Jib and I have been playing Moon this winter break, partly for research and partly because it’s a game that I’ve been meaning to play for a long time. In the first few hours of the game, I felt a strong sense of what it was like to be a child. In Moon you play as a young boy who, after falling through the TV into an RPG world, lives with a granny who, depressingly, thinks that he is her grandchild that died in a mysterious tragic accident. You follow in the footsteps of the world’s “Hero,” rescuing the souls of “monsters” that the Hero has slain.
There’s something to be said about this disconnect between the “adult” world and the world that the boy exists in, and how that leads one to feel childlike, so I’ll say it, even though I don’t think that that is actually the biggest contributor to the feeling. In Moon, there exists a world that you have very little understanding of, and very little access to, and the same seems to be true of the world that the boy operates in, for the adults. You rescue souls that no one else in the world seems to be able to understand or see, as you introduce yourself to townsfolk you hear snippets of the story of a child who died tragically years ago who looks just like you that everyone waves away because you’re too young and you’re new in town. People ignore corpses laying in their houses, and at night you dream of a god of love that encourages you to save them. This existence of a world that you don’t understand, and the active creation, conscious or not, of one that you do seems to be one pillar of a childlike feeling. It’s something comforting, reminiscent of the safety of childhood, where we’re protected from things we don’t understand by adults, and create fantasies that explain them based on what little we do know.
I do think that this sense of separation from the adult world contributes to the childlike feeling of playing Moon, but I did notice that as I played more, that feeling began to fade. Moon has a time passage mechanic where if the player is awake for too long, they will pass out and reset from their last save. As you rescue monsters by collecting their souls, the amount of time that you are able to stay awake is extended, up to several full day to night cycles. As time passes, a small clock in the corner of the screen ticks forward, with your deadline marked by a red arrow. I think that this hard restriction on time, which fades as the game progresses, contributes even more to the childlike feeling when playing Moon than the separation from the adult world. Of course, even as adults we have restrictions on our time. They may not be as strict as a little kid’s bedtime, but they do still exist. The true childlike feeling comes not just when time is restrained, but when it feels infinite at the same time.
In Moon, there is a ticking clock day by day that controls how long you can stay awake, but there is no countdown to some major plot event, and no deadline for rescuing every monster. Though you must return home to sleep before you reach your limit, you are free to move at your own pace. Maybe you can rescue a monster in one day, but if you walk to it, try one method to save it, fail, and head back home, you have as many more days of trial and error as you need. This sense of time being restricted yet infinite, to me, mirrors my childhood, where I had strict limits imposed on my day-to-day time by my parents, teachers, and the structure created for children' s lives by the adult world, but I never considered the broader passage of time in the way that I do now. I remember that even when I graduated from high school, I was completely shocked that my life had even reached that point. It was simply not a horizon I had seriously considered, even when applying for college, because of how I processed time. Such a disregard for the passage of time even so late in life might be unique to me, but I do think it holds true for many people in their childhood.
When aiming to make people feel “childlike,” I think we need to be wary of nostalgia. I don’t think that nostalgia works as a gimmick, because even original things that people feel nostalgic for don’t live up to that feeling. Nostalgia functions similarly to horror, in that it is strongest when it exists mostly in the imagination. Once it’s no longer a prospect and actually exists, it rarely lives up to expectations. Nostalgia tends to erase friction and hardship, and to highlight only the peaks of past experiences. Often, nostalgia is more related to the conditions in which one experienced that which they are nostalgic for than anything else. That is why, in order to make one feel childlike, I feel it is better to evoke those very conditions rather than to imitate what existed within them. In Moon, the separation from the adult world (in both directions) and restricted yet infinite time create a distinct childlike feeling. I do wonder how much of my personal experience influences that feeling, but I’m not a psychologist. My mom is though so I could ask her.