Greg Kasavin Executive Editor	Now Playing: The Legend of Zelda: The Wind Waker (GC), The Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Past (GBA), Metal Gear Solid 2: Substance (PC), Car Battler Joe (GBA), Vietcong (PC), Red Faction II (Xbox, GC), Animal Crossing (GC), Capcom vs. SNK 2 EO (Xbox) Favorite Games I Played as a Kid: Ultima IV (Apple II), Phantasy Star (SMS), Space Harrier (Arcade)

Will Somebody Please Think of the Children?

The editors at GameSpot have one thing in common: We've been playing games for as long as we can remember. That's no coincidence. While there's something to be said for having a fresh perspective on a subject, there's more to be said for having a lifetime of experience in it. I sometimes try to imagine how my life would have been different had I not been exposed to games at a young age, but try as I might, I can't. Would I still be as seriously into them had I started playing games, say, when I was 15, rather than when I was 5? I doubt it. People often pick up their lifelong hobbies early on. Chess players, athletes, and painters all tend to start young, to name a few examples. Same goes for lifelong gamers, if you ask me. The thing is, I get the impression that kids these days are less likely to become lifelong gamers than they were 10 or 20 years ago--specifically because there are fewer games out there that are well suited to them. This isn't just a social concern. For empirelike companies such as Sony and Microsoft, which intend to still be in business long after you and I are dead, it's also a business concern.

This isn't a game for kids--it's for everybody.

But what are kids playing today? As the gaming industry has grown up, the games themselves have grown up too, leaving much less of a selection for younger audiences than there used to be. And while I certainly see the business sense of marketing a product toward the MTV-watching, Maxim-reading, male, 20-something demographic, with its hard-earned pizza-delivery-wrought disposable income, I also think today's biggest video game publishers would be wise to make more of an effort to appeal to younger players as well. Mark my words: The Grand Theft Auto money is going to dry up one day, and when it does, no one's going to go parading around, looking forward to the next game from Take-Two Interactive or Rockstar Games just for the sake of it. Most game publishers are so busy trying to capture the attention of high-school-aged and college-aged males that they're missing a huge opportunity to appeal to kids and build lifelong affinity with that audience. When guys like me were young, we'd buy new games from Nintendo, Sega, and others almost automatically. Now that's brand loyalty for you.

This game may be incredibly successful, but it's not exactly suitable for all audiences.

The key to making a great game for kids is to not make it for kids, but just to make it accessible to everyone. This subtle fact is probably the reason why most games for kids these days are so bad. That phenomenon is similar to a certain trend from some years ago, when a few publishers tried to find a niche by marketing "games for girls" and failed miserably when neither girls nor anybody else took any interest in their offerings. What went wrong? Perhaps it was the fact that, even when they do fit into a clear-cut demographic or other category, most people don't like to be categorized. Girls don't want to play "games for girls." Kids don't want to play "games for kids." So, when a game publisher tries putting out a game for kids and sees it fail miserably, that publisher shouldn't lose heart, but should rather consider the three following notions about kids and the games they actually like:

Just because they're young doesn't mean kids can't deal with some mature themes in their games.

• Kids aren't stupid. A game that's suitable for younger audiences doesn't have to be short or simplistic. Some of my best experiences playing games as a child came from role-playing games, with their epic storylines and well-defined characters, and I'm not an exception in this.

• Kids have reflexes. This is the one that really gets me. For some reason, many games for younger audiences are extremely easy these days, as if children didn't know how to contend with a challenge. I sometimes go back and play some of the games from my youth and am shocked at how much harder they are than games tend to be these days. I love the recent Zelda game for the GameCube, but it's somewhat startling to realize that it's the easiest Zelda game yet. Games shouldn't just keep getting easier, because everyone, young and old, likes a challenge. The challenge is often what makes the games we play as engaging as they are. Easy games are the ones that tend to be easy to put down.

• Kids aren't ignorant. Games for kids don't all need to be lighthearted, colorful Disney cartoons with talking birds in them. A child growing up in this day and age would be better off knowing sooner rather than later about some of the realities of the world he or she was unceremoniously cast into. No, I'm not advocating that Grand Theft Auto should be played by preschoolers--on the contrary, I strongly believe that ESRB ratings should be dutifully enforced. But the fact that kids shouldn't play games in which they can mow down cops with an automatic shotgun doesn't imply that they shouldn't play games in which serious things happen. Should kids be learning about life and death and the birds and the bees from their games? Not entirely, but for my part, I certainly learned a lot from the games I played.