Games Are Not For Children; Children Are For Games

"Remember: children are strong. They're resilient. They're designed to survive. When you drop them, they tend to bounce."

Terry Gilliam - prologue to Tideland
(Well thanks for the reminder Patsy, but did you really have to drop her quite so often and so far?)


The sadly underappreciated A Monster Calls is a skillful enough movie to make me forget my usual disdain for "coming of age" tripe. In most such stories the youth is condemned as only clay to be molded by the wisdom of elders. Here, as I worded it in the case of Whisper of the Heart, the protagonist remains the principal agent of his own becoming. Moreover, his internal struggle, the perceived moral failing he faces is one which would cost most adults no small amount of sleep. Yet at no point does it ring false; a thirteen-year-old boy may have lacked the foreknowledge of such morbid quandaries, but we have no trouble empathizing with his assimilating them, grokking them into his personal growth.

I've repeatedly railed here against various computer games either stagnating or being deliberately dumbed down. The catch-all excuse you're most likely to encounter is "accessibility" for those naive of such products' potential. Now, to me declaring your entire customer base handicapped seems a non-starter in itself. We make the various functions of society more accessible by empowering the disabled to perform at a competent level, not by forcing the entire population to walk around blindfolded and read everything in braille. In games in particular "for the children" (or at the most for teenagers) provides an even easier cop-out for uncreative hacks who are themselves incapable of moving past the tropes of twenty years ago. Reminds me of my uncle who, upon watching Princess Mononoke, commented that it was no good for the "kiddies" for incorporating too many factual references, mythical/philosophical symbolism and moral ambiguity. I guess those millions upon millions of DVDs it sold must've all gone to university-trained historians and semanticians.

To use such an excuse for childproofing gameplay mechanics ignores the simple fact that "Nintendo hard" titles were aimed at children to begin with.
Using it as an excuse for Disneyfying plot and setting ignores our own memories of reading Ender's Game, Dune, Red Mars, Stranger in a Strange Land, The Silmarillion and fucking Hamlet in our mid-teens.

For one thing, the last thing I wanted when I was twelve was to be treated like a child, and I'm hardly the only one. Play, as a mammalian learning tool, aids development by approximating adult behavior... or at least what we in our youth imagine to be adult behavior. Elevating the expectations of adolescents is very much a matter of "fake it 'til you make it" as we are so achingly sensitive to societal expectations at that age that simply creating an awareness of a better option can shift an overwhelming demand. Starcraft and Half-Life may not have been Asimov-quality SF plots, yet still made it vastly more difficult for companies to market plot-less RTS or FPS in their wake.

For another, you don't make a good game by designing it for children. Chess did not become a classic by limiting itself to the presumed cognitive abilities of ten-year-olds. Yet I did play it with some zest when I was ten, as did many others. A billion children don't kick a ball around after school because football was designed specifically for them but specifically because it wasn't, because they are emulating the World Cup (right down to bribing the referee with a stick of gum.) This is especially poignant in online games, where companies refuse to enforce the logical rules of sportsmanship for fear of alienating the braindead little shits who continually grief their own teams. Yet learning good sportsmanship was integral to the endless after-school pick-up matches which online games have replaced. Arbitration is not artificial. The lack of repercussions for griefing, online game developers' insistence on protecting bullies from retribution, that is the artificial element in these social interactions.

Neither should we expect that such punishment would drive away more customers than the inequity of watching bullies get away with their bullying match after match after match. When some retarded little shit scored an own goal on the playground because he thought it would be funny, he used to get shoved off the field. He didn't stop playing. He sulked for a few days, then came back asking to play again. Instead, online game developers refuse to analyze the griefer's actions while banning anyone who curses him out in team chat as "toxic" players. Decades of punishing the crime of fair-mindedness have contributed as much as anything to the narcissism of snowflake culture. While playing games, youths are supposed to assimilate the objective rules of fairness, practical harm and instrumental self-worth in interacting with others. This is not an unrealistic expectation to demand of adolescents, and the rules of fair-play should not be mangled to suit some false image we've concocted of the mental fragility of youth.

Don't design a bad game for bad players. Design a good game and let them learn to play it.