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What Kids Really Think About Kids' Games
marcellizot writes "For a hobby that's supposedly childish, real child gamers have quite a hard time of it. When they're not having every avenue of fun scrutinized for nasties and bad influences, they're often being sold game ideas that are boring and old even when the adults of today were young. Pocket Gamer asks, what do kids really make of today's kids games? 'Both Polly and Andrew both agreed that there were more good games for kids than bad overall, but most of the games they showed weren't just for kids at all. This betrays the difference in perception between parents and their children. Most of them aren't looking for the same old killing - instead, they want something that genuinely entertains them.'"
Kids enjoy fun things more than boring ones? Get outta here.
...but is it art?
The problem is that these games are marketed to the parents, who play the game little, if at all. A sale's a sale!
How is this news?
"Kids like to play the same games adults do" and "Not all games are about violence and beating hookers" is not news. Any real gamer (aka not some FPS kiddy who thinks Nintendo is for kids) can tell you that violence doesn't make a game fun. It can be part of a fun game, but senseless violence without a good system behind it will suck for all age groups.
I doubt there are many people who would argue that Tetris is one of those all time greats that everyone has played at some point. Yet the most violent thing in Tetris is a line of bricks (blocks, tertites or whatever you call them) disappearing.
So why the hell are we acting like games can only be fun if they are rated 15/18 (or whatever Americans use as their adult oriented entertainment label).
I like muppets.
Sorry I can't help, but I can comment that your issue is one of the reasons I like doing side games judy for fun. Whether it be a missile command clone, a scrolling shoot'em'up, or a lunar lander game, it's just simple and straight-forward fun. When my kids ask if they can play the game that Daddy created, I have no qualms about letting them have at-it. In fact, they're my little Beta-testers. I watch how they play and make adjustments where they have troubles.
The buggers get pretty good at it, too. I once left my 6 yr. old son playing my lunar lander game (one of the harder games I'd devised) while I took care of business elsewhere in the house. When I left him, he was having a lot of trouble getting past the third level. Obviously, he had slammed headlong into the difficulty curve. I come back an hour later to find that he'd made it to the 8th and final level! (A *really* hard level that was intended to give players a conniption fit.) If we didn't have to go then, I have little doubt he would have found a way to beat it! Impressive little bugger.
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That's only because those games are conveniently disconnected from matters of everyday life. Try any adventure game, and immediately moral issues start to crop up.
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Nah, that much is obvious to everyone.
The story is actually that what grown ups think as a fun kid game, isn't actually fun for kids. The story isn't kids dislike boring game. The story is, basically, "yeah, but some grown ups thought that those boring games would be the apex of entertainment for junior." If you will, the story is about the disconnect between (A) what kids really _are_ like, and (B) how their parents imagine them.
Imagine, if you will, being 10 years old and basically someone coming over and telling you, "I just painted the fence. Wanna come watch the paint dry? I bet it'll be hours of fun for someone your age." Worse yet, they actually believe that.
The problem is, almost everyone grows up and proceeds to forget that they were children too, and what it really was like. They flip to some imaginary world where kids are stupid simpletons. Which just isn't true.
Yes, especially in the 3-4 years of life the kid doesn't even have all neurons yet, and later doesn't have all the data yet. Yes, they're still wired until puberty to follow mommy around and learn by playing. But they're not brain-dead. (And not half as blissfully care-free as most adults think, either, btw.) And learning by playing is slightly more complex than just being entertained by _any_ simplistic stuff.
Playing with dolls is pretty much enacting "what if" scenarios with those props. They're not the most intricate scenarios, but they do involve some neurons firing. They involve some creativity, at the very least. (You have to think up the script in real time.) They also exercise the memory (what did I see mommy/Buggs Bunny/whatever doing in that situation?) and some critical thinking (would it really go that way?). It's more like playing chess against yourself for practice, than just being entertained by anything whatsoever that involves dolls.
That's what most people who come up with kid games have forgot. They think that just dropping some cartoon character or franchise doll in a game is all that's needed to make a game fun for kids, and that it has to be stripped of anything that involves any thinking at that.
And then there are the games for little _girls_, which actually go one step further in dumbing it down. Everyone seems to be dead sure that little girls are too stupid to even understand more complex stuff than dressing up Barbie or becoming prom queen in 5 dialogues. Or if not too stupid, surely girls don't have other interests and can't be motivated to follow any other plots, right?
Well, actually, wrong. Even in the countries where they do eventually flip to pretending to be an airhead, it happens at puberty. Girls in elementary school still dream of being a chemist, a teacher, an astronaut, whatever, just like boys do. Only in high school the culture becomes distorted into, basically, "being popular is everything, being smart is outright uncool".
And it does so for both genders, anyway, so no need to single one out as the simpletons. Just as girls flip into trying to be the popular airhead, boys flip into trying to be the popular dumb jock.
At any rate, making a game for a 10 year old girl based on how you perceive 16 year old girls, is just a dud for both. It's missing what the 10 year old is actually interested in (she's still wired as a kid, i.e., to follow mommy and to learn), and it's too dumbed down for the 16 year old. Heck, most are too dumbed down even for the 10 year old.
Briefly: people would do well to actually ask the kids if they find a game fun, instead of basing the whole design and testing on adults and their mis-conceptions about kids.
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