advantage over their opponents. As seen in Scarlett's interaction with the game, she chooses cards with a higher value to gain an upperhand in comparison to other players. This further pushes children to think about their choices and form reasoning for their choices, ultimately developing their problem solving and strategic thinking skills.
Convergent and Divergent Problem Solving
As research shows that children that engaged with divergent toys, generally do well with both convergent and divergent problems, showcasing high abilities in coming up with flexible ways in problem solving (White, 2012). Diving into this, Happy Little Dinosaurs imposes a set of rules while still allowing for a vast and flexible nature of play. This not only pushes for convergent problem-solving, but also many opportunities for divergent problem-solving. During gameplay, adaptability is important for players as they respond to different scenarios with their set of cards on-hand. Happy Little Dinosaurs is a well-balanced hybrid of convergent and divergent thinking where children will work around situations and rules to gain the best outcome for themselves. This game provides children with a great overall learning experience with problem-solving.
Economic Theory, Marxism and Material Culture
The gameplay and framework of Happy Little Dinosaurs closely mirrors the capitalist dynamics of the real-world. With the usage of cards in dealing with disasters, it reflects real-world phenomenons of competition, sabotage and survival skills.
From a Marxist perspective, class conflict is inevitable as long as there is an unequal distribution of resources (Berger, 2016). As society is built and consists of differences in various aspects, including differences in social class, racial background, economic background and many more. Wealth and resources will never be distributed equally among people on Earth, which leads to class conflicts where some people will be exploited in the benefit of others. Happy Little Dinosaurs introduces a stripped down version of this idea very early on in the game, where there are different dinosaurs has traits with different attributes that react differently to different scenarios. For example, if a player is playing as the "Nervous Rex", they will need to add one point when faced with a "Predatory Disaster" and subtract one point when it's faced with a "Emotional Disaster". This shows that players are plays with a predetermined set of attributes depending on their dinosaurs and it functions similarly to how people come from different backgrounds and ties into the Marxism view on capitalism and the unfair distribution of resources, affecting different individuals.
Sociological Analysis
Happy Little Dinosaurs is a board game that can be analysed through various sociological aspects. This could provide more insights to its functions as a game in a broader perspective.
Functional: Evoke social interaction, competition, strategic thinking and entertainment for players.
Dysfunctional: Competitive gameplay might result in fallout of relationships and damage personal feelings.
Non-Functional: Not Found
Functional Alternatives: Other games that involve strategic thinking (Ex. Exploding Kittens, Among Us)
Manifest Function: Social board game designed for friends and family.
Latent Function: Subtle factors like gambling and risk-taking, it also reinforces humor in disasters with the way it is presented.
Limitations
Happy Little Dinosaurs imposes some limitations in gameplay. Firstly, it could make children playing the game feel frustrated as it involves luck in drawing cards. Children that do not take it well may find it unfair for the game to be built in this way, leading to an unpleasant experience. Throwing tantrums will also bring negative effects among players as it could ruin or damage bonds when playing the game. Also, some aspects of this game is slightly more complex, which could impose hardships for the game to be played among children only. It is more beneficial for children playing the game with their older siblings or even their parents as adults provide a different perspective of the game in terms of strategic play, which can be a great learning experience for children playing with them.
Conclusion
All in all, Happy Little Dinosaurs provides children with a great experience not only in gameplay, but also in cognitive development and learning about the world through play. As explored, Happy Little Dinosaurs presents children with a strong platform to develop their critical thinking and problem solving skills. Through this game, there are real-world implications that children can pick up from this as well. There is a focus of economics and Marxism when it comes to a pre-determined role of dinosaurs, just like how social status and resource allocation works in the real world. Children get to relate to these social phenomenons through the game in a lighthearted manner. Lastly, Happy Little Dinosaurs presents some limitations when it comes to dealing with the emotional aspect of the game. Nonetheless, children playing this game will definitely learn a lot of skills while having fun along the way. As seen from the interactions with Scarlett, this game imposes good fun between friends and family while encourages strategic thinking within gameplay.
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