My 2014 in gaming: Introducing my four-year-old daughter to Fable III

My four-year-old daughter turned to me, brown curls whipping around her face, her fist raised and holding an invisible sword. “I am a warrior! I do not sleep! I have no home.” Then she leaped down from her mushroom stool before charging headlong into her bedroom to put on her pajamas.

I looked at my wife. “Look,” I said, “I don’t care what she says, as long as she gets ready for bed.”

I suspect Fable III played something of a role in this. Fable III, a role-playing game from the visionary Peter Molyneux, is famous for its down-for-whatever social interactions and one-button-does-all gameplay. Those are at least a couple of the reasons why my kid latched onto it so easily.

No, Fable III isn't a new game. It came out in 2010, the year my daughter was born. But I didn’t introduce her to the fantastical world of Albion until 2014, the year she started going bananas for warrior-princesses.

So on Fable III’s character selection screen, my daughter smiled as she skipped over the handsome male protagonist and selected the woman in the beautiful aristocrat’s dress. The narrator intoned, “Of course; the Princess.” My daughter usually avoids conflict in video games, quickly handing me the controller if even the soundtrack hints that trouble could be brewing.

But that didn’t happen with Fable III. My daughter learned what button to push on the Xbox controller to raise up a magical ring of fire around her feet (“It’s red-button magic, Daddy”), which satisfied nearly all of her combat needs. With the ring of fire's 360 degrees of effectiveness, she never had to draw her sword or direct a gunshot from her rifle, unless the puzzle-lite gameplay asked for it.

Other than that, she loved browsing new outfits, buying new outfits, trying on new outfits...then hanging those outfits up in the Sanctuary so that she could put her original beautiful princess dress back on again. She got better with the sword, sure, though magic is definitely where it’s at.

So, as any proud father would, I beamed a smile at my wife as our daughter charged back into the living room, footie pajamas zipped up from her knees to her neck, fingers splayed open to indicate that she was no longer brandishing an invisble blade, but brimming with raw magical power.

“It’s hard to sleep, Daddy, because in my room, when I close my eyes, everything gets closer.” She thought about it for a moment, and instead of metaphorically handing me the controller in real life, she decided she would take on this fight for herself. “But I have magic,” she said. “And when I wake up and change out of my pajamas, I will have magic and a beautiful dress to put on.”