 As with most fairy tales, the unfinished swan is incomplete without tragedy. Monroe's mother has just died, and the only tangible memory he has left of her is a single painting. It is of course an unfinished swan, a metaphor that carries much weight in our culture. In Hans Christian Andersen's famous story, The Ugly Duckling, a creature cast aside as a freak later finds out it is a swan, mirroring an internal recognition of self-worth with a physical transformation equally as transformative. However, in Monroe's case, the ideal he seeks is not within, and so the swan escapes the captivity of the painting and guides him to a magical land. And so like with Alice in Wonderland and The Wizard of Oz, he enters a painted world, armed with nothing but his longing for that which can't be complete. Monroe, as protagonists tend to do in fairy tales, stumbles on a kingdom run by a tyrannical king, but king obsessed with order, rules, and precision. However, his didactic dominion has driven people away, and is now ostracized on a remote island of his own creation. Monroe, though, is an antidote to the sterility of regimentation, a maze devised to be intimidating no longer serves any function, its paths meander endlessly. The world not only has no color, it has no shape of any kind. This is, of course, until Monroe uses the paintbrush inherited from his mother. Revelations are also a part of fairy tales, though, and the culminating one here is that the king is in fact Monroe's father, who drove away his mother because of his obsession with control. Beauty cannot be harnessed or exploited to preserve a butterfly for ourselves, is to kill its very spirit. Monroe ventures to meet his father, but he is a broken man filled with regret and a paralyzing emptiness. And finally, as with all fairy tales, whimsical cliche. Monroe is the only work of art the king and queen ever really conjured, and it is with this realization of connection, of legacy, of understanding, and of the playful reconciliation of order and creativity that this artwork is complete. Children spend their waking hours engaged in the work of play. They imagine, they create, they express, unbound by the strictures of society and its stifling mandate to conform. We also tell them stories, tales that distill and communicate lessons from the past, that invoke all manner of creatures from the symbolic to the demonic. Children, as far as I can tell, don't distinguish these enterprises. Play and story are one and the same. It's funny. Academic studying games debate the nature of play and story. Are games ludological, narratological? Is this a false dichotomy perpetuating a formalism of its own? Who cares? Imagination doesn't need formalism categories or discrimination. However, are we not then guilty of what the king in the unfinished swan is guilty of? Not just in how we unweave the rainbow, but in how we seem to suppress the creative instincts of children. Play is now commonly understood as an integral part of a child's development, cognitively, creatively, and socially. In his book Free to Learn, Peter Gray argues that our industrial societies actually inhibit our children's creative capacities. We impose strict curriculums, expect excellence with no failure, and don't give children the freedom to learn. As James Guy argues in his book What Games Teach Us About Learning, it is in those activities our society deems as a waste of time that we find how children learn. Children learn by playing, by imagination, by being given the freedom to explore and make mistakes. However, this seems incompatible with the culture obsessed with efficiency, with rules, and ultimately, with work. The unfinished swan captures a deeper meaning then, whether intentional or not. We are the tyrannical king. Fairy tales were not initially marked out as a distinct genre. They fall under the larger umbrella of folktales. In fact, stories of old were not even written. They were part of an oral tradition that was passed down from generation to generation. And so fairy tales go deeper than ASOP fables and grim fairy tales. They go back to pre-literate societies and the cultural mythology of civilizations. Folklore and fairy tales were not initially just for children though, but the recent innovations shouldn't attract from the fact that even though the surface layer may seem childish, their themes are anything but. And so it's not really clear what a fairy tale is then. In his essay on fairy stories, one of the pioneers of the fantasy genre, J.R.R. Tolkien, defends the formalism of the fairy story. In the essay, Tolkien claims that one feature of the authentic fairy tale is that it is presented as wholly credible. Tolkien emphasizes that in the use of fantasy, which he equates with imagination, the author can bring the reader to experience a world that is ironically rational. He calls this a rare achievement in art. Tolkien also suggests that fairy stories can provide emotional consolation through their happy endings or eukatastrophe. He says, Far more powerful than poignant is the effect of joy in a serious tale of fairy. In such stories, when the sudden turn comes, we get a piercing glimpse of joy and heart's desire that for a moment passes outside the frame, runs indeed the very web of story and lets a gleam come through. We see how the fairy tale comes to underpin much of modern fantasy fiction, which in turn has influenced the foundational archetypes in games. What are Dungeons and Dragons and the Legend of Zelda if not interactive renditions of fantasy tropes? Dwarves and elves and magic and such are intrinsically a part of almost all role-playing games, which draws from folklore, folk tales and fairy tales. What's interesting with games is that the practice of storytelling is getting fused once more with another act upheld by children. But are there more explicitly fairy tale-like fairy tale games? Well, what of a game that has revolutionized game design in ways we are only now recognizing? Eco. Eco starts with tragedy as well, a boy is cast to a forbidden castle, persecuted for his demonic horns, and you have to escape its confines with the aid of Yorda, a princess. Eco also uses a symbolic approach to storytelling reminiscent of fairy tales. And what is the game if not another version of the ugly duckling? There is even an evil witch and a sleeping beauty and of course a more explicit marker of fairy tales, a child protagonist. How about Brothers, A Tale of Two Sons, a game that starts with a dead mother and an ailing father? It evokes Jack in the Beanstalk, it has whimsical creatures, and you play as two brothers on a quest to find a cure. As with most fairy tales, the world is enchanted and set in a realm apart and explores themes like brotherhood, love, and obligation. What about games like Inside, Little Nightmares, and Limbo? These are much darker stories that take inspiration from horror as well. They feature children exploring a realm apart with creatures of the night, maniacal threats, and a pervasive fear of capture. Fairy tales in our medium, perhaps not surprisingly, host some of the most thematically rich and artistically ambitious tales in gaming, far more mature than the power fantasies that dominate our industry. They function as playable metaphors for children coming to terms with the world around them, reconciling the function of both play and storytelling using interactivity. And so fairy tales illustrate things about our medium we are perhaps insufficiently playful to recognize. One is that games can learn a lot from the oral tradition of storytelling that predates modern literacy. Participatory communal storytelling makes more sense for an interactive medium. We are all storytellers. Scholars like Vladimir Prop have even studied the formalism of fairy tales and shows how it adheres to common templates and archetypes that can be invoked to tell stories. They also illustrate the power of disempowerment, of the subtlety required of storytellers to render clear arguments using vague symbolism. Most importantly though, they illustrate some fascinating parallels between play and storytelling that perhaps might benefit both games and ourselves if we recognized. The unfinished swan wears the influence of fairy tales on its sleeve. It is narrated as if from a book, uses animal symbolism and invokes the power of eukatastrophe and cliche to provide resolution. It is also, perhaps not paradoxically, an extremely mature game, despite as all fairy tales seem to be somewhat childish. And so with this comes another metaphor that speaks to something deeper about our culture. We often cast play as a waste of time and antidote to the mundanity of everyday, sure, but ultimately inessential to our lives. Play is also rhetorically relegated to instrumentality. We insist that it is only good because it helps us develop, helps us become proper citizens in a corporate industrial order. However, as Johan Huzinga argued, what if we are defined by our playfulness? What if we are homo-ludens? The ultimate inversion of the fairy tale is that true maturity can only come from an indulgence of our inner child, of the impulse to explore, create, and ultimately, to play.