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Computer Games for Grown Ups (Part 1)
By Richard Nantel | December 21, 2007
Movies aimed at children changed significantly about 15 years ago. Film studios realized that little kids didn’t go to movies on their own. They were there with their parents, who paid for their tickets and obscenely overpriced candy, popcorn, and soft drinks.
Some smart movie producer realized that parents would be more likely to bring their children to movies that would also be enjoyable for the parent. The result was that kids’ movies such as “The Land Before Time” (1989) — a movie universally condemned by human rights advocates as too cruel a form of torture for adults — were replaced with movies such as “Aladdin” (1992), a movie that contained the appeal of a well-known comedian, Robin Williams, and inside jokes only adults would understand.
A few years later, it was common to see adults without children seated in showings of “Monster’s Inc.,” “Chicken Run,” “Toy Story,” and many others.
Game developers seem to be on the cusp of a similar discovery.
Parents have for many years been grudgingly buying game consoles for their kids and have been tolerating having them spend hour after hour in the playroom shooting up aliens and crashing cars. Four of the top five best selling games for the Xbox 360 platform are violent, “shoot-em-up” action games.
Nintendo’s Wii, the most coveted unavailable electronic device of 2006 and 2007, is helping to introduce an entirely new generation to games. In many households, the kids are being sent to bed early so that Mom and Dad can head to the playroom and get in a few games of bowling or tennis before calling it a night.
The result is that parents want a Wii as much as kids. This is contributing to Nintendo’s inability to meet demand, even when producing a staggering 1.8 million of these devices per month.
Game developers have realized that adults can be introduced to games through good design and the appeal of playing non-violent games they already know, like tennis and bowling. The logical next step will be to design games specifically for adults.
My next post will examine what these games might look like.
December 23rd, 2007 at 9:21 am
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