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International Toy Fair Nürnberg 2006
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Prelude I
Many Dutch players visit the Spellenspektakel in Eindhoven, and every year more of them find their way to Spiel! in Essen. At the Nürnberger Spielwarenmesse, an international toy fair for the toy branche, it becomes clear that all the beautiful products presented to us are the result of ‘just’ hard work. Two days before the opening of the fair, there’s hard work going on in the twelve enormous halls. It’s cold; all the big doors are open to allow transport of the required building materials. Everywhere there’s pallets and building materials in the aisles, and in the stands that are already near completion, carpet is being cut. Around lunchtime, a pan of soup is bubbling on an electric stove in one of the aisles. This is the domain of the stand builders that perform all the important work in the background. When the fair opens and the public steps into the new world that they have created according to a carefully arranged schedule, their job is done.
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Prelude II
One day later, on Wednesday at nine o’clock in the morning, there’s a warming up for the press in the flashy new press centre. On various open floors there’s a lot of excitement going on; here, the exhibitors that found it important enough to show themselves to the press on this occasion have paid a small fortune to give a presentation. Exhilarating music, drumming, disco music: everything is exploited to attract the attention of the press.
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The latter is accomplished with great success: it’s clear that in our society news is being máde. If there’s a demonstration somewhere, the special camera lenses are whipped out of the garage and the shot angle is adjusted so that all the twenty people that happen to be in the vicinity are on the picture. And if necessary, the room is ‘filled up’ with volunteers, ‘for the picture’. Here as well, the music and the noise were very effective: everybody is standing in front of a new footballgame (oh yeah, of course, the World Championships are coming up). There seems to be a general agreement between the press and the exhibitors: if I am allowed to be here, you get my attention. And everybody wants to ‘belong’. The press is a neutral observer, but the most important selection has already been made at the gate. The best connections get the prettiest pictures, and it seems that there’s an unhealthy relationship between the press and the subjects they are supposed to write about objectively.
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And there’s mascottes, lots of mascottes. Good Lord, what an amazing amount of pluche! This is a business on its own! Bumblebees, Superman, Turtles, unrecognizable creatures... they must all be computer guided, because they know only three movements that they keep performing in random order: hands in the air to represent euphoria, one hand in front of the mouth to simulate surprise, and waving, lots of waving. Gee, these creatures are so friendly, you would almost want to hurt them to restore the balance! And the question arises whether they have an afterparty after the show: Like the press, that reconveines at the end of the day for a meet and greet?
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Somewhere on a stage there’s three miniature women playbacking. These ten-year-old girls look so much like grown-up women that the association with child porn comes to mind. And what’s the product here? A new minidoll of some brand or another. And elsewhere children are used as well. Barbie has something new: cooking with Barbie. A trendy cook with ‘ABCDH’ (while we move with twentyfour frames per second, they use only twelve!) assists the girls. Cooking with Barbie? In the old days we used to cook with the girl next door! Why does everything that’s natural have to be commercialised? Why is playing with blocks no longer good enough? Where is the freedom to use our own imagination? Why does Lego sell completely preassembled toys, while the building itself, and using your imagination, used to be the most important part of playing? ‘Why?’, would the deceased Dutch writer and columnist Ischa Meijer ask, and he’d demand a real answer.
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