The Dude and the Bud got "Go Diego Go: Great Dinosaur Rescue" for Christmas, a PS2 game in which our titular hero runs through an incredibly friendly prehistoric wasteland collecting berries, leaves, and anachronistic badges while helping dinosaurs who have gotten into trouble more immediate than "Will one day be extinct."

The design is fascinating. It looks like a platformer. It is a platformer. Except that you cannot fail. Diego hits a cliff? He says "Whoah!" and stops, even if he was jumping. Diego is swinging from vine to vine? He cannot let go except to grab another vine or leap down to the ground. There's no failure option.

On each mission section, Diego has two things to find: badges, which purely represent points and get you a badge at the end of the mission, and food for whatever dinosaur is waiting for him to help at the end of the mission. You get these things either by running straight into them as they hover in space or by walking past a moving object, seeing that "X:" has highlighted on the screen, and pressing X, at which point Baby Jaguar jumps into the bush or the tree or the cave or whatever and flushes out some food or a badge or a dino buddy. It's adorable and fascinating.

So I'm playing with the Dude. It takes him a bit, but once he grasps the concepts, he will not give me the controller, except on the climb-the-vine parts, which require you to wiggle the two thumbsticks in opposite directions, and sometimes he'll ask for help. Otherwise, though, he will utterly refuse to let me play. It is his game. He's the one making Diego jump and climb and stuff. Which is awesome.

Except.

That he was doing it wrong.

At first, he was playing normally. Find a bush? Have Baby Jaguar flush something out. Great. All good. Lots of food, lots of badges. Hitting all the achievements.

But then he started missing things.

He would climb a vine and head on instead of checking back along the back of the upper level to see what was back there that he might have missed. Okay, forgivable.

He would leap and in so doing miss a bush. Sure, who hasn't done that?

But then... then he just started running by the bushes. Like they weren't there. Like they didn't have badges for him. Like the achievements meant nothing.

I sat, silent, impressed with my self-control. It was his game. Who was I to judge, aside from an award-winning game designer with years of industry experience? I could sit quietly and watch him play it wrong.

I was, in fact, so impressed with my silence that when the Damsel came down, I mentioned my silence on the subject to her. She congratulated me. Then she watched.

And she cracked first. (Which is why I love her.)

"Sweetie," she said, as the Dude ran by a completely obvious bush full of loot, "I think you missed that bush back there. Do you want to go back and see what's inside it?"

The Dude turned to her, and said, very seriously, "Sorry, Mommy, we don't have time for that. We have to help Maia the Maiasaurus."

And then he went back, zipping across the level as fast as he could, while the Damsel and I sat, lips pursed, and tried not to laugh.

Clearly we had not been invested enough in the narrative.