True story:
When I was a kid, and the very first game consoles were just coming out, I asked my parents if we could get one for Christmas. My mom said that video games were a complete waste of time, and that we would never get one. By no means were we lacking in toys. We had everything from action figures and boardgames to Legos, Erector sets, and Tinker Toys. But my mom thought it was important for kids to use their imagination, and the ability to build things was part of that. She said that if I wanted to play a computer game I needed to make my own. So I did. My dad was a teacher and had received one of the first personal computers one summer so that he could start a computer class. This was before Windows, before the mouse, and before the hard drive existed. We had a magazine with a short text adventure game in it, written in Basic. I started with that and kept experimenting on different variants to make different kinds of games and tell different kinds of stories. I taught myself arrays, string parsing, finite state machines, etc. I was in middle school, and by the time I was in high school, I was able to help my dad teach a few of his community college courses in Basic programming. In college, I did not initially major in Computers. I had no idea how anyone would make a living doing that. I just took the Computer Science classes for fun. Eventually I switched, got a job at a big company, and over the past 20+ years, overall, have had a great time using my imagination, building things, and solving problems.
When my daughter was old enough to enjoy video games, my wife and I bought her a GameCube for Christmas, and some years after that a Wii. Video games looked a little different by then (but my mom still does not like them). The Nintendo characters are great. They're a creative collection, they're family-friendly, and they lend themselves to great video games from their stories and their fun game mechanics. Our family loves Disney, has been to Disney World many times, but until now we've had very little interest in Disney's video games. They just didn't seem to have their own spark. And our daughter rarely plays console games anymore. She's very good at them (much better than me), but now if she does any gaming it's mainly on her iPhone. She's taken a year of Java programming already, and once I showed her the Creativi-Toys, she immediately saw the connection. She enjoys Infinity. Admittedly, I got Disney Infinity largely for myself. I see it as a tremendous way to invite kids to use their imagination, to innovate. I want to volunteer at summer tech camps to teach game design with it. I want to see high schools, middle schools, maybe even elementary schools, form game design clubs around it. It's not going to teach you to be a Java programmer, but it can teach some fundamental programming concepts, and make it fun. I hope by now that the Disney Interactive team realizes that the combination of their IP, their artistry, these 3D building blocks, and these "Creativi-Toys" full of computing concepts, this gaming platform really has no age boundaries.
Hopefully the tone of this message translates well in print... but when you describe completing a bunch of these Play Sets, yet claim to have no time for the Toy Box, that makes no sense to me. When you claim to enjoy the Play Sets but wonder if this gaming platform is worth the cost, that makes no sense to me either. It's like paying $100 to go into a Disney theme park, trying out a bunch of interactive queues, skipping the main attractions, and claiming to be dissatisfied. The Play Sets are the pre-shows. The Toy Box is the show. Wherever your child is in their cognitive development, the Toy Box has such a variety of virtual toys for building things. It can be whatever you want it to be. It can be 3D art/sculpture. It can be your own virtual city. It can be your own custom-designed car race, horse race, obstacle course, hedge maze, or whatever else you can dream up to try.
Chatting with my mom over the phone the other day, I described Disney Infinity to her. In a 5 minute description, she likes this gaming platform. She hasn't seen a single trailer or as much as a single snapshot photo. But she understands that it enables kids to use their imagination, and to build things. Now I'm not claiming that Disney Infinity is perfect. Some of its Creativi-Toy interfaces are a little quirky, and its social media support is a little lacking so far. I can't definitively claim that it builds better than Minecraft or designs game levels better than LittleBigPlanet. But it brings those elements together with that Disney magic that no other company can, and I fully believe that this is just the starting point. It's going to get even better. Disney Interactive is effectively "all in". I do not work for Disney, and I'll add the usual disclaimer that this is just my personal opinion and not necessarily the opinion of my employer. But I think Disney Infinity is very cool (and so does my teenager, my wife, and even my mom). Hopefully that gives you a few reasons to continue going forward.