How to Play “Music Video Party”

A do-it-yourself game created by a three-year-old

Have you ever made up games you can play for free? My former foster daughter and I made up a game called Music Video Party, which is free if you have an internet connection and a TV or other device onto which you can stream YouTube content.

Music Video Party combines the fun of being a disc jockey (or video jockey, as they used to say in the old days of MTV) with the exercise of dancing, and it involves a little bit of cultural history and art appreciation, too.

My foster daughter came to live with us when she was three years old. She was a bundle of energy for sure. I quickly abandoned my Inexperienced Parent viewpoint about avoiding TV because I realized that, in moderation, TV had a calming effect on our household.

One thing that kept TV as a helper was watching it together, or semi-together while I responded to student emails or graded a few assignments. For Music Video Party, we watched 100% together as the game involved choosing the music videos together, and then talking about them and sometimes dancing along as we watched.

I can’t even tell you how happy I was to learn that my foster daughter had a natural love for the 1980s music videos I’d grown up watching. These were the staples of our Music Video Party sessions. Some of our favorites included “Wake Me Up Before You Go-Go” (Wham!), “Karma Chameleon” (Culture Club), and “Cruel Summer” (Bananarama).

We liked the strangeness of the “Cruel Summer” video when the women from Bananarama went striding along the city streets and suddenly ended up in a semi truck where they were tossing banana peels out the window at a police car. What?! And of course the Wham! video had all kinds of fun in store with the glow-in-the-dark neon outfits, and the easy to learn lyrics of the song.

My foster daughter used to refer to Boy George as “the beautiful man” as in: “let’s watch the video with the beautiful man.” And she loved all the women dancing with Cyndi Lauper in “Girls Just Wanna Have Fun.” Music Video Party became a pretty affirming and celebratory game.

We also liked to go a little deeper back in time and watch YouTube videos of The Carpenters. We found some videos of their TV appearances, and our favorite had big alphabet letters spelling out Y-O-U on the set. Two band members were playing their instruments on top of the O, and Karen was sitting inside the U as though it were a comfortable seat on her front porch. You’d think this was for “Top of the World,” but actually it was “We’ve Only Just Begun.”

My foster daughter had some more recent favorites, too, namely Brandi Carlile singing “Dreams” and a compilation video of women singing “Let It Go” from Frozen (her favorite movie at the time) in different languages. My foster daughter has Mexican and Vietnamese heritage, and she would mention how certain singers in the “Let It Go” video reminded her of her mom and grandma.

In short, you can play Music Video Party with any videos you and your child enjoy. Isn’t this really just hanging out and watching TV together? Yes. But by calling it Music Video Party (my foster daughter came up with the name one day), it became a special game that she and I had made up for ourselves.

The game got better each time, too, as we tried different videos — many didn’t make the cut to join our regular rotation, but some did. It was fun when I remembered a favorite song that I thought she’d love, too, like “I Wanna Dance with Somebody” by Whitney Houston. Years later, she still knows the lyrics of that one if I play it in the car.

Mostly, the fun of Music Video Party came from our conversations. We’d remember our favorite videos and then pull them up to watch again, commenting as we watched.

And who’s to say that appreciating the beauty of Karen Carpenter’s voice or the colorful fashion choices of Cyndi Lauper isn’t a way to introduce children to experiencing art and creativity in the world?

When we give something space in our lives and maybe even give it a name, it can take on a meaning of its own. I’ll always be grateful to my foster daughter for making up Music Video Party back in 2014 with me.