Game Development Reference
In-Depth Information
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 indica-
tor of success.
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Visual design.
Young children don't have as much experience as adults do at fil-
tering 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-Exupéry's
The Little Prince
.
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Appropriate content.
This tricky area actually has more to do with what par-
ents 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 enter-
tainment needs to address children's concerns. This is one of the reasons the early
Harry Potter topics are so brilliant; they capture children's concerns perfectly. Kids
easily identify with Harry's feelings of alienation, being misunderstood by his fam-
ily, and his sense of latent but untapped promise. Even the emphasis on food in the
early topics 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.
NOTE
For further
reading on the Kisses
of Death, consult
Carolyn Handler
Miller's book
Digital
Storytelling, Second
Edition: A Creator's
Guide to Interactive
Entertainment
(Miller,
2008).
■
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.
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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 con-
text. 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
