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[C.A. Sinner]

I grew up playing Tennis for Two on an oscilloscope.

[SirNiko]

I had this atari game with ants. There was this anteater that would try to eat you, and sometimes it rained. We had absolutely no idea how to play it, but we loved it.

My observations when playing with a six-year old girl I used to babysit was that she preferred games where there were no monsters and no chance of death or failure. Climbing up a cliff and falling down and having to climb back up was very frustrating. Games that were relatively simple where she could succeed and practice repeatedly were fun for her. She adored scribblenauts, but she didn't know how to read or write very well and that got in the way.

If I had an exploration game without any text in it that would have probably been ideal.

I thought she'd like Knytt (no monsters, free exploration) but she burst into tears the first time she had to do a wall jump and missed. But maybe she was just way behind the curve for action-game reflexes.

She also screamed and threw the controller the first time the heartless appeared in Kingdom Hearts. While she didn't enjoy that, I was amused by her terror at the idyllic tropical paradise turned into a living nightmare. Probably a poor choice for a young girl's game.

[Gimym TILBERT]

I grew up playing Tennis for Two on an oscilloscope.

I grew up playing OXO
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OXO

/thread

[JWK5]

I've yet to grow up.

[ithamore]

First of all, any game can be a children's game when correctly matched to the child.

My daughter's favorite game is Machinarium. She memorized the demo when she was 3, and kept wanting to play it and to play more than what was available in the demo. So, I had to buy it.

It's now about 2 years later, and we've beaten the game more than 10 times. She keeps getting better at it and needs less of my help with the harder puzzles and the action parts.

She also likes Little Wheel and can play it all by herself. Although, she prefers to have me help her with the timing puzzle with that involves lining up the wires in 3 asynchronously rotating dials.

Then there are the games at pbskids.org, which she likes for their simplicity.

If I'm playing a game on my PC, she usually wants to watch or to know which buttons she can press to help me. However, she will want me to mute the music when it is tense or dark. At first, she even disliked the robot announcement voice that comes from the radio in Machinarium and would take off her headphones whenever she heard it. She now tolerates it.

Similarly, my younger brother was more sensitive to music more than I was when we were kids. We grew up with a NES and played almost anything we could get our hands on. However, the dungeon music in the Legend of Zelda gave him nightmares, so I had to play them.

You should, however, reconsider your question about games for children 4-10 years old. For young, growing children, each year can be like a lifetime. Also, more than one new skill is learned during each year.

If you want to make a game a game for a specific age range of children, keep the range small (a range of 1-2 years for example). Also, the younger the child is the more easily that child will be easily frustrated, distracted, and impatient.

[Jasmine]

If you want to make a game a game for a specific age range of children, keep the range small (a range of 1-2 years for example).

Rather than building games for the "average" child aged 6-7, I think it's worth remembering the real children develop some skills earlier than average, and some skills later than average. "Average" is only of interest to statisticians.

Compartmentalizing skills into such narrow age groups could mean that many children feel unfulfilled playing the games on offer, because they'd all be designed around a false expectation of averageness.

[ithamore]

If you want to make a game a game for a specific age range of children, keep the range small (a range of 1-2 years for example).

Rather than building games for the "average" child aged 6-7, I think it's worth remembering the real children develop some skills earlier than average, and some skills later than average. "Average" is only of interest to statisticians.

Compartmentalizing skills into such narrow age groups could mean that many children feel unfulfilled playing the games on offer, because they'd all be designed around a false expectation of averageness.

Yes, "average" sucks for those of us who aren't "average." I'm not "average."

When trying to develop a game for young children, however, one should always take literacy into consideration. Like I was trying to say before, unless an adult (and I should have added older child) is helping the young child, the language skills of the young child trying to play a game are a huge factor of importance for many games.