For Christmas, Santa Claus decided to get my boys a Kinect. He thought it’d be a fun way for them to play video games together. What he didn’t realize was how even the simplest of controls were sometimes hard for my youngest two sons to grasp.

As if hearing my pleas (or potentially having a surveillance camera in my house), Double Fine came to the rescue with Happy Action Theater.

I don’t think anyone would quantify it as a game per se, but it’s much more than a tech demo for Microsoft’s camera peripheral. It does the one thing so many pundits claim that electronic entertainment takes away: it expands my children's imagination.

The one thing Double Fine Happy Action Theater has going for it over, say, Sesame Street: Once Upon a Monster or Kinectimals is that instead of establishing a set of rules and game mechanics that younger kids won’t or can’t understand, it works around what they are capable of comprehending. In other words, Happy Action Theater eliminates the inherent frustration of figuring out a game and replaces it with unmitigated joy. Kids don’t have that desire for structure or need for gratification that comes from completing a quest or level. They just want to have fun.

The best way to describe Double Fine Happy Action Theater is that its stages are of the literal sense. They provide different situations for you to mess around in. There’s a lava field that swims across your living room, which takes into account your furniture and whether you’re in or out of the pool. The level lets you pick up fireballs, and impressive lighting features flames that flicker around you. There's also a television-sized ocean scenario where you can interact with tropical fish, make bubbles, and get caught by a fisherman's hook.

There’s also a jelly mold in a fridge, which you can jiggle to your heart's content and my kids always seem to want to escape from. My personal favorite is a mode where the game takes a photo of you every 10 seconds or so, then lets you interact with yourself by making funny poses. It even takes into account how close you are to the camera so you can tool around with the depth of field, making for a very robust toy.

The title isn’t about having an objective or getting to a certain point. It is what you make of it. Making your own fun seems like such a foreign concept these days, but playing and acting a fool in front of a camera is just as gratifying to me as completing a multiple-hour-long adventure or unlocking a hard-to-get achievement.

So Santa...you did good. While Dad enjoys The Gunstringer and Mom likes Fruit Ninja Kinect, there’s finally a piece of software for whom the Kinect was intended for.

And thanks Double Fine. You saved my bacon.

I'm not a real games writer. I just play one on the Internet. Feel free to follow me on Twitter @MHMason, or read more on my blog, Obtain Potion.