8 ms·

Hating on Candyland: Why most games for kids are awful

54 points by bengarvey 16y ago

jerf 16y ago
The purpose of Candyland is to play a game, without playing a game. It's for toddlers to learn to take turns, to accept negative or positive outcomes without stomping off in a huff, and to play a game with a level playing field between the adults and children... and at the level we are talking about, if there is a meaningful choice at all, then the child, or perhaps rather toddler, will simply lose. It's more than just "following directions", it's the whole set of skills necessary to play a game. This is why family games have a gradient to them, gradually trading chances for decisions, and gradually expanding the state space, until the game player is ready to join the adults fully with something like Scrabble in the early teens or so. The mentioned Connect 4, for instance, is relatively simple and can be effectively "solved" by an 8 or 9 year old, for instance, so a 8yo and an adult are still not separated by such a large gulf that the game is a joke. Children are actually pretty good at figuring out that they are being "let" win. If you replace Candyland with something that has any choices at all, you've replaced something other than Candyland. That said, I'm not saying the progression is optimal as it stands, but if you don't understand the reasons for the enduring popularity of the "standard game loadout", which hasn't seem to have hardly changed in 50 years, you're not going to improve on it properly. And I'd say most of the flaws are on the higher end and solved with things like Settlers of Catan and such, not the children's part of the progression.
- bengarvey 16y ago
  When I have opened up this debate among friends, your counter point is the one brought up the most. I think they can learn taking turns and accepting outcomes while making decisions, even if at the start those decisions are random. Even if I concede that Candyland has a place in the progression, kids jump past it so fast I wonder if it is even worth including. Thanks for reading and responding, though.
  - jerf 16y ago
    How do you plan on addressing the problem of the result of the game being a forgone conclusion if you include meaningful choices, pretty much by definition of "meaningful"? That's the core of my point, not really the learning or discipline bits, and there's a certain mathematical inevitability about it; choices -> adults winning against young children. Or having to throw the game, and kids aren't dumb, they notice that.
    - kragen 16y ago
      What if the game incorporates so much randomness that the best possible decisions still only win two games of every three against the worst possible decisions?
    - JoshTriplett 16y ago
      Don't play as adversaries, then. The original article suggests a simplified role-playing game, where the adult effectively just implements the game mechanics and acts as a GM. You don't have to structure it like an RPG, but any game with meaningful choices that remains balanced will have a similar structure: the adult implementing a game for the kid. That's not "throwing the game", that's redefining the idea of the game. Consider that the job of a GM isn't to beat the players by any means possible, but to make a fun game with the right level of challenge. In an adversarial situation you'd call that "throwing the game". But in a game where the GM simply implements the game mechanics, they just act as an infinitely flexible interpreter of desired actions and generator of sensible results. In other words, you've implemented a single-player game for the kid(s). That said, I do think "games" like Candyland have a place; they're just really uninteresting as games. They do something interesting and allow interaction. So do toys that light up or make noise when you interact with them. Candyland demonstrates a structured form of interaction, and a concept of game rules (moving your token according to defined rules rather than just marching it across the board as you please). Calling it a "game" is a stretch, but that doesn't make it worthless.
      - jerf 16y ago
        Actually, I'd pretty much agree with you wholesale. The only thing I'd further add is that there should be both adversarial and non-adversarial gaming in the mix. There is a certain element of maturity building you get out of adversarial "gaming" with Candyland that non-adversarial gaming either can't introduce, or will have a much harder time introducing, and vice versa.
- deleted 16y ago
  [deleted]
  - kragen 16y ago
    Most games are bad, but there are plenty of good old games. Tic-tac-toe, soccer, chess, go, nine men's morris, fanorona, alquerque, checkers, truco, canasta, gin rummy, pool, the numerous variations of mancala (wari, kalah, and dozens of others), shogi, gomoku ("Pente"), reversi ("Othello"), chinese checkers, and on and on. So I think your statement, "It's only really in the late 80's early 90's stuff really developed in the board game world," really misses the mark. It's true that the US had a deeply impoverished board-game culture for decades, especially with regard to kids' boardgames. And it's true that we're in the middle of an unprecedented explosion of excellent boardgames. But there were already a number of excellent boardgames in existence.
- hugh3 16y ago
  Your comment reminds me of when I used to play Trivial Pursuit with my family (all much older) when I was eight or so. Of course I hardly knew anything at the time, but quickly cottoned on to the fact that "Hitler" seemed to be the answer more often than anything else, so I'd just answer "Hitler" to anything I didn't know.
  - jberryman 16y ago
    Trivial Pursuit is candyland for grownups.
    - Alex3917 16y ago
      I've never understood trivial pursuit. Every single science question can be easily answered by anyone with a fourth grade education could answer, and yet all the other categories involve things like obscure B movies from the 1930s that no one has ever heard of.
      - sliverstorm 16y ago
        The conclusion I always drew was, logically speaking, when Trivial Pursuit was created it must be that 4th grade science was about as well-known as slightly outdated pop trivia.
      - hugh3 16y ago
        Well then, it's possible that your distribution of knowledge is atypical. Besides, most people have forgotten most of what they knew in fourth-grade science, unfortunately. I recently gave a talk about planetary science to a classroom full of seven-year-olds, and was astonished how many random facts some of them seemed to know. Kid: "How many moons does Jupiter have?" Me: "Well, there's four large ones, and quite a number of smaller ones. We're still discovering new ones, and the smallest ones are only a kilometer or so in diamet..." Kid: "Sixty-three!" I checked when I got home, and damn, he was right, there are currently 63 known moons of Jupiter. I research Jupiter for a living and I didn't know that, but this seven-year-old kid did.
  - 16y ago
- raganwald 16y ago
  Meaningful is not strictly equivalent to influencing the outcome. Imagine a typical "racing" game where players advance along a track. The track could incorporate forks such that mathematically, all choices are equivalent. But the entertainment value of the forks may differ. Some children may want to cut through the "garden," others through the "playground."
  - dfranke 16y ago
    If they're all perfectly equivalent then even very young kids will catch on to that quickly. Here's an improvement: make the choices equal in EV but different in variance. That adds a little bit of strategy: take the predictable choices when you're ahead and the risky ones when you're behind. Nonetheless, a child with no concept of this strategy can sometimes win against an adult who plays optimally. N.B.: I was home-schooled through preschool. My mother designed a bunch of board games that she used to teach me basic math. Then I got to kindergarten and got introduced to Chutes & Ladders. I saw through it immediately and got into arguments with my classmates about what a stupid game it was.
    - hammock 16y ago
      The game you just described is Chutes and Ladders, but with choices. Could easily be implemented by having two dice, a "safe" die and a "risky" die. On your turn you only roll one die (you choose which one) - the risky die you move ONLY when the number would land you on a chute or ladder, otherwise you stay put. The safe die you move no matter what, and chutes/ladders do not apply to you wherever you land.
- Almaviva 16y ago
  > The mentioned Connect 4, for instance, is relatively simple and can be effectively "solved" by an 8 or 9 year old, for instance, so a 8yo and an adult are still not separated by such a large gulf that the game is a joke. Interesting post, but your Connect 4 game sounds extremely, extremely poor:)
- michael_dorfman 16y ago
  Exactly. In fact, I'd go so far as to say that Candyland is the best game ever for children of a certain age. I went to great lengths to import a copy here to Norway, and my 4 and 5-year-olds absolutely love it. The time will come, soon enough, when they want a game that requires them to make decisions, and plot strategy-- and when that day comes, there are plenty of such games to choose from. (My two older daughters both jumped straight to chess when they got to that stage.) But right now, game playing is about the social aspects. In fact, prior to the arrival of Candyland, my five-year-old (then four) would make us play board games without any rules. She'd roll the dice, and move the pieces around randomly, and have us do the same. That was the part that was fun. Lately, she's gotten into card games, and her favorite at the moment is a game of her own invention, called "Stop and Go". You divide the cards equally among the players, and each player has a stack, face down. When it is your turn, you turn over the top card. If it is red, you stop. If it is black, you turn over another card, and keep going until you hit a red card. The first person to go through their whole stack wins. No strategy, no decisions-- from a game theory standpoint, it's the same as a lottery drawing-- but that's the beauty of it. EDIT: for clarity.
  - hammock 16y ago
    I am reminded of the childhood favorite card game, "War," also a game of pure chance.
daeken 16y ago
This is off the topic of the actual post, but the concept of Kids Dungeon Adventure is just awesome. I'm getting this to play with a friend of mine and her 5 year old daughter -- we play games whenever I'm in town, but I've never felt they tapped into her (mindblowingly amazing) creativity and imagination. Great job, Ben; we need more of this!
- bengarvey 16y ago
  Thanks and I hope you like it! Send me the pics of your dungeon and I'll post them up on the blog.
  - daeken 16y ago
    Absolutely will do. Gonna head out there in a couple weeks and give it a try. Can't wait to try it -- brings me back to the days of sitting around with friends in elementary school and creating our own little RPGs.
impendia 16y ago
Ah, but you can make decisions in these games. Years ago I was teaching English in Japan to a 6-year-old, a 4-year-old, and a 3-year-old. We were playing some utterly moronic game where the kids took turns drawing cards, having me read the letter of the alphabet they drew, and then moving their pawn as appropriate. It was really more for the younger kids, so the 6-year-old made a decision: he attempted to cheat! He simply moved his pawn forward ten squares or so when he guessed we weren't looking. Regrettably for him, we were indeed all looking at the board. He offered to move his pawn back the ten spaces, but no, it was back to the beginning for him.
burgerbrain 16y ago
I've got to say, I find even Monopoly to be a terrible game. My strategy for the game can be summed up as: "buy the property if I can, otherwise pay rent if I have to". I almost never stray from that strategy, and even when I do, it's not like those exceptions make the game any more interesting.
- cdesmar 16y ago
  You are not playing optimally. Monopoly is far from perfect, but there is some more depth than that. Here's two questions: - How many houses is optimal for most sets? - Would you rather have both utilities or two railroads?
  - burgerbrain 16y ago
    That's the point though; you don't have to play optimally, doing so doesn't really make the game any more interesting.
- andrewflnr 16y ago
  I know what you mean. It doesn't get interesting until you start making deals and trades with the other players, especially when everyone agrees to relax the rules a little. The plotting starts to get messy as you try to figure out who is getting screwed worse in a given deal, or when you have to work out three-way trades.
  - burgerbrain 16y ago
    I find a much better game if you're into "deals" is Risk. You know you've had fun when the cleanup involves finding all the pieces that were put on ballistic paths in the final forfeit gesture of the game... good times.
    - sidek 16y ago
      Risk is incredibly frustrating, though. I cannot tell you how many times 18-man armies have been mowed down by lone men
geraldalewis 16y ago
In `A Theory of Fun`, Raph Koster writes about games being learning and teaching tools. When my brother and I would play 'soldiers' growing up, we were safely simulating, and learning from, what it would be like to be a warrior (evolutionarily, a useful identity). I always like the idea that Candyland was a game game -- it's a game to teach kids how to play games. It's a really spectacular book; I learned a lot from it despite not being a game designer: http://www.amazon.com/Theory-Game-Design-Raph-Koster/dp/1932111972 http://www.amazon.com/Theory-Game-Design-Raph-Koster/dp/1932...
- TillE 16y ago
  Raph Koster is one of a few remarkably unique minds in game design. He "gets" virtual worlds like almost nobody else does; dig around on raphkoster.com for some of his writing on the subject. Ultima Online in 1997 was so far ahead of its time, nothing quite like it has been made since. Some games have fumbled around with elements of UO, like open PvP or player housing or crafting, but nothing has ever captured its real essence: feeling like a living world with a wide variety of people, not just fantasy hero cutouts. You could spend months in the world without killing a single monster, just mining and blacksmithing and selling your wares to make money to buy a house. And it was fun! You could wear clothes just for aesthetic reasons, not because they gave you +1 dexterity. They got so many subtle details so right. It makes me sad that "immersion" now basically just means "pretty 3D world".
chuckfouts 16y ago
My family has found Gamewright to be one of a handful of companies that have games that both children and adults can enjoy. http://amzn.to/gIh8gU http://amzn.to/gIh8gU We still own the "traditional" childhood games mentioned in the article but rarely play them.
sliverstorm 16y ago
What's wrong with 'terrible' games like Candyland existing? Choices are not things that ONLY happen in games. When kids are ready, they'll move up. When I was a kid, I chose not to play Candyland. I chose to play Battleship and Stratego and Checkers and Chess and (much later) Magic.
cubicle67 16y ago
warning: paypal gripe ahead looks like a great idea (his game) so I decide for $6 it's worth a shot. My only payment choice is cc via PayPal, but PayPal are demanding my home address ("Please note we do not accept PO Boxes. If we are unable to match your address against Australia Post records, we may ask you to verify it by providing documentation."), full name and valid home phone number. Sorry, but they're not getting them. I'm still interested in the game though.
xiaoma 16y ago
Tom Vasel, of Dice Tower, reviewed Candyland. After reviewing 999 other games, his daughters pretty much bullied him into doing a video for Candyland. He panned it and rightfully so, but he also spent some time on what makes it so appealing to children. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Tas5aCeNgEU http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Tas5aCeNgEU Other than the hundreds of other kids games that offer better alternatives, he also suggested letting each player draw four cards and choose which one to play. This way, there's still a lot of luck and the kids will still win sometimes, but it's not completely passive. I have to agree with Tom. It's hard like a game that gives kids no choices. In life people do have choices.
midnightmonster 16y ago
Really excited about Dungeon Adventure. Going to have to sort out how to make it run well with multiple children controlling the heroes. Mostly, how not to be biased in dealing out monster attacks to the heroes. Possible monster 'strategy': attack whoever just attacked you. If you weren't attacked, attack whoever dealt the most damage to your monster buddies in the last roll. For when the monsters have initiative, make the order of the heroes walking through the dungeon significant--whoever's in the lead gets attacked first, giving them the opportunity to collectively decide to put the healthiest guy in the front, or let one person keep the protection ring in exchange for always taking the lead, or put the weakest in front to watch him die (or trade him out for a new hero) or whatever.
- bengarvey 16y ago
  Great! Make sure you send me a pic of the dungeon you guys create. I'm always looking for new ideas.

54 points by bengarvey 16y ago

jerf 16y ago

The purpose of Candyland is to play a game, without playing a game. It's for toddlers to learn to take turns, to accept negative or positive outcomes without stomping off in a huff, and to play a game with a level playing field between the adults and children... and at the level we are talking about, if there is a meaningful choice at all, then the child, or perhaps rather toddler, will simply lose. It's more than just "following directions", it's the whole set of skills necessary to play a game. This is why family games have a gradient to them, gradually trading chances for decisions, and gradually expanding the state space, until the game player is ready to join the adults fully with something like Scrabble in the early teens or so. The mentioned Connect 4, for instance, is relatively simple and can be effectively "solved" by an 8 or 9 year old, for instance, so a 8yo and an adult are still not separated by such a large gulf that the game is a joke. Children are actually pretty good at figuring out that they are being "let" win. If you replace Candyland with something that has any choices at all, you've replaced something other than Candyland. That said, I'm not saying the progression is optimal as it stands, but if you don't understand the reasons for the enduring popularity of the "standard game loadout", which hasn't seem to have hardly changed in 50 years, you're not going to improve on it properly. And I'd say most of the flaws are on the higher end and solved with things like Settlers of Catan and such, not the children's part of the progression.

bengarvey 16y ago
When I have opened up this debate among friends, your counter point is the one brought up the most. I think they can learn taking turns and accepting outcomes while making decisions, even if at the start those decisions are random. Even if I concede that Candyland has a place in the progression, kids jump past it so fast I wonder if it is even worth including. Thanks for reading and responding, though.
- jerf 16y ago
  How do you plan on addressing the problem of the result of the game being a forgone conclusion if you include meaningful choices, pretty much by definition of "meaningful"? That's the core of my point, not really the learning or discipline bits, and there's a certain mathematical inevitability about it; choices -> adults winning against young children. Or having to throw the game, and kids aren't dumb, they notice that.
  - kragen 16y ago
    What if the game incorporates so much randomness that the best possible decisions still only win two games of every three against the worst possible decisions?
  - JoshTriplett 16y ago
    Don't play as adversaries, then. The original article suggests a simplified role-playing game, where the adult effectively just implements the game mechanics and acts as a GM. You don't have to structure it like an RPG, but any game with meaningful choices that remains balanced will have a similar structure: the adult implementing a game for the kid. That's not "throwing the game", that's redefining the idea of the game. Consider that the job of a GM isn't to beat the players by any means possible, but to make a fun game with the right level of challenge. In an adversarial situation you'd call that "throwing the game". But in a game where the GM simply implements the game mechanics, they just act as an infinitely flexible interpreter of desired actions and generator of sensible results. In other words, you've implemented a single-player game for the kid(s). That said, I do think "games" like Candyland have a place; they're just really uninteresting as games. They do something interesting and allow interaction. So do toys that light up or make noise when you interact with them. Candyland demonstrates a structured form of interaction, and a concept of game rules (moving your token according to defined rules rather than just marching it across the board as you please). Calling it a "game" is a stretch, but that doesn't make it worthless.
    - jerf 16y ago
      Actually, I'd pretty much agree with you wholesale. The only thing I'd further add is that there should be both adversarial and non-adversarial gaming in the mix. There is a certain element of maturity building you get out of adversarial "gaming" with Candyland that non-adversarial gaming either can't introduce, or will have a much harder time introducing, and vice versa.
deleted 16y ago
[deleted]
- kragen 16y ago
  Most games are bad, but there are plenty of good old games. Tic-tac-toe, soccer, chess, go, nine men's morris, fanorona, alquerque, checkers, truco, canasta, gin rummy, pool, the numerous variations of mancala (wari, kalah, and dozens of others), shogi, gomoku ("Pente"), reversi ("Othello"), chinese checkers, and on and on. So I think your statement, "It's only really in the late 80's early 90's stuff really developed in the board game world," really misses the mark. It's true that the US had a deeply impoverished board-game culture for decades, especially with regard to kids' boardgames. And it's true that we're in the middle of an unprecedented explosion of excellent boardgames. But there were already a number of excellent boardgames in existence.
hugh3 16y ago
Your comment reminds me of when I used to play Trivial Pursuit with my family (all much older) when I was eight or so. Of course I hardly knew anything at the time, but quickly cottoned on to the fact that "Hitler" seemed to be the answer more often than anything else, so I'd just answer "Hitler" to anything I didn't know.
- jberryman 16y ago
  Trivial Pursuit is candyland for grownups.
  - Alex3917 16y ago
    I've never understood trivial pursuit. Every single science question can be easily answered by anyone with a fourth grade education could answer, and yet all the other categories involve things like obscure B movies from the 1930s that no one has ever heard of.
    - sliverstorm 16y ago
      The conclusion I always drew was, logically speaking, when Trivial Pursuit was created it must be that 4th grade science was about as well-known as slightly outdated pop trivia.
    - hugh3 16y ago
      Well then, it's possible that your distribution of knowledge is atypical. Besides, most people have forgotten most of what they knew in fourth-grade science, unfortunately. I recently gave a talk about planetary science to a classroom full of seven-year-olds, and was astonished how many random facts some of them seemed to know. Kid: "How many moons does Jupiter have?" Me: "Well, there's four large ones, and quite a number of smaller ones. We're still discovering new ones, and the smallest ones are only a kilometer or so in diamet..." Kid: "Sixty-three!" I checked when I got home, and damn, he was right, there are currently 63 known moons of Jupiter. I research Jupiter for a living and I didn't know that, but this seven-year-old kid did.
- 16y ago
raganwald 16y ago
Meaningful is not strictly equivalent to influencing the outcome. Imagine a typical "racing" game where players advance along a track. The track could incorporate forks such that mathematically, all choices are equivalent. But the entertainment value of the forks may differ. Some children may want to cut through the "garden," others through the "playground."
- dfranke 16y ago
  If they're all perfectly equivalent then even very young kids will catch on to that quickly. Here's an improvement: make the choices equal in EV but different in variance. That adds a little bit of strategy: take the predictable choices when you're ahead and the risky ones when you're behind. Nonetheless, a child with no concept of this strategy can sometimes win against an adult who plays optimally. N.B.: I was home-schooled through preschool. My mother designed a bunch of board games that she used to teach me basic math. Then I got to kindergarten and got introduced to Chutes & Ladders. I saw through it immediately and got into arguments with my classmates about what a stupid game it was.
  - hammock 16y ago
    The game you just described is Chutes and Ladders, but with choices. Could easily be implemented by having two dice, a "safe" die and a "risky" die. On your turn you only roll one die (you choose which one) - the risky die you move ONLY when the number would land you on a chute or ladder, otherwise you stay put. The safe die you move no matter what, and chutes/ladders do not apply to you wherever you land.
Almaviva 16y ago
> The mentioned Connect 4, for instance, is relatively simple and can be effectively "solved" by an 8 or 9 year old, for instance, so a 8yo and an adult are still not separated by such a large gulf that the game is a joke. Interesting post, but your Connect 4 game sounds extremely, extremely poor:)
michael_dorfman 16y ago
Exactly. In fact, I'd go so far as to say that Candyland is the best game ever for children of a certain age. I went to great lengths to import a copy here to Norway, and my 4 and 5-year-olds absolutely love it. The time will come, soon enough, when they want a game that requires them to make decisions, and plot strategy-- and when that day comes, there are plenty of such games to choose from. (My two older daughters both jumped straight to chess when they got to that stage.) But right now, game playing is about the social aspects. In fact, prior to the arrival of Candyland, my five-year-old (then four) would make us play board games without any rules. She'd roll the dice, and move the pieces around randomly, and have us do the same. That was the part that was fun. Lately, she's gotten into card games, and her favorite at the moment is a game of her own invention, called "Stop and Go". You divide the cards equally among the players, and each player has a stack, face down. When it is your turn, you turn over the top card. If it is red, you stop. If it is black, you turn over another card, and keep going until you hit a red card. The first person to go through their whole stack wins. No strategy, no decisions-- from a game theory standpoint, it's the same as a lottery drawing-- but that's the beauty of it. EDIT: for clarity.
- hammock 16y ago
  I am reminded of the childhood favorite card game, "War," also a game of pure chance.

daeken 16y ago

This is off the topic of the actual post, but the concept of Kids Dungeon Adventure is just awesome. I'm getting this to play with a friend of mine and her 5 year old daughter -- we play games whenever I'm in town, but I've never felt they tapped into her (mindblowingly amazing) creativity and imagination. Great job, Ben; we need more of this!

bengarvey 16y ago
Thanks and I hope you like it! Send me the pics of your dungeon and I'll post them up on the blog.
- daeken 16y ago
  Absolutely will do. Gonna head out there in a couple weeks and give it a try. Can't wait to try it -- brings me back to the days of sitting around with friends in elementary school and creating our own little RPGs.

impendia 16y ago

Ah, but you can make decisions in these games. Years ago I was teaching English in Japan to a 6-year-old, a 4-year-old, and a 3-year-old. We were playing some utterly moronic game where the kids took turns drawing cards, having me read the letter of the alphabet they drew, and then moving their pawn as appropriate. It was really more for the younger kids, so the 6-year-old made a decision: he attempted to cheat! He simply moved his pawn forward ten squares or so when he guessed we weren't looking. Regrettably for him, we were indeed all looking at the board. He offered to move his pawn back the ten spaces, but no, it was back to the beginning for him.

burgerbrain 16y ago

I've got to say, I find even Monopoly to be a terrible game. My strategy for the game can be summed up as: "buy the property if I can, otherwise pay rent if I have to". I almost never stray from that strategy, and even when I do, it's not like those exceptions make the game any more interesting.

cdesmar 16y ago
You are not playing optimally. Monopoly is far from perfect, but there is some more depth than that. Here's two questions: - How many houses is optimal for most sets? - Would you rather have both utilities or two railroads?
- burgerbrain 16y ago
  That's the point though; you don't have to play optimally, doing so doesn't really make the game any more interesting.
andrewflnr 16y ago
I know what you mean. It doesn't get interesting until you start making deals and trades with the other players, especially when everyone agrees to relax the rules a little. The plotting starts to get messy as you try to figure out who is getting screwed worse in a given deal, or when you have to work out three-way trades.
- burgerbrain 16y ago
  I find a much better game if you're into "deals" is Risk. You know you've had fun when the cleanup involves finding all the pieces that were put on ballistic paths in the final forfeit gesture of the game... good times.
  - sidek 16y ago
    Risk is incredibly frustrating, though. I cannot tell you how many times 18-man armies have been mowed down by lone men

geraldalewis 16y ago

In `A Theory of Fun`, Raph Koster writes about games being learning and teaching tools. When my brother and I would play 'soldiers' growing up, we were safely simulating, and learning from, what it would be like to be a warrior (evolutionarily, a useful identity). I always like the idea that Candyland was a game game -- it's a game to teach kids how to play games. It's a really spectacular book; I learned a lot from it despite not being a game designer: http://www.amazon.com/Theory-Game-Design-Raph-Koster/dp/1932111972 http://www.amazon.com/Theory-Game-Design-Raph-Koster/dp/1932...

TillE 16y ago
Raph Koster is one of a few remarkably unique minds in game design. He "gets" virtual worlds like almost nobody else does; dig around on raphkoster.com for some of his writing on the subject. Ultima Online in 1997 was so far ahead of its time, nothing quite like it has been made since. Some games have fumbled around with elements of UO, like open PvP or player housing or crafting, but nothing has ever captured its real essence: feeling like a living world with a wide variety of people, not just fantasy hero cutouts. You could spend months in the world without killing a single monster, just mining and blacksmithing and selling your wares to make money to buy a house. And it was fun! You could wear clothes just for aesthetic reasons, not because they gave you +1 dexterity. They got so many subtle details so right. It makes me sad that "immersion" now basically just means "pretty 3D world".

chuckfouts 16y ago

My family has found Gamewright to be one of a handful of companies that have games that both children and adults can enjoy. http://amzn.to/gIh8gU http://amzn.to/gIh8gU We still own the "traditional" childhood games mentioned in the article but rarely play them.

sliverstorm 16y ago

What's wrong with 'terrible' games like Candyland existing? Choices are not things that ONLY happen in games. When kids are ready, they'll move up. When I was a kid, I chose not to play Candyland. I chose to play Battleship and Stratego and Checkers and Chess and (much later) Magic.

cubicle67 16y ago

warning: paypal gripe ahead looks like a great idea (his game) so I decide for $6 it's worth a shot. My only payment choice is cc via PayPal, but PayPal are demanding my home address ("Please note we do not accept PO Boxes. If we are unable to match your address against Australia Post records, we may ask you to verify it by providing documentation."), full name and valid home phone number. Sorry, but they're not getting them. I'm still interested in the game though.

xiaoma 16y ago

Tom Vasel, of Dice Tower, reviewed Candyland. After reviewing 999 other games, his daughters pretty much bullied him into doing a video for Candyland. He panned it and rightfully so, but he also spent some time on what makes it so appealing to children. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Tas5aCeNgEU http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Tas5aCeNgEU Other than the hundreds of other kids games that offer better alternatives, he also suggested letting each player draw four cards and choose which one to play. This way, there's still a lot of luck and the kids will still win sometimes, but it's not completely passive. I have to agree with Tom. It's hard like a game that gives kids no choices. In life people do have choices.

midnightmonster 16y ago

Really excited about Dungeon Adventure. Going to have to sort out how to make it run well with multiple children controlling the heroes. Mostly, how not to be biased in dealing out monster attacks to the heroes. Possible monster 'strategy': attack whoever just attacked you. If you weren't attacked, attack whoever dealt the most damage to your monster buddies in the last roll. For when the monsters have initiative, make the order of the heroes walking through the dungeon significant--whoever's in the lead gets attacked first, giving them the opportunity to collectively decide to put the healthiest guy in the front, or let one person keep the protection ring in exchange for always taking the lead, or put the weakest in front to watch him die (or trade him out for a new hero) or whatever.

bengarvey 16y ago
Great! Make sure you send me a pic of the dungeon you guys create. I'm always looking for new ideas.