Children’s adventures

One of the best unpublicized (until today) benefits of having children is that you can purchase many really cool things intended for kids, for yourself, and still keep your authority, pride and reputation intact. Strange looks from clerks cause no anxiety for me, as I smile reassuringly and state: “This light saber is for my little boy.” Little do they know I refer to the inner child, as I sprint from the counter in glee, ripping the plastic wrapping off my latest puerile purchase, making daunting ballast-gone-bad noises to terrified shoppers in the parking lot, before taking off in the Millennium Isuzu.

Other than this particular accessory to parenthood, I’m certainly no expert on children’s games. However, having children of your own does give you some insight as to what kids like, what they want, and what’s available. To define the terms “kid/child/children,” for purposes of this article, we are referring to that general age group from five onward, with a concentration on the toddler to early teens.

What Kids Want

Adventure games and children would seem to be a perfect match. Like macaroni and cheese, the simple word adventure is ever tasty to the childish palate. Whether it’s reaming out a pretend highway in the dirt for a Hot Wheels race, building a Lego empire, or writing and illustrating their own book; every kid in the world (even the ugly, loud ones that break the sound barrier in the grocery line) loves an adventure.

As far as adventure games are concerned, I think it’s safe to assume that kids want something immediately gratifying, easy, fun, funny, and or otherwise engaging. These are basic and general qualities that shouldn’t be a stretch for any developer. As a rule, younger children are fairly predictable and uncomplicated, so fulfilling these basic requirements should be easy, right? The reality is that often the end results are more cookie-cutter than creative and inspiring.

With so many PC games available for kids, it’s no wonder that many seem to be thrown together in tandem with a brand, or as an afterthought for the quick bucks that Saturday morning commercials generate. It is with due merit then, that Adventure Gamers asks the question: what will the future of adventure games for children be?

To get a glimpse of what that future might be, it’s necessary to consider what’s currently available to our kids in the way of adventure games, and those games whose prime directive is fun and adventure.

What They Get

Children’s adventures are probably best thought of as a small bezel in a clockwork market. The “adventure” often gets blended in and sometimes altogether lost in a genre-mixing puree that’s anything but “pure.” At least in the terms we are discussing here. So what we have is a bevy of games that borrow the exciting elements of adventure games but often fail to carry them through responsibly.

The majority of PC games for kids are brand based. It’s a given that if a child likes a TV show, they’ll inevitably talk their parents into getting brand-based EVERYTHING. Consider, for example, what has become the ageless phenomenon of SpongeBob Squarepants. THQ uses the Nickelodeon license well with this and many of the most popular kids shows, and many of the resulting games have been of excellent quality. Also included among them are monster sellers such as Hot Wheels, Bob the Builder and animated movie tie-ins like the recent Finding Nemo.

Then you have the smaller developers and publishers whose focus is on creating their own characters, such as Freddie Fish, Pajama Sam, SPY Fox, Putt-Putt, and others. These are all Humongous Entertainment creations, though now a division of Infogrames, currently owned by Atari Kids. These games focus on entertaining while teaching; encouraging responsibility, teamwork, critical thinking, and involving children in story lines of varying complexity. I have to say, most of the games developed by Humongous (and I own all but a few titles) successfully pull this off, and in fact, some have a flavor distinctly reminiscent of older LucasArts adventures (see SPY Fox and Pajama Sam).