With all the guff surrounding the coming of President Barack Obama, it was easy to overlook one thing: that he had declared war on videogames. “The time has come,” he said in his inauguration address, “to set aside childish things.” He then outlined a vast programme of console destruction, with videogames to be replaced by enforced listening to Brahms, and communal readings of the Federalist Papers and Goethe. America needed to grow up, because playing with virtual soldiers on your Xbox inevitably makes you want to play with real soldiers and send them en masse to attack far-off countries – which had been, after all, one of the many lamentably childish habits of the outgoing administration. Dick Cheney, watching from his wheelchair, muttered, “Go fuck yourself,” and then tilted the giant calcified potato of his head back downwards to continue his game of Advance Wars. (Cheney is a particular fan of levels involving Fog of War, and hallucinates unseen weapons of mass destruction in every obscured square.)

Oh, all right then, that wasn’t exactly Obama’s message. By ‘childish things’, Obama really meant Beltway bickering. But it has long been a criticism of videogames, too, that they are childish. The normal response of the videogame industry is to intone the latest demographic statistics (the average age of a videogamer is now 76), or to point to ‘mature’ themes treated in videogames, such as neoliberal interstellar economics. (One awaits the first videogame about a galactic recession.) Both responses, however, miss the point. An awful lot of videogames, I’m afraid, are childish, in the sense of that word that conveys disapprobation: immature, simplistic, illogical, given to irrational tantrums and unjustified outbursts of violence.

Many of the most childish videogames, in fact, are those targeted precisely at older adolescents or adults. Most games of ‘realistic’ warfare or fantasy ultraviolence are no more sophisticated than a children’s game of cowboys and Indians, and less interesting in their intersubjective phenomenology. I recently tried playing the PSP God Of War and, after 30 incredulous minutes, I decided I would rather be reading Harry Potter (and when I had tried to read Harry Potter I decided after 20 incredulous pages that I would rather be reading something for grown-ups.) A childish videogame’s idea of novelty is: ‘Hey, now you can slice off the limbs of your enemies one by one!’ Psychopaths who enjoyed pulling the legs off spiders in their youth no doubt rejoiced (along with Dick Cheney). But it is clear that Dead Space is a much more childish videogame than Zelda: Phantom Hourglass, even though the latter is drawn in a more apparently child-friendly style. Similarly, Far Cry 2 is more childish than World Of Goo; and Fallout 3 is more childish than Professor Layton And The Curious Village.

The best games are not childish, but they are likely to be childlike, in that they invoke a sense of innocent wonder and experiment. It is always meant as laudatory when it is said of some fantastic doddering old genius in science, philosophy or art that he maintained a ‘childlike’ attitude towards the world, taking nothing for granted. Similarly, World Of Goo, Phantom Hourglass or Professor Layton are childlike not because of their warm ’n’ fuzzy cartoony aesthetics but because of the opportunities they provide for joyful experimentation. More naturalistic games can also be childlike in this sense: for example, MGS3 or the best Tomb Raider levels.

The stunning art direction of LittleBigPlanet, meanwhile, seems itself to be presenting a subtle visual argument about the relationship between the childish and the childlike. A priori, it seems a childish thing to construct make- believe games from scraps of cardboard and fabric. But once those materials can be realistically simulated, we are ushered into a second-order realm where it is possible to reflect pleasurably on the cutely juvenile physical resources that are being replicated, at the same time as we marvel (in properly childlike fashion) at the ingenuity with which they have been combined, and attempt to solve (with gleeful childlike fearlessness) the puzzles they present. During a recent session of LBP, in which a friend and I played through the co-op parts, we were both giggling like six-year-olds when a bomb went off too near one of us and he got covered in soot; but we weren’t being childish, we were being childlike. It would have been substantially more childish, I propose, for us to have watched some TV show in which men in tight jeans tell a mooing audience how brilliant it is to drive cars.

Instead, in LittleBigPlanet, we were working out strategies, experimenting and discovering things. And it is that childlike potential that is among the the most important virtues of the form. Every child, it has been said, is naturally a scientist. The best videogames enable us all to practice science as pleasure.

Steven Poole is the author of Trigger Happy: The Inner Life Of Videogames. Visit him online at stevenpoole.net.