There are lots of games aimed at kids, but few places that can let parents know which ones are any good before they part with their cash. That’s where Pixel Daddy comes in. I’m Dan Whitehead, a writer and father of two with almost twenty years experience reviewing games.
In watching my own son dive enthusiastically into the world of videogames, I’ve realised that the existing games media doesn’t understand how kids play. They confuse simplicity for shallowness, or praise uninspired design on the assumption that children don’t know any better. Kids are smarter than they’re given credit for and, as the site motto says, Pixel Daddy is about taking kids games seriously.
See, there’s more to a great kids game than simply having the right characters or offering enough vague distractions to keep them quiet for a weekend. That’s why this site won’t focus solely on whether a game is educational, or whether the content is suitable for all ages. Knowing that a game is inoffensive is useful, but for the parent who wants to be sure that their children are being inspired and entertained, checking the age rating should be the first step, not the only step.
Pixel Daddy is about what makes a game fun; what makes a game accessible. What makes a game so enjoyable that kids will keep coming back to it out of passion rather than habit. It’s about which games have been designed with a young audience in mind, and which have been cynically shovelled out to gobble up more of your money.
Kids play and experience games differently to the dedicated adult gamers that most magazines and websites are aimed at, and they need fresh criteria to properly judge their worth. This was an idea I began to explore in a feature for Eurogamer, and one which will hopefully continue to evolve here.
Your children may spend a lot of time playing games. You’ll certainly be spending serious money on the games in question. Games for kids are serious business, so isn’t it time we treated them as such?
