FUNDAMENTALS OF GAME DESIGN, SECOND EDITION

Designing for Children

Video games for children differ from those for adults, just as books and television shows for them do. Nor is there one single type of game appropriate for children— their motor and cognitive skills change throughout childhood. Here are the commonly recognized age categories:

■ Preschool and kindergarten (ages 3 to 6)

■ Early elementary (ages 5 to 8)

■ Upper elementary (ages 7 to 12, the tweens)

■ Middle and high school (13 and up, the teens)

Each of these groups has, on the whole, its own interests and abilities. Because we encourage children to aspire to adulthood and its privileges and discourage them from acting young ("don't be a baby"), kids tend to scorn anything made for an age group younger than themselves. As a general rule, entertainment made for children of a certain age group will actually feature characters older than the players.

If you're planning to make games for children, consider the following issues.

■ Hand-eye coordination. Young children's motor skills are poorly developed at first, while those of teenagers often surpass those of adults.

■ Cognitive load. Children can solve puzzles just as adults can, but for younger children the puzzles shouldn't be too complex. The number of elements involved must be fewer, and the chain of reasoning required must be shorter.

■ Frequent rewards. Games for older players often require the player to go through many steps before reaching a reward. We expect adult players to be patient and to regard their progress alone as sufficient reward. Children need feedback

more frequently. You don't have to have a saccharine character say "Good job!" every single time they do something right, but provide a clear and pleasant indica­tor of success.

■ Visual design. Young children don't have as much experience as adults do at fil­tering out irrelevant details, so keep the user interfaces in games for children simple and focused; make them deep rather than broad.

■ Linguistic complexity. Don't talk down to children, but use age-appropriate vocabulary and syntax. Long sentences full of words that they don't know turn kids off. Short sentences made up of carefully chosen words can still express quite sophisticated ideas; for an example, read Saint-Exupery's The Little Prince.

■ Appropriate content. This tricky area actually has more to do with what par­ents want for their children than what the children want for themselves. Adult themes are not so much wrong for children as they are irrelevant. Children's enter­tainment needs to address children's concerns. This is one of the reasons the early Harry Potter books are so brilliant; they capture children's concerns perfectly. Kids easily identify with Harry's feelings of alienation, being misunderstood by his fam­ily, and his sense of latent but untapped promise. Even the emphasis on food in the early books is significant; for younger children, food is a major interest and a big part of their daily routine.

Carolyn Handler Miller, a longtime developer of entertainment for children, has devised a list of "Seven Kisses of Death," features that drive children away rather than appealing to them. The Kisses of Death are widely held misconceptions about what children like, generally founded on what adults want them to like.

■ Death Kiss #1: Kids love anything sweet. This holdover from Victorian ideals about childhood holds true for toddlers, but any child older than that knows the world isn't sugarcoated and rejects the suggestion that it is. Think about the Warner Brothers cartoons: wisecracking Bugs Bunny; Sylvester the cat's endless efforts to eat Tweety Bird; Wile E. Coyote's similarly endless efforts to kill the Roadrunner; homicidal Yosemite Sam and rabbit-cidal Elmer Fudd. Kids love these cartoons— which actually include a sneaky moral about violence redounding upon the violent—but there's nothing remotely sweet about them.

■ Death Kiss #2: Give them what's good for them. Kids are forever being told what's good for them. They're made to eat food they don't like; they're made to go to school; they're made to do chores, learn to play the piano, and a million other things supposedly meant to build their characters or strengthen their bodies or minds. Most of this is reasonable and necessary, but not in an entertainment con­text. How would you, as an adult, like to be fed a dose of propaganda with every book and TV show you saw? You wouldn't, and neither do kids. When they want to relax and have fun, they don't want a dose of medicine with it.

■ Death Kiss #3: You've just got to amuse them. This is the opposite of Death Kiss #2; it cynically assumes that kids are less discriminating than adults, so any
old fluff will do. It won't. Kids can't tell the difference between good acting and bad acting, and they aren't experienced enough to recognize cliched plot lines, but they won't put up with just anything. Walt Disney realized this, and so do the writ­ers and animators who continue his work; Disney movies are multilayered even though they are for children. So, too, are the best children's books. Meaningful content will keep a child's attention longer than trivial content.

■ Death Kiss #4: Always play it safe! This is a variant of the "sweet" Death Kiss. Some people, in an effort to avoid violent or controversial content, go overboard and try to eliminate anything that might frighten or disturb a child or even raise her pulse. This inevitably results in bland, dull entertainment. Again, look at Disney films for good counter-examples: Dumbo's separation from his mother; Snow White's terrified flight through the forest; the outright murder of Simba's father in The Lion King. These are not happy things, and that's OK. Gerard Jones argues in his important treatment of the subject Killing Monsters: Why Children Need Fantasy, Super Heroes, and Make-Believe Violence (Jones, 2002) that learning to deal with threatening situations constitutes an important part of growing up.

■ Death Kiss #5: All kids are created equal. There's no such thing as a single children's market. Kids' interests and abilities change too quickly to lump them all into a single category. If you're planning to make a game for ages 6 to 10 and the publishers decide they want a game for ages 8 to 12, you'll have to redesign the game. One-size-fits-all definitely doesn't work with kids.

■ Death Kiss #6: Explain everything. Kids are much happier with trial-and-error than adults are, and they don't want long introductions explaining how to play the game. They want to dive in and play. Above all, avoid talking heads with a lot of jabber. Adults naturally tend to assume that kids need things explained to them, but it's not true of video game worlds in which they can't hurt themselves or any­thing else. Keep exposition—and especially anything that smacks of teaching them—to a minimum.

■ Death Kiss #7: Be sure your characters are wholesome! Wholesome equals boring. We wouldn't put up with bland white-bread characters in entertainment for adults; why should we make children do it? You don't have to introduce serial kill­ers, but create real characters with their own personal foibles. Sesame Street famously offered a variety of characters, many specifically designed to represent moods or attitudes familiar to young children: greedy, grouchy, helpful, and so on.