The toughest crowd: How little kids pose big problems for game makers

When it comes to entertaining children, it's easy for adults to make assumptions about what makes a child tick. A quick scan of shopping mall aisles or a glimpse of a McDonald's advertisement tells us that anything - no matter how plastic, flimsy or silly - is able to set off the switch in a child's brain that makes demands and results in parents all around the world shaking their wallets vigorously over cash registers.

The assumption is that children are easy to entertain - that, unlike experienced adults with knowledge, understanding and taste, children don't know any better. So the second assumption is that it must be easy to create entertainment for them. Game developers should just be able to make a McHappy Video Game for the children of the world and wait as those brain switches simultaneously flick. Unfortunately for the hamburger game makers of the world, assumptions can often be wrong.

"Targeting kids can really mean a lot of different things," says Nathan Martz, project lead on Once Upon A Monster.

"Kids change a lot from year to year. A four-year-old could not be more different from a five-year-old, especially in their own minds."

To make a game targeted at an under-six audience, Martz and his whole team needed to get their heads around what children liked, what they didn't like, how they behaved, and how they perceived themselves. A childhood development expert was eventually brought on board to help the team understand what works with kids at different ages; first, however, the team was built to include as many parents as possible.

"We really tried to pick people who were first qualified in terms of their actual skill-set, but also had children and were excited about making a game their young kids could play," Martz says. "That gave us a lot of micro-detail to inform our decisions and we were steered by these people's daily experience raising children."

The early months of the project challenged Martz's own assumptions about young gamers every day. The game he thought would be simple to make proved particularly tricky when he realized he had assumed all the wrong things about his audience. 

One of the first things he learned was that not all children are the same.

"I know this one is a bit obvious, but every kid is different. Even developmentally you have some kids whose ability to follow rules may be above grade level but their physical coordination might be below.

Back over at Bubble Gum Interactive, making a game with social elements for children presented them with another challenge. The majority of MMOs are designed for older players who understand online safety. In MMOs like World of Warcraft, players can reveal as much or as little about themselves as they wish. Players can establish relationships, their interactions with other individuals or clans go unmoderated, and it is assumed that they can take care of themselves in an online environment. The same assumption does not exist for children.

"Safety for children in our game is fundamental - it's absolutely paramount," says Gray.

"When you're making a game for kids, you actually have two customers: One is the kid and the other is the parent, and both play a pretty important role."

Gray says that while adults generally do not play the game, they are the ones who determine whether or not their children are allowed to play. They will want to know that the game is content appropriate and that it's safe. They will want to know that if they turn their backs for even a minute, their child will not be put at risk as a result of playing a game. So where many MMOs give players free reign to how they wish to communicate and share information, Little Space Heroes has implemented safety measures to ensure that their game remains both fun and safe for its audience.

First, all players remain anonymous. The children are able to create in-game avatars and choose nicknames, but the game does not ask them for any personal information. Second, they use chat filtering tools that don't only target profane words, but also key phrases that children might use.

"We really did read the dictionary multiple times to keep refining this, but even if you take out bad words, it's still very easy for kids to say things like 'I hate you' or 'I hope you don't come back' to each other," Gray says. "We recognize that's totally unacceptable because this is a virtual playground. In a normal playground there's always someone there making sure it's safe, so we're doing the same in our virtual playground."

"Kids are very demanding customers," says Paul Gray. "They'll let you know if they don't like something, but it can be really hard to define what they do like."

Both Nathan Martz and Paul Reiche agree with Gray's sentiments: Child gamers may not take their opinions to message boards or petitions, but if they are unimpressed by a game, they will put down the controller and walk away.

"One of the big things I learned was how quickly three and four-year-olds are to tune out," says Martz.

"One of the things we take for granted with older players is that you can start your game with a long intro cutscene that's unskippable, but it has amazing full-motion video - with young players, you've either got them or you don't," he says.

For Reiche, kids may be a tough crowd, but at least they don't have unreasonable expectations like adult gamers.

"Kids expect that games will be fun, cool and something they want to tell their friends about. Adults on the other hand have all these unreasonable expectations, like 'this will have cutting edge 3D grass rendering,'" he says.

Reiche fires off a list of requirements that many adult gamers force onto games; conditions that games need to meet before they can even be considered worthy of playing. He describes many of these conditions as being unreasonable in their breadth.

"It's very difficult to make a high-quality top tier adult game without really digging a very large hole and then spending a lot of time filling it before you start adding something new and innovative on top of it."

While Nathan Martz won't say that kids are a tougher audience, he admits that making games for them is far from easy. The game he set out to make - the game that was meant to be simple - turned out to be anything but. In many ways it presented challenges that he would not have even encountered had he only worked on blockbuster action games, but he believes that time spent making Once Upon A Monster was incredibly valuable and educational.

"If I were to synthesize it all I would say kids hold you to a higher bar. They won't ever be mean, but they will do what they feel like and if you're not entertaining them they'll go and do something else," he says.

"If you really want to entertain young children, you better bring your A-game."