Viva Piñata!

I'm always on the lookout for good kid's games, and I recently picked up a copy of Viva Piñata™. If you haven't seen it, Viva Piñata is a new game where you cultivate a garden and try to create an environment that attracts cute and colorful piñatas. If you do it right, you can raise the piñatas as your own when they choose to settle in your garden.

Build your own garden and attract piñatas.

The great thing about the game is the way it all comes together. The unique combination of water, grass, plants, flowers, and trees in your garden will attract different piñatas. In fact, attracting smaller piñatas as food for larger piñatas is another part of the game.

I knew that my son Hunter would definitely be into this game. He's a veteran of such games as Animal Crossing and Black and White, games where you control the environment and the evolution of that environment affects the gameplay.

Decisions early on tend to affect how Piñata plays out. You can create more than one garden, so Hunter decided to start with a test garden. He followed the general path the game starts you on: You clean up, you start with some Whirlms as the first residents of your garden, then you build them a house, romance them a bit, and soon they're all over the place.

As you develop your garden, other piñatas will move in. You can sell your permanent residents to raise funds, and you can feed the Whirlms to other piñatas like Sparrowmints and Fudgehogs.

Piñatas feed on other piñatas.

I asked Hunter if he would create a test garden for me, so we built one with swampy ground and plants you wouldn't normally cultivate. After six hours or so we had a cool little garden that looked like a terrarium. There were a number of frogs and other aquatic species of piñata that seemed happy to make this watery garden their home. By the time our experiment was finished we had built a nice home for a Quackberry. When our experiment was finished we just kept going because we were having too much fun.

By this point Hunter regretted not putting all this work into his own garden. We explored some options and realized we could mail everything in our experimental garden to Hunter so he could set it up in a garden of his own. We added all the items he wanted to keep to a package and we mailed it to Hunter's Xbox LIVE® account. Remember that when you do this, the items will be removed from your own garden, so make sure you send your items to the right person.

After we sent the package, Hunter logged into his account and built a new garden that was on an island in a lake with a small beach. He opened the package and put our Quackberry and its house on the island along with all the decorations we had bought for our experimental garden. Hunter was thrilled because we'd transferred our work instead of having to start over. By now we were about 10 hours into the game, which was eight hours past our usual daily gaming limit, but hey, it's for work, right? Daddy had to write an article.

Can you learn responsibility from a digital piñata?

The Post Office system is cool and handy on its own, but as I thought about it, I realized it had a practical use when playing Viva Piñata with younger kids. They tend to enjoy seeing the progress of a garden, but don't always have the patience to get there. Mom or dad can build up their own garden and send bigger piñatas to their kids so that they stay interested in the game and don't have to wait for more exciting piñatas to show up.

One other noteworthy feature of Viva Piñata is Family Mode. In this mode, anyone with a controller can help out in the game. This mode was added to the game so that adults can help younger children with more difficult tasks. We weren't really sure what this mode was going to be like when we added a second player, but it turned out to be just as much fun to take turns in the game as it was to help my son build his garden.

Don't think that Viva Piñata is just a family game or a game for kids, though. I know lots of adults who own this game and they happily spend much of their spare time cultivating a garden. From a family perspective, though, this game is a great lab for kids to experiment with cause and effect: Add water, get a water creature; grow flowers, attract bees, etc. It is also a game that teaches a degree of personal responsibility: If you don't take care of your piñatas, they can get sick and even die if you ignore them.

I knew this game would be perfect for Hunter, and it was. He has put tons of effort into his gardens, and they have all turned out beautifully. He keeps his gardens clean and his piñatas are all extremely happy. My only question is how to we transfer his need to tend and nurture a garden into a desire to do the same thing with his room.  

Article by Brian "Brize" Johnson