You remember knex?

Quite honestly, playing with knex and legos as a kid was way more entertaining then any other video game, movie, song, or otherwise I've ever partaken of in my life. I mean I could create anything I wanted and dream up any device that I saw fit. I could make entire universes and make the story lines go however I wanted. I could literally just play inventor/god for hours/days/months/years, and watch heroes fight the mightiest of foes or watch them fly the coolest of spacecraft, and live in the coolest of houses, all that I designed completely on my own. 

Now I've grown up considerably, and as I've been doing so, I went through a gaming phase. I could sit and watch as I controlled the mightiest of heroes fight kinda cool bad guys and race in kinda alright looking cars, and live through the decent story lines. All the while I was trying to do the exact same thing I did as a kid, I was just role playing with much lamer characters and elements along with the fact that I had no control over anything whatsoever besides whether the main character dies or not, or more realistically; how many times the main character died. Same thing with watching movies, the only difference is that this time you don't have control over pretty much anything! 

So basically we never really grew up. We matured to the point where it was unacceptable to obsess so much over fantasy things, which was the entirety of our imaginative selves, and to do so we stopped creating, but instead of grounding ourselves in reality, we kept obsessing, and instead of making use of the obsession and creating things like we did as kids, we sit down and live in pre-packaged fantasy. 

We watch and play things that are just as unrealistic, fantasy, or epic as we created as kids, except we aren't creating them anymore, were just bathing in them. So we really didn't mature did we? We actually took a step down, demoting ourselves from our aspiring god-like status to lazy couch-potato, and kept indulging in the very thing we set out to grow out of.

So why is it totally cool for me to get on the computer and play Starcraft or something like that, and really really not okay for me to pull out all my favorite childhood action figures and have an imaginary action figure adventure? It sounds completely stupid and childish, but other then the fact you'd be ignoring the label "For ages 6 to 12" the real difference is a habit of creation and a habit of indulgence. The kids are creating your entertainment, and you are indulging in it. By "kids" I mean grown men and women with heads buzzing full of strange ideas, writing them onto paper, drawing them, acting them, and animating them. 

Sure though, as far as we know, you can't make a living playing with knex and action figures, but you can't make a real living watching movies and playing video games either. Then why aren't there more movie or video game developers out there? Why aren't people realizing that they have just as much right to create that they did as kids, and just because they can't do it with kids toys, doesn't mean they can't do it with a computer, a wrench, a hammer, a pencil, a paintbrush, a welder, a guitar, a piano, your own ability to move, a glue gun, or a video camera. Or if your gutsy enough and somehow know a way to keep yourself alive and healthy with it, do it with knex again.

Anyway... 

The difference between adulthood and childhood is that we stopped creating and started indulging.