Unlearning Productivity with Baby Steps

Much like other games in this genre that Bennett Foddy helped pioneer, the very act of playing Baby Steps is an affront to games as we understand them. Our productivity-centered culture has developed empty calories to satiate the inevitable human hunger for being alive, in the form of instant gratification. This algorithmic approximation of happiness has bled into the canon of game design as developers are forced to justify why works of art are worthwhile products. Many modern games are evaluated by their “quality of life” features and difficulty, for instance. From the very beginning, games have been about accomplishing a goal and receiving a reward—that rush of dopamine for achieving something, checking off a to-do list. Games have always been about being productive.

When I was a kid, I spent a lot of time playing MMORPGs like ToonTown and Wizard101. I was deeply uninterested in these titles as games; instead I was enamored by their environments, the customizable avatar I could embody within them, and what those interactions sparked in my own imagination. I would create little stories for myself moving through these virtual worlds that had nothing to do with the games’ actual objectives. I had no interest in playing in the traditional sense of progressing, but the way I engaged with these games as a child was an even more authentic form of play.

This was, of course, long before the pressure of constant productivity was instilled in me. As far as I was concerned, I had all the time in the world to explore and imagine and toy.

Baby Steps has given me this experience again for the first time in a decade. The game has no interest in rewarding your accomplishments because the game has no interest in your accomplishments—much like how Free Realms didn’t care when I rode from one end of the map to the other on my cyan-furred wolf just because I wanted to (the wolf was cool as hell, and my avatar looked cool as hell riding it). The vast majority of Baby Steps’ gameplay has zero impact on the rest of the game. There is an end goal, sure, but it exists more to give you a direction to walk in than anything else.

Though designed, every encounter in Baby Steps is delightfully voluntary; it is not so much a game as it is a series of circumstances that the player is invited to make their own games out of. For instance: the roof of an abandoned carousel lies half-wedged into a mound of dirt. At its center, a propeller hat sits. What will this propeller hat do for me? Absolutely nothing. Yet I find myself reaching for it anyway, sliding down the pinstriped slope over and over and over again, knowing I’ll probably lose the hat forever in a few hours (it took 20 minutes). I did not get the propellor hat because it would fill in a silhouette in a Collectibles menu—I did it because I genuinely wanted to. And I wanted to because the developers couldn’t care less either way.

To me, great art is totally absorbing. I know I’ve seen an important film when I forget I have to pee during it. Despite its demand for patience from players systematically conditioned to be inpatient, Baby Steps is engrossing. This is in part due to its relentless humor, the unexpected depth of its narrative, and its absolutely brilliant soundtrack (my partner jokes that the music always starts up at the exact right moment to piss you off). But most of all, Baby Steps is a fantastic game because it does not demand anything of you; rather, it invites you to demand things from yourself.

Bee Wertheimer is a games writer based in New York City. You can find them on Bluesky or visit their website at beewertheimer.com.