The Brainy Gamer (a proud new parent, as well as a terrific blogger and podcaster) recently asked for thoughts on what age kids should be introduced to video games. I began writing a comment, but it turned into a post, so I’ll put my thoughts here instead.
My simplest answer: I haven’t yet seen a video game I’d want my two-year-old daughter to play.
I still believe that games (in general, not just video games) are among the absolute best learning tools available. In fact, I’d go so far as to say that most good education involves games and most of the best games involve learning. I haven’t examined the thought in detail, nor searched for evidence, but I suspect that peak playing experiences and peak learning experiences are biologically and socially very similar. I think humans (and other animals) have an evolutionary imperative to play that, at its root, arises from our need to learn and adapt.
But of course that doesn’t mean we should be plopping our six-month-old children in front of Halo 3.
My own daughter is now two and a half years old. We’ve been very careful in the consumption of all sorts of media. We decided to comply with the AAP’s recommendation to avoid all television before two years of age before she was born. I know some quality children’s programming may not hurt, but I also know that a you child’s mind may be one of the most powerful things in the universe.
Children seem built to learn, and to learn fast. It’s a good thing, too, because they have so much to learn. I remember thinking, in the first few weeks of her life, how many things I knew and knew how to do. Somehow, she’d have to pick up most of those, as well as learning millions of things I’d never know. Staring at the little warm bundle, I couldn’t imagine how it would ever happen.
Watching her walk and dance and do puzzles at two and a half, listening to her sing and laugh and have imaginary conversations with a toy llama, marveling as she happily matches pair after pair of Memory cards, I can see that, yes, it’s possible. She will successfully transform from the helpless tube she was to a wise, fun-loving woman. She’s built for it!
So much of what she’s had to learn exists in the “real” world. She had to learn that when she’s holding a toy and opens her hand, the toy drops to the ground. She had to learn that she can roll a ball. She had to learn that the cat doesn’t like to have her tail pulled but loves to have her face rubbed. She had to learn that when she laughs, her parents almost always laugh too.
Do you know that feeling of euphoria when you get completely immersed in some new and fascinating subject? Or when you begin to internalize the mechanics of a game? A new human has to be immersed in life. Every moment—even one so simple as picking up a rattle—is a moment of full engagement. As adults, we get experience this total engagement, this mindfulness, only occasionally; for children, it can be a full-time experience.
My daughter was exposed to some television before her second birthday. Not a lot. We never once left her in front of a set while we rushed about getting things done. (We still haven’t. When she’s watching, we watch too.) Whenever she caught a glimpse of that glowing, musical box, though, it grabbed her attention and sucked it in
The first time I saw it happen, I was a bit terrified. She directed her full concentration to the screen. She didn’t have any words, but the faces and music and colorful lights consumed her full attention. I knew her mind was fully engaged.
But her body had gone slack. The wriggling, the grasping, the giggling, the wild kicks . . . they all stopped. She became almost 100% watcher.
Television is so ubiquitous we forget how powerful it is. Watching my daughter get caught up in it, though, reminded me: it is awesome; it is terrible.
My daughter did have some positive early exposure to games. Although we resolved never to play World of Warcraft (despite the compulsion) while she was awake, when she was ten months old I did once log in long enough to move a character from one location to another in preparation for an event after her bedtime and she caught a glimpse of the screen. She loved watching “the bird” (I don’t remember if it was a gryphon or a hippogriff) fly gracefully over the forests.
She responded differently than she had to television. She sat in my lap, stuck her arms out, and leaned back and forth the way the bird did. She flapped her arms. And she laughed.
It seems to me that she knew, somehow, that we were involved with the flight. She saw the figure sitting astride this fantastical animal, and she understood that, in a way, we were riding it. I’d been pretty liberal in letting her play with my job-provided laptop. She’d bang on the keys and laugh or squeal when the screen changed. (We even have a record of some of her earliest “e-mail messages,” long strings of characters that delighted her grandparents.)
She understood that this device wasn’t there just to show her things, that it was a tool for doing things. She’d ask for the bird every couple of days for a while, so we’d send one of our characters on a longish flight. When it landed, she was sated.
Now, our daughter watches a little bit of TV almost every day. That is, as a family we watch from fifteen to forty-five minutes of TV together within the hour or so before she goes to bed. We choose the content from DVDs and video tapes.
See, now she’s ready for it. She has a huge mental vocabulary, so she can understand what’s happening on TV. When she was one year old, she didn’t necessarily understand that everyone had a name, that animals couldn’t talk, that balls never fall up, that letters had sounds. Now, when she watches a few clips from Sesame Street (out of distaste for Elmo, “the Red Menace,” we only spin up selections from Sesame Street: Old School
, which offers a peaceful five minutes of cows instead of an overproduced barrage of self-promoting music and colors), she asks insightful questions about how the characters are feeling or sings along with the girl bringing her llama to the dentist.
So what about video games? Is she ready? She may well be ready for video games, but I haven’t found a single one that I’d waste her time with.
We don’t think she needs to master touch-typing by the time she’s five, and we know that a program that splashes bright colors on the screen in response to bangs on the keyboard will only interest her for a little while, while costing more than the handful of animal figures that stimulate her imagination, figure in her storytelling, and keep her happily entertained for endless hours.
Really, these things aren’t so much games as toys. They’re virtual toys controlled by the keyboard, but toys nonetheless. As for the educational programs designed for slightly older kids, like the ones I see running on computers in the children’s section at the public library, I haven’t found one that appealed to me. Why? Because they don’t seem fun. (Defining “fun” can make for an excellent exercise when discussing the theory of games, but I still maintain that games should be fun.)
And she’s not ready for games requiring skill, dexterity, and timing, though they may be somewhat more fun. She’s still working on catching balls, the mechanics of fitting puzzle pieces together, and living without diapers.
My daughter shares my passion for games, but she doesn’t truly play them. For example, she adores chess (I happen to have a Simpsons chess set
, and the brightly colored, anthropomorphic figures are a big part of the appeal), but “playing” consists of setting up the pieces—along with other toys—on the board. When she helps roll the dice while the grown-ups play Arkham Horror or Descent, she’ll carefully count the dots, announce the number, and then throw her hands up in the air and cry, “I win! Daddy wins! Mommy wins!”
In a year or two, she’ll really be playing games. She’ll delight in figuring out how the rules work and developing strategies. She’ll take pleasure in a hard-won victory and (I hope) a fair defeat. When she does, I won’t hesitate to play video games with her.
But I’ll sure as heck be playing board games, ball games, card games, skill games, and roleplaying games with her, too!
January 17th, 2008
The grand illusion in roleplaying games (single-player CRPGs, MMORPGs, and even to some extent tabletop RPGs) is that you face greater challenges as your character becomes more powerful. The truth, though, is that the end game content of MMORPGs is almost exactly as challenging as the first few levels, which is to say, “Not very.” In this post, I’ll continue thinking about what would make a dream MMO.
An idealized, perfect video game would present its player with a pleasurable rise and fall of challenge and difficulty. After the initial learning curve, players ought alternately to face challenges that give them a thrill and to enjoy the fruits of meeting said challenges. The fact that different people find different degrees of challenge in a single activity presents designers with one of their great challenges.
As Tobold points out, when a game has a multimillion–dollar budget, its publishers want more than just the praise of a few hardcore aficionados and sage critics. They need customers—and lots of them. Make the game too difficult and too many people will give up.
The converse isn’t actually true (except in the absurd). Making a game too easy will drive hardly anyone away, as long as there are perceived challenges to be met. In an MMO, you can strive to reach the level cap, scheme to get some rare piece of gear, or strive to down the greatest foes (again and again).
Thus, developers opt, time and time again, for easy games with mass appeal. A wise decision. I have some real-life friends, dedicated WoW players, who occasionally find the game’s challenges to be just within their abilities! This leaves gamers like me, who actively enjoy testing their gaming skills, a bit out in the cold. I think, though, that there’s a design solution, not too hard to implement, that would render games fun for a broad audience interested in a low-difficulty game that’s simultaneously satisfying for the more hardcore gamer.
For the most part, MMORPG game goals are achieved through time investment and social engineering. In fact, outside of special encounters designed for groups, the enemies you face at the level cap are just as easy to defeat as the kobolds upon whom you committed genocide back when you were level 2. Probably easier, in fact, because you’ve been granted a greater breadth of tools to deal with enemies. Yes, you advance through levels and watch your statistics climb, but the player skill required for a level 70 character to defeat a level 70 monster is only slightly greater than that required for a level 1 character to defeat a level 1 foe.
The greatest challenge for me in getting to the level cap in WoW, in hitting the cap of various professions, in exploring intriguing instances, was in finding sufficient time.
There are, of course, other reasons to play MMOs than for the challenge. After all, WoW held my interest all the way from level 1 to level 70. But let’s face it, there’s a reason so many WoW players create artificial challenges for themselves. They still want to play the game (because they have friends there, because they’re addicted, because they find the game relaxing and pleasurable even if it’s not altogether interesting).
This lack of challenge doesn’t sit well with everyone. Some turn to PVP (although even the staunchest PVP advocates agree that most MMOs don’t implement it very well). Some simply abandon MMOs.
The solution can be found in the many existing games that let players level-set their own challenge level. Many recent FPS video games do this explicitly, but a great many games, including nonvideo games, scale to meet the skill levels of their players. Two-person strategy games, for instance, allow players to choose opponents who present a pleasurable (not necessarily evenly matched) challenge.
An MMORPG should offer a player hundreds of possible goals. The very visible goals of leveling, improving equipment, and seeing rare content serve the explicit design goal of keeping players happy while they pay monthly subscription fees, but a flatter approach offering even the newest player dozens of goals of varying challenge levels could do just the same.
Instead of rushing players to the leveling treadmill, why not explicitly offer them a choice of activities with different degrees and sorts of challenge?
- Easy: the chance to clear ten rats out of the basement for a modest experience reward
- Moderate: the chance to rescue a villager from angry goblins for more experience and a decent weapon
- Hard: the chance to call out the head of a local gang for more experience and a valuable reputation game
- Nearly (but not quite) impossible: the chance to head off on an difficult overland journey to capture a wild horse which can ultimately be tamed to be a mount, granting no experience reward whatsoever
These are all straightforward adventure quests, of course. A rich game with a fulfilling crafting system, thrilling PVP competition, social goals that foster guild loyalty and teamwork, achievement ladders, and strong exploration and narrative elements could present an even bigger menu to the new character. Each possible path to advancement should present the player with tasks of different challenge for the player.
It’s always a numbers game, of course, but it’s possible to balance activities so that a player who enjoys greater challenge will receive approximately the same reward for time invested as a player who prefers to relax with a series of comparatively easy quests. Since MMO designers have a vested interest in keeping people playing as long as possible, they are hesitant to grant greater advancement rewards to players willing to pursue greater challenges.
Instead of galloping quickly up the one mountain that counts (leveling, in all existing MMOs of note), challenge-oriented players may, for instance, earn prestige items (that horse from questing may have a different look than one purchased from the local vendor), titles, and even access to Easter-egg style content. Taking on a greater challenge may result in more rapid “advancement,” but it doesn’t have to equate to a more rapid consumption of content.
After all, the main reward for taking on more challenging gameplay should be the pleasure of more challenging gameplay itself.
Of course, the question remains: what challenges, exactly, can a game present? What activities can invite a player to use his own skill, rather than the aribtrary number next to his character’s skill, to meet a challenge? I’ll delve into that a bit—and into questions of an alternative system of rewards that doesn’t focus only on power acquisition, into tools to enhance the dying social dimension in MMOs, and the concept of a broad range of advancement paths—in upcoming posts.
For now, I’ll just end where I began: By simply granting players greater choice in the level of difficult of the activities they pursue in game, a dream MMO can maintain mass-market appeal without sacrificing challenging gameplay.
January 11th, 2008
I don’t like bloggers making excuses or apologies for absences, but as I haven’t posted in over a month, I do think a quick explanation is warranted.
I do most of my writing on the corporate dime. The company I work for requires me at my desk for around forty hours a week, but gives me far fewer hours worth of work to do. This usually gives me ample time to muse in writing about games, correspond with friends, and read.
Periodically, though, it just gets busy! December usually works out that way. In the weeks leading up to the end of the year, panic about fiscal statements and rushed sales result in longer, more work-filled hours.
I could, of course, write blog posts at home, but since this busy time at work coincided with the holidays, there was little enough time at home to sit around writing about games. Family and friends—and my very absorbing participation in musical theater—consumed most of the remaining hours.
That said, I do have lots to chatter about regarding games in the coming weeks, and I look forward to putting some of my thoughts into writing.
After all, though I didn’t get to write about games, a fair amount of the family and friend time did involve playing them. I’ve tried a bunch of new board games and several new video games, and I’ve started reading a couple of new tabletop RPG books. I got to experience more of the wonderful world of toddler gaming (earlier posts on the subject: 1, 2, 3, 4), this time with some commercial products. And when everyone was off to bed and I couldn’t sleep, I even found time for a few digital adventures in online worlds.
January 8th, 2008