Making Better Games For Kids

With so many voicing concerns about violent games, and infantilizing the medium while they do so, it's easy for those of us who actually play and defend videogames to forget that kids really do like them too. But then considering kids games often look like shoveled out, licensing grabs, it's amazing they do at all.

Being fair, as a whole kids' games aren't always bad, even when they seem licensed to a ridiculous degree. Just look at Traveller's Tales' Lego Star Wars games. Some how they've managed to make a kids' game, designed around two franchises, that even the most hardcore gamer can enjoy.

During his keynote at the Nordic Game Summit, the head of Traveller's Tales, Jonathan Smith, explained just how his company came to make a kids game any kid could be proud to own. It all came from this realization: “"We believed that children were very badly served by the games they were being given,” he said, adding, “"as parents at the time with children ourselves we knew that children were looking for things in games that they were rarely getting. We identified a market opportunity."

Smith even thinks kids make the best game testers, and Traveller's Tales uses them as such while developing their games. You can't always rely on adult's, because, according to Smith, adults' experience with bad games leaves them jaded and cynical about many new ideas. Kids though, they'll try anything, and tell you right away if they like it or not, Smith said. "We continue to find that by a thousand miles they are the best people to judge whether the work that we are putting into the game is the right work,"

[via GameIndustry]