I agree with Chugway in a sense that a 30 year old is much different mentally than a 10 year old. Of course we can still play with our toys, just not in the same manner as a 10 year old would do. For instance, my 10 year old self just LOVED spring loaded missiles, and loved to fire them at anything and everything. Now, I can't stand spring loaded missiles because they are redundant, very weak in power, and usually takes away from the appearance of the gun that it fires from. For me, I transform them, fiddle with them, probably tweak them and mod them to make them better too. I will never grow out of playing with transformers, just my methods will change over time.
I don't "play" with them but I will transform them, find cool poses for them, and sometime do make gun shot sounds.
For what it's worth if you do read the thread some time, i didn't accuse anybody of having learning difficulties. Hopefully the follow-up posts explaining in more detail why i think that and clarifying the point further helped soften the blow for you, but i stand by my original comment one hundred percent! Patterns of play may have superficial similarities, and we transformers fans may well think that we're free-thinking toy hedonists embracing our potent inner child as we plink at Legends figures with spring-loaded launchers and making PEW! PEW! noises, but simply by merit of no longer being children our play is different to that of a child. I could write pages and pages of perfectly lucent examples of why a whole bunch of factors - driven primarily by, but not limited to, age - affect our very concept of play on every single level, but in the end it'd still boil down to otherwise intelligent posters reading one sentence, deciding they don't agree and thinking "stop spoiling the forum for the rest of us, troll". It's incredibly frustrating tbh.
While I really haven't done it in a while, I miss playing with them so much. Back in the days of Armada I had Smokescreen as a sniper with his massive cannon of doom powering up while the guys up front made sure to buy him enough time to start peppering the battlefield. I hardly cared about show accuracy or anything as long as the figures were easy to transform back and forth. Now a days the transformations for the accurate figures get a bit tedious and are time consuming, which would hurt their play value. I can certainly see myself going about playing with a more adult demeanor as my imagination never seems to stop tinkering. Though most of the time its just me imagining battles instead of picking up figures and the like, but sometimes I really, really want to.
Absolutely - that's the coolest thing about the whole concept of 'play', there is no right or wrong way to go about it. To avoid the obvious cruder example, it's like sitting and noodling away with a guitar for your own amusement. only with little plastic robots.
I fiddle with them a bit, pose them, and if I have time and motivation, I photograph them for my webcomic. That's my excuse to 'play' with them. I don't set them up, all like 'pew pew pew'.
Yup, same here. Try to find new poses to put them in and rearrange and what not for display after transforming back and forth. Current fave to do this with is Springer (Warbot). Finally got his transforms down.
I don't play with my toys. I enjoy collecting them and appreciate what I had as a kid in the 80s. However, I do transform them to get the pose I want for display purposes.
I'm not quite 25 yet, but all the same, I still play with my toys. There's no merit in getting into a psychological debate over whether an adult and a child play the same way. I do know that besides just picking up a couple of figures and transforming them back and forth, I do frequently outright play with them. Epic battles, storytelling; my playing might not possess the same imaginative innocence as that of a kid, but I think my imagination is still well intact, thank you. I just have fun. And what good are toys if you can't have fun with them?
Exactly, I was far from being a child (at least by age) when Transformers where introduced. So my "Play" is mostly in my imagination, not on the floor.
Agreed. What I don't get is why some peeps buy it and leave it in the box. I mean, I understand it's to preserve the figures integrity, but....HOW CAN YOU RESIST NOT OPENING IT?!!?!! I keep my Star Wars figures on the card, but they don't do anything but sit there and look pretty anyway, so might as well just keep it on the card. Transformers is a completely different story though, can't resist playing with them.
"Critics who treat 'adult' as a term of approval, instead of as a merely descriptive term, cannot be adult themselves. To be concerned about being grown up, to admire the grown up because it is grown up, to blush at the suspicion of being childish; these things are the marks of childhood and adolescence. And in childhood and adolescence they are, in moderation, healthy symptoms. Young things ought to want to grow. But to carry on into middle life or even into early manhood this concern about being adult is a mark of really arrested development. When I was ten, I read fairy tales in secret and would have been ashamed if I had been found doing so. Now that I am fifty I read them openly. When I became a man I put away childish things, including the fear of childishness and the desire to be very grown up." — C.S. Lewis I'm about 3-4 years away from 25, but yes, I do occasionally pew-pew with my toys.
I'm almost 20, not 25 yet. I don't think most people over the age of, I don't know, a junior high school student plays with their toys as vigorously as they did as a kid. However, I find nothing really wrong with playing and imagining things once in a little while (it reminds me of the Seinfeld episode where they basically "drug" a woman with food to play with her deceased dad's toys ). I'm just hesitant to take things off the shelf, because I like displaying them and putting them back after playing with them is too much work...
I was just watching The 40 Year Old Virgin last night and this thread reminded me of what Andy said. "This is IRON MAN! I got this when I was six years old! Do you know how hard it is for a kid NOT TO OPEN this?" It's like, why buy a car that your never going to drive?
I'm twenty God damn years old and I still play with my toys from time-to-time. Not like big, grand battles on the carpet while I make noises with my mouth, but I pick them up, transform them, pose them around, maybe if I feel like it there'll be a scrap on the desk, but I still play with them rather than let them collect dust. Besides, I use my floor to play with my dog.
