Gifts rapped
Toys are trashy and expensive, says Anthony Horowitz, and many children will have discarded their Christmas presents by the end of this month 1 t's easy to tell when Christmas is over. Dead fir trees, dumped overnight, pile up in local parks and on common land. Huge hoardings go up advertising Creme Eggs. And all those toys, wrapped with such optimism and torn open with such fervour, are finally abandoned, broken and unwanted, at the back of the bedroom cupboard. Some don't even make it to the end of January.
Is it my imagination, or are toys much less fun than they used to be? Toy is a small word for an industry worth £2 billion that covers everything from dolls and jigsaws to board games and building bricks. Stand in any modern toy shop and you will quickly see that most of them boil down to pretty much the same three or four ingredients: cardboard, paper and brightly coloured plastic with the occasional elastic band thrown in for added excitement. Their nasty, mass-produced nature needs little investigation. Made in Taiwan, China, Thailand . . . all the usual suspects are there, raising the spectre of children slaving away on one side of the world for the pleasure of their better-off counterparts on the other.
Disappointment starts with the toy shops themselves. We may have fond memories of 'a shop window full of alluring objects, magic balls, magic hens, wonderful cones, ventriloquist dolls.. . ' and the slightly unworldly shop man: 'a curious, sallow, dark man, with one ear larger than the other and a chin like the toe-cap of a boot; But we will have to search hard to find H.G. Wells's Magic Shop today. The high-street stores are nearly all chains, and lurking round the corner is that scowling giant, Toys'R'Us, with 1,600 stores worldwide and 9,000 different products on the shelves. Parents will know that shopping in their vast, neon-lit warehouses, with toys packed from floor to ceiling and few staff around apart from the bored, low-paid checkout girls, is an experience utterly devoid of magic.
Of course, nobody now buys toys for their aesthetic qualities. It's the ideas that count. But the ideas are frequently feeble, not helped by the fact that many toy-makers go in for massive over-claiming on the boxes. Take one random example, a mountaineering game called Extreme Rock Climbing that promises 'heart-pounding, nail-biting, freeclimbing thrills' — on sale at £19.99. The contents turn out to be a plastic cliff, two small dolls and two magnets that fit over your fin
ger. The aim is to use the magnets to drag the dolls up the plastic. Will little Jimmy really imagine himself hanging by his fingertips from Kilimanjaro as he plays this? I rather doubt it.
The best games are generally the oldest. Monopoly, still the world bestseller, was invented in 1934. Barbie (currently engaged in a fight-to-the-death with a more delinquent gang of Bratz) can be described quite literally as a little old lady. She first appeared in 1959. Then there's Lego (1934), Cluedo (1947), Scrabble (1948), Risk (1959) and Uno (1971). Even Trivial Pursuit, arguably the last great board game, celebrates its quarter-centenary this year. There's still Etch A Sketch (invented 1960) scratching away at aluminium powder and glass beads and leaving behind traces of old pictures the more it is used. And dozens of games still rely on a device invented in 700 Bc: a pair of dice.
Refurbishment often seems to mean simply taking the old format and adapting it to the current craze. You enjoyed Lord of the Rings? Well now you can play it with special versions of Trivial Pursuit, Risk and Monopoly. There are also jigsaws, trading cards and a range of specially designed board games. Nothing wrong with that if children want to find new ways to immerse themselves in Tolkien's world, but inevitably the whiff of exploitation fills the air. Another random example from my local high street, Junior Scrabble, is on the shelf for £14.99. But next to it you can find Disney Scrabble (Play the world's most popular word game as you immerse yourself in the wonderful world of Disney') for an amazing £29.99. True, it has special Mickey Mouse-shaped tiles and 'pixie-dusted racks' but can this really justify the price hike? And to add insult to injury, the cover shows various words being formed: ALICE, ARIEL and TINK. Even the first of these wouldn't be accepted under Scrabble rules, but of course they're Disney characters. Was fun or indoctrination uppermost in the creators' minds?
Consider the Hany Potter books and toys. As the success of the books soared, the market was flooded with yet more molten plastic. The Harry Potter Potion Maker, the Whomping Willow, the Slime Chamber and, at an eye-watering £39.99, the Levitating Challenge were just a few examples. But there was something of a backlash against both the prices and the games. Pieces were missing. The toys didn't fit together. Even when they worked, they were uninventive. Seven thousand Potion Bottle key rings had to be recalled in America because they were leaking petroleum distillates. The facts speak for themselves. We'll still be reading the books to our grandchildren. But many of the toys — created outside Rowling's control — have already been discontinued.
But there has been one huge change in Toytown. Computer games haven't grown out of traditional toys, even if Monopoly, Cluedo and many others are now available on CD. Should parents worry about children abandoning the fireside for locked rooms and long, solitary hours in front of the screen, maiming, mutilating and murdering their way through their empty virtual life? Professor Jeffrey Goldstein is a psychologist at the University of Utrecht, studying what he rather charmingly calls 'what people do when they don't have to'. He is unconcerned. 'There is a social element to these games, even though the children may be playing alone in their rooms. They talk about the games at school. They use them in much the same way as men use sport_ They need to be experts.'
Nor does he worry about the amount of violence that has supplanted the more innocent pursuits of traditional games. 'They may imitate the behaviour they see on the screen — martial arts, for example. But it's a pretend fight. They're laughing and smiling. Observers think they're fighting. Whether these games stimulate "aggressive play" is an open question.' In fact, Professor Goldstein doesn't even accept that toys have in any way declined. 'You strike me as one of those adults who lament the loss of a childhood they thought they once had. Who believe that nothing is as nice as it was. But things are different. It's a losing battle to want children to have the same as us.'
But that's not true. By and large, children have it much better than us. They travel and ski. They have rollerblades and surfboards and a huge variety of recreational choices. There are new and wonderful chocolate bars, Mars bar ice-creams, great films, more music, better clothes. But when the plastic back falls off a toy the day after it's been opened, or a 'heart-pounding adventure' turns out to be just another rip-off, I find myself reaching for my gun . . . even if the pop variety is the only one to hand.
Anthony Horowitz is the author of the Alex Rider series.
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