There’s a cemetery next to my house, and I walk my dog through it everyday. I try to stay alive to the world around me, looking out for interesting names on the graves, strangely shaped tombstones, or unusually long or short spans between the date of birth and death. But sometimes you’re in your own head and stop paying attention. When I walked through that cemetery with my niece last year, she noticed all the things I didn’t. I felt younger because, in her eyes, the world was mysterious and strange again.
Regular, mundane activities — the kinds you do everyday — look different when you do them with a kid. I remembered that again this weekend, when I introduced my two eldest nieces to Astro Bot.
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Astro Bot Is Simple. Or Is It?
When I play Astro Bot myself, it seems simple. It’s a game where, most of the time, you’re only working with four straightforward verbs. You can run, jump, punch, and spin. There are other, infrequent actions like tugging on cords, but even then, you’re only using three buttons — the left stick, X, and Square. While playing the game with my nieces, I realized how much more there is to the game that, usually, is invisible to me.
They’re seven and eight, and though they’ve played some N64 with their parents, most of their experience with games is through iPad games. That means touch controls, so they have almost no experience with a thing that anyone who plays games with a modern controller learns to do: controlling the camera. If you play video games, you do this without thinking about it. It’s like breathing or walking, something you have to do to accomplish other, more complicated actions, but which doesn’t take up any brain space.
If you record gameplay or play with someone else in the room, you may find yourself thinking about how to perform the camera to highlight cool shots or just to make it smooth. The awkwardness you feel then only highlights how second nature it is most of the time.
Technical Difficulties
For kids (or adults, like my dad, who don’t play many console games), controlling the camera is difficult. This wasn’t as much of a problem in earlier 3D games because, paradoxically, the camera controls were a lot worse. The game handled a lot of the heavy-lifting for you, positioning the viewpoint where it needed to be or giving you a limited range of options to pick from. Super Mario 64 had a similar perspective to Astro Bot, but it turned the camera in set increments instead of giving you total control.
If you’re a habitual gamer, returning to that kind of control scheme in 2025 can be difficult because you have to give up control. If you have no experience using R3 to frame your perspective, the old way is easier because it’s one less thing your hands need to be doing.
While playing Astro Bot, my nieces only turned the camera when they absolutely needed to. They’d run into a wall and lose sight of Astro completely and get stuck. Only then, out of necessity, would they try to turn the camera.
These sessions left me thinking about Astro Bot’s camera quite a bit. That’s weird, because I hundred percent-ed the game last year and don’t remember thinking about it once. If you play a lot of games, cameras are only notable when they’re doing something strange. Pikmin 4 and Baldur’s Gate 3 stuck out because they, weirdly, handled their camera in the same way — allowing for up-close third-person and long range isometric.
More recently, Lost Records has made an impression because it shifts between third-person and first-person depending on if you’re in the 1990s or the 2020s. But when you see the world through a kid’s eyes, the invisible stuff stops being invisible. I understand the game better after playing it with two people who didn’t understand it at all.
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