3 Steps to Creating Nonviolent Storylines for Make-Believe Games

We’ve all heard it, “Moooom!/Daaaad!/Grandmaaaa! (etc.), will you play (dinosaurs/knights/pirates/police, etc.) with me?” At first we might think, “Sure ok! This is what having children in our lives is all about. How hard could it be?” When we were kids, the dinosaurs killed other dinos, the knights killed dragons (and maybe other knights too), the pirates were basically ocean-faring criminals and the police would catch “bad guys”. Simple, right? Except it’s not the (70s, 80s, 90s) anymore (sob!). These days, being an adult playing with a little kid and talking about “bad guys” or “killing” and so on can actually feel really strange, if not, kinda… wrong. (So much so that this is a major reason there are no weapons depicted in our flagship bilingual storybook Little Byron - Xiǎo Bái Rèn - 小白任, which has a pirate theme: the ship has no cannons, and no character is brandishing a sword - only a treasure map!)

Now, some people might have no problem playing something like “the T-rex has a battle with the stegosaurus and guess who becomes lunch for whom” because it’s supposedly the natural order of things. However, the fact remains that making up a role playing game with a little kid on the spot that is sufficiently dramatic and conflict-driven so as to make you feel as though it has some kind of exciting storyline without inserting violence into the mix is surprisingly challenging! So here are our steps to forming alternative storylines - including examples - that may help you steer the game away from violence while still keeping things dramatic, exciting, and engaging.

STEP 1. First, establish the WHO, WHEN and WHERE

This is the easy part and can eat up a significant amount of time if you want to extend the conversation with your little one. This is where you are getting them to set the scene and describe their vision to you. You would ask each other things like:

• Who are you/Who am I? (name, role, relationship to other “characters”)

• What equipment, tools, or useful clothes do I have?

• When does this take place (past, present, future)?

• Where does our game take place? (a fairly realistic, everyday location such as “the bank”, or a general description of an environment such as “a valley*” or “a huge desert*” or “a jungle”, maybe even on a faraway planet!)

* Our book Let's Pretend! - Ràng Wǒmen Jiǎxiǎng - 让 我们 假想! is all about the WHEN and WHERE because it shows multiple examples of nonviolent, adventurous settings and imaginative activities for the characters.

STEP 2. Establish the WHAT and (possibly) the WHY (ie. the mission and possibly the motivation as well)

Establish what the characters want and need, in other words, their core mission which leads them to any action they must take in the game. At this point you might also establish the WHY, but choosing to might depend on the age of the kid you are playing with. In other words, an older kid might be able to come up with the motivation for a character you or they are playing but a younger kid is less likely to if the scenario is more fantasy-like as opposed to everyday-transactional.

An example of an “everyday-transactional” game would be if you are playing ‘hair salon’. Character A’s mission is to get a haircut from Character B because A is the customer and B is the salon owner. Clearly, Character A’s WHY will be that their hair is getting too long! However, in a fantasy scenario such as if Character A and B are warrior princesses living on Planet Sapphire whose duty is to protect their land from all evildoers, drilling down much more into the WHY for those characters would be difficult for a very young kid.

A super basic fantasy-style game I played when I was very little was simply called “witches”. The whole game consisted of my (male, actually) friend and I “hiding” a Kermit the Frog doll I had, then going to another part of the house, cackling like witches and declaring we needed a frog for our cauldron of (soup? stew? potion? ...probably potion), then sneaking about the house, more cackling, then “finding” Kermit, taking him “home” to our lair, and putting him into my plastic Fisher Price play food pot and “cooking” him. That was it. What was the potion for? Couldn’t tell yah. But that was enough for two 4 or 5 year olds! Bottom line: our mission was simply to, “Get that frog, my pretty!”

This calls to mind the kinds of storylines some children’s tv programming use today. If you have young kids who are allowed any amount of screen time, and you stream on Netflix or watch CBC Kids in Canada, you may be familiar with Mighty Express: This is a show all about repetition (which kids often respond very well to, especially if it is one element of a larger playtime experience) and manufactured conflict. For the first five seasons of the show the characters, train engines and humans alike, were always getting themselves into - and then out of - some sort of very avoidable mess of their own making in the span of each episode. (They later introduced an antagonist human and a side-kick engine who tend to have their plans foiled and never truly seem to learn any lessons, which was unfortunate.) Just one example of their self-inflicted drama is in Season 1’s episode “Pop Stars” where the train engine Farmer Faye (the WHO) is supposed to bring a load of popcorn from one location to another for a movie night (the WHERE and WHEN): Faye’s train car filled with said popcorn lacks a lid to secure the load, and the pesky geese characters swoop in to steal her confection cargo (the WHAT) forcing the protagonists to make a series of detours and fix the situation in time to save movie night. If that train car had a lid the whole episode would have been free of conflict; the lack of one made for simple, avoidable, low-stakes drama that is still a major hit with littles. In this fictional world of heightened drama (one character’s catchphrase is “It’s the end of the world!”), no one ever gets hurt yet there is no end of suspense and the resolution always involves perseverance, problem solving, and teamwork.

If you are playing a game such as dinosaurs, pirates, police, knights and so on, not having a good WHAT and/or WHY can really make the game challenging to continue for the adult, less fun for the kid, and way more likely to resort to a violent direction as a means of escalating the action. As a result, the adult may feel strange condoning the violence and overcorrect by trying to provide a fun-killing amount of deeper context (“Ok but WHY is he a ‘bad guy’? Maybe he had a rough childhood and is just really misunderstood. Let’s unpack that…”. “UH NO THANKS, AUNT CHERYL. I JUST WANNA USE MY PRETEND TASER. ZAP!!!”).

The trick here is to come armed with some WHATs and WHYs that don’t require violence but are still sufficiently dramatic. Here are suggestions based on the 7 types of conflict in fiction:

• Person vs. Person: Probably best to avoid this one!

• Person vs. Nature: This is a good one. Think escaping/avoiding/surviving natural disasters like a volcanic eruption, an avalanche, a tornado, a tsunami, etc. Search-and-rescue missions/quests also work well. You can also play it as a team who needs to deliver something valuable such as life saving medicine to a remote location during which you have to cross treacherous terrain with unexpected challenges and setbacks (perhaps not killing wild animals but stealthily avoiding them!). This topic can, of course, be done in a more realistic way (think: Coast Guard team) or as fantasy (think: roving band of medieval travellers, each with their own distinct magic skill, searching for their lost party member).

• Person vs. Society: This would cover topics such as struggling against a tradition, an institution, a law, and so on. Those topics could potentially work with an older kid in that they could imagine scenarios in which the characters struggle to build a better world, but they can also be a bit too abstract. However, saving-the-planet themes in terms of an environmental mission/quest work well here. Playing inventors, scientists, activists or leaders could work.

• Person vs. Technology: Help the humans to keep control of robots! Disabling and reprogramming dangerous, rogue robots is not the same as killing a sentient being.

• Person vs. Supernatural: You might think this could work too, because vampires, werewolves, aliens, and ghosts are not “human”. However, they can have human-like feelings, so this subject area may be challenging to use unless, for example, the scenario is that the aliens have crashed into Earth and need help getting back to their home planet! Playing brave astronauts, genius astrophysicists and engineers, or even just “average Janes and Joes being called to others’ aid in a dramatic turn of their ordinary life’s events” can work perfectly here. (And obviously, trapping mischievous ghosts to prevent them from wreaking havoc on a city is not the same as killing…)

• Person vs. Self: Obviously, internal conflict is hard to make into a good role play game with a little kid. However, playing a game where the motivation is to pay a debt/avoid financial ruin can work. For example, the farmer who will lose her land if she doesn’t come up with a fantastic solution to produce more goods in a short period of time, perhaps rallying her town to help her. Or the entrepreneur who needs a great idea to hit it big. You can also play athletes on a team trying to win a major competition, or daredevils looking to perfect the scariest jump/highest dive or just generally succeed at any extreme sport that puts their physical bodies in some good ‘ol wholesome, weapon-free danger.

 

• Person vs. Destiny (Fate/Luck/God): This one works well for playing scientists and doctors looking to find a cure for a disease in general or a specific person trying to overcome a disease. It can also work well for characters who at first appear destined to perform a certain role in their life (ex. princess) but have to find a way to be accepted as what they think is their true calling; something more fulfilling (zoologist, writer, you name it!). They’d have to convince others who have more power than them (ex. the king and queen) to let them break free and be themselves, perhaps by succeeding at some challenge. This theme is popular with Disney, of course, such as with the movie Brave. One convenient thing about that movie’s example is that the main character has what a kid would consider to be an exciting weapon (bow and arrow) but she uses it to prove she is more than a pretty face by winning a competition, not by killing someone with it!

STEP 3. Fill in the HOW and the WHAT HAPPENS NEXT

This can sometimes be the most challenging step if the child you are playing with has trouble sticking with one main plot, or if they tend to throw in a bunch of content that is contradictory or just plainly does not make any sense (which can happen A LOT)! Ideally, with practice, your child will start to understand the give and take of improvisational games and be able to make more and more “yes and…” type suggestions. Until that happens, when your game hits a roadblock you can try things like pausing the action to ask the child lots and lots of questions which may help them realise which of their suggestions don’t work, even when a game is 100 percent imaginary, or may inspire them to come up with creative solutions which remove previous roadblocks.

Some final tips and thoughts:

Of course, our first love for story inspiration will always be children’s books, but the right children’s television programming can provide a quick and plentiful go-to source. If you have very young kids and are not in the market for “conflict” in your storylines, per se, but do want a touch of drama, Daniel Tiger (available on PBS Kids, CBC Gem, and with limited episodes available on other platforms) has great jumping-off-point scenarios like “playing restaurant” or “playing farm” (maybe someone gets the wrong order at the restaurant, or a chicken goes missing at the farm, etc). For a good mix of some everyday transactional scenarios as well as more high-stakes storylines, the Australian tv series Bluey (streamable on Disney+) offers bite-sized episodes filled with wholesome humour the whole family can appreciate. And, as mentioned above, the majority of Mighty Express (created for Netflix) is all about something-went-wrong-now-we-have-to-fix-it situations that can provide a great deal of dramatic flare minus anyone being mean or getting hurt.

Another storyline concept that can simultaneously heighten the drama and give you a set parameter for the time the game takes is a “race against the clock” scenario. With very little set-up in terms of the time it takes you to get through the 3 Steps above, you can create an exciting, fast-paced game where a problem arises, an objective needs to be accomplished, and the resolution is dependent on achieving the objective within a time limit. Bluey’s Season 3 episode 20, “Driving”, is a perfect example of this. The mum character can only take a few moments to play between all the things dividing her attention when Bluey asks her to “play driving”. At first, simply driving around is all Bluey is after, and Mum grows tired of the game quickly. Bluey switches over to hosting a tea party, and realizes she can give her mum a task to accomplish which will suit her better than just driving in circles. They come up with a scenario where Bluey has one very grumpy guest (a cat) who will scratch up the curtains if she doesn’t get almond milk for her tea in the next five minutes. They put a timer on Mum’s phone, Mum is a car, Bluey is the driver, and they race off to the shop: There are twists and turns and bumps and hills and weather and closed shops and roadwork to deal with on the journey, all contributing to a thrilling, laugh-filled micro-play for mum and daughter that fills Bluey’s emotional bucket to the brim and of course they achieve their objective (in the nick of time).

Lastly, If you really want to prevent the use of violence in an imaginary game, you can make the mission more challenging for the characters by having them lose any weapons they had at the very beginning and never get them back, requiring them to use their ingenuity to avoid danger instead (in other words, the “Macgyver” method, basically).

We hope this helps you revel in the wonderful, weird world inside your child’s brain, and that nobody has to be “impaled-and-die-but-it’s-OK-cuz-it’s–pretend” for the story to arrive at a dramatic, climactic, and satisfying conclusion!

Shoot over (nonviolently, lol) to this link to grab our cheat sheet summarizing the 3 steps and standard 7 types of conflict in fiction plus our associated play-scenario examples for you to draw from at a glance.

What’s your go-to playing-pretend game right now? Tag us on social media @littlecrabpress to share it or the tools/toys that get the most use during your family’s imaginative play sessions. We’d also love to know which of your favourite kids’ books bring the drama but leave out the violence.

Happy Make-Believing!