#oneaday Day 36: Imaginative Play

Playing around with Honey Select Unlimited Extend yesterday reminded me in many ways of how I used to play with toys growing up.

Obviously I'm not talking about the explicit sex scenes or anything; I am, instead, referring to the Studio NEO app and the Honey Unlimited Studio software that came before it. These pieces of the overall Honey Select experience are nothing if not pure, true digital dollhouses — they provide you with a selection of environments, some "dolls" to play with (bonus: you get to design them yourself!) and no objective whatsoever besides letting your imagination run riot.

When I was a kid, I liked to spend any time that I wasn't playing video games with toys that stoked the imagination — toys that allowed you to set up some sort of situation, and then explore it somehow. I was particularly fond of anything that had lots of "bits" that you could arrange in various ways to create dioramas; I'd try and imagine how those components would come together, how they might move, how they might interact and what their "story" might be.

A favourite of mine was a set of toys called Manta Force. This consisted of three main playsets: the large Manta Force "mothership", which contained a variety of air, sea and land vehicles along with little figures to put in them; the Red Venom "mothership" for the "bad guys", which was very much along the same lines, and the Manta Force Battle Fortress, which was the most interactive of the three, featuring targets you could fire discs at to catapult vehicles and people off platforms, working guns of various sizes and a pleasing sense of "solidity". I never owned Red Venom, but both the original Manta Force and the Battle Fortress had enough "Venom" figures to allow you to set up a few villainous situations.

When I played with Manta Force, I'd get down on the floor with it and play with it "up close". I'd try to imagine the vehicles life-size, like I was right there with the little coloured figures that represented Manta Force's air, sea and land specialist troops. I'd make sounds, I'd make up stories, I'd perform dialogue. I must have looked like a right cock. But I enjoyed myself.

Despite this, some part of me was always slightly aware that I was playing with a toy; this stuff wasn't real, I couldn't really get into the ship and see things from the perspective of the little spacemen and, as much as I wanted to, I couldn't really fly, drive or dive in the smaller vehicles. I wished that there was a way I could shrink myself down and play in "their world", but I couldn't. So I made do.

Now, here's where stuff like Honey Select comes in. While I'm not quite "inhabiting" that world in full 3D like I really want to, I am afforded the opportunity to get up much more close and have much more control than I would have done with my childhood toys. I can move my viewpoint wherever I want, I can pose the characters however I want, I can imply whatever interactions I like by placing them in various circumstances.

In short, when I fire up Studio NEO or Honey Unlimited Studio before it, I'm finally able to pretty much realise those dreams I had when I was a kid. Okay, I'm playing with pretty girls rather than spacemen, but really, the context doesn't matter all that much; the thing I enjoyed with my childhood toys wasn't sci-fi spacemen pewpewpew, it was the simple joy of expressing myself and exploring my imagination. Don't tell anyone, but I actually kind of envied the female friends I had as a kid; I always sort of liked the idea of toys like Barbie as they were prime material for imaginative play. But I also know that if I'd had Barbies as a boy in the '80s, I would have been beaten up at school even more than I was already, so it's probably for the best.

Oh well. I can make up for it now with my digital dolls. And I'm certain I will!