Window Dressing

The first and most common method, window dressing, is the gaming equivalent of piping ESPN into Baby Gap. It was something I was shooting for when writing SpongeBob SquarePants: Employee of the Month a few years ago.

The puzzles and gameplay were generally designed with an age range of 6-10 years old in mind, but some of the humor was specifically aimed at parents -- for example, at one point in the game SpongeBob runs into a fish transplanted to the Pacific Ocean from the English Channel. She is unaccustomed to the climate and gripes, "It's not the heat that gets me, it's the salinity." Whether this pun elicits a giggle or a groan is certainly debatable, but the point is that while a child wouldn't likely get it, a parent probably would.

It isn't difficult to pepper your design with sight gags or one-liners that suit this purpose and, within reason (as long as they are peripheral to the plot, because you cannot count on them being absorbed by the player), the more the merrier -- although it is worth mentioning that it only takes a few laugh out loud moments for a game to be considered funny. This credo assumes that the subject matter of every Piggyback game is comedic, or at least light-hearted. This is not wholly accurate, but the nature of the beast is such that even if the game itself is not strictly a comedy, interstitial jokes won't usually seem out of place.

Another hitch you have to get used to when using this method is the less than favorable hit/miss ratio. Many writers would like nothing more than to strap gamers to a table and force them to listen to every line of their dialogue while they cackle in the corner with Kubrickian glee. It's frustrating to labor over a line knowing it's something that only a small percentage of players will hear, see, or -- the most elusive element to quantify -- get. This is a difficult enough process in a game aimed at one demographic; if you try and hit two disparate age groups you are immediately splitting the hit/miss ratio of every joke or dramatic moment in half.

In practice, window dressing is a safe method of adding another layer to a children's game. Even if many of your gags backfire you aren't really hurting anything. It doesn't typically interfere with any other aspects of design and, as such, can be tweaked late in the development cycle. As long as you aren't overly possessive of your ideas and don't mind a fair percentage of them being lost in translation, it's also relatively painless to do.

Brute Force

The brute force method consists essentially of designing puzzles difficult enough that kids will be forced to enlist the help of their parents to complete them. Occasionally this may pop up inadvertently as the result of unrefined game design, but more often its appearance is intentional.

The phenomenally popular Her Interactive series of Nancy Drew games is a case, I am certain, of the latter. These are highly polished games that are very well designed, but the simplicity of their plots and dialogue often belie the complexity of the puzzles they contain. Try playing The Curse of Blackmoor Manor without consulting a walkthrough and I'm sure you'll see what I mean.

This practice is more acceptable today in part because, in PC development at least, it is fast becoming safe to assume that your audience has readily available internet access. I am continually amazed by the fact that a full walkthrough for each installment of the Agatha Christie trilogy I've worked on has been available within 24 hours of each game's release.

This new set of consumer expectations may turn a game-stopping design blunder into little more than a momentary annoyance, but does not exculpate developers from doing all they can to ensure that the situation doesn't arise in the first place.

Unfortunately, the problem that emerges even among the most dedicated and experienced designer is one of accurately measuring a quality that is inherently indefinable. Even if you were designing a game with one specific child in mind, it would be impossible to discern exactly how difficult a given puzzle should be to test that child's reason to its limit without crossing the line into the realm of the unreasonable.

All the same, making games for kids that intentionally require parental assistance unfavorably recalls school science fairs comprised of projects whose juvenile involvement included little more than carrying the blasted things to class. So while you can be a little daring in erring on the side of puzzle complexity, ratcheting up difficulty to milk a few more hours of gameplay out of a sparsely interactive title is hardly the high road -- as always, games should be judged less on how many hours they take to complete and more on how many hours you actually enjoyed playing them.