Wednesday, June 13, 2012

Make it Accessible, Don't Dumb it Down

One thing we had to consider when developing the games for this company was our target audience. Since this is an educational tool, we wanted it to be used by school aged children, but the difference in ability and maturity is vastly different from K up to 12. How do we strike a balance between making something that is generally accessible by the greatest number of people without alienating some other section by "dumbing down" the content?

I'm speaking from personal experience, but I believe kids know a lot. They know what they know, but they also "know" what they don't know. They also don't like being told that they don't actually know what they don't know, which makes getting some kinds of information across difficult. Kids also generally have a low tolerance for things made for age specific levels. If a 5 year old is given a toy made for 5 year olds, he'll say you're giving him baby toys. He want's what all the 6 year olds are playing with. Turns out all the 6 year olds don't want to play with their 6 year old toys and want the 9 year old toys. This scales up linearly almost into college, where most people finally realize that no one actually knows anything and we should have just spent more time playing. All of this means that creating targeted video games can become difficult when trying to reach children.

Neural Energy Games will try and create games with a broad spectrum of appeal. While aimed initially at the Middle School market (grades 5-8), we want to make sure that the games are still accessible to younger players, but still don't alienate older players. By talking to kids in a respectful manner, we hope that we can engage in accessible dialogue without being patronizing. Because we all know the fastest way to lose the interest of a kid is by talking down to him.

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