Scribblenauts is a game that I am excited about.

The funny thing is, it’s one of the few games where I don’t even particularly care too much how the gameplay turns out. It’s like being excited for Encarta to come out.

Remember Encarta? It was one of the first CD-ROMs I ever had for our first major home PC and it was essentially an encyclopedia. It was just a way to search through articles that contained information on your computer. It wasn’t a game (although it did have a kind of wacky visual knowledge quiz part of it), but it was exciting because of how it presented the information. Interested in a related article or want to see a picture of the fruit that this seed grows into? Just click! No need to find another volume and flip through it until you found the right article.

Scribblenauts is kind of the same thing. It’s the dictionary, presented on the DS, with the ability to spawn nouns. Sure, there’s a puzzle aspect to it – you have a little guy and you’re trying to collect stars and you can write down any word and it’ll appear in the game world.

I know what you’re saying: that’s impossible. Every word? Those are the same doubts I had when I first heard about the game. But it demoed at E3. There are videos on Youtube. And it looks…shockingly robust. So, sure, I’ll get it to play the main “game” portion of it. But like The Sims 3, you also buy the game to experiment, to see how far it’ll go.

So this fall, Katie will be busy on her DS with the new localized version of Professor Layton, and I’ll be trying to think of nouns that couldn’t possibly have been included in Scribblenauts. I imagine we’ll both be pretty happy.