Cheeky Little Gits

This kid is a cheat and a liar!

I’ve spent a fair amount of time lately creating games for kids, and playing games with kids – primarily my own two girls who are 6 and 9.  I’ve come to the conclusion that the natural state of gaming for children is to get away with absolutely as much as possible and do what needs to be done to try and win the game or shape it to their satisfaction. I kinda love this about kids too, for  several reasons. I admit that my sample pool is pretty small – my two kids who are always willing to play games in the name of science, and a few other sessions with other kids. So, take this report with a grain of salt.

For some systems, this is okay. There are a ton of kid oriented RPGs out there, my own Argyle & Crew being one of them. These tend to go a little lighter on the rules than RPGs aimed towards adults. The fact that kids seem to like to cheat is one of the reasons I built A&C like I did. Yet, rather than call it cheating, I simply call it imagination. We’ll get back to this in a few paragraphs.

Of all the kids I’ve played with over the past few years, it doesn’t matter what we’re playing – board games, RPGs, My Little Freaking Pony, many of them tend to let their imaginations really run wild.  It’s an awesome experience. I can interject something strange, such as a Martian spacecraft into my daughter’s My Little Pony play session and not only does she take it in stride, it gets incorporated into her play in a matter of fact way. That’s not cheating.

When you’re playing Quarriors though, and she opts for eight dice rather than six, well that is cheating. Really in her mind it’s a much lesser form of cheating than say introducing my Godzilla action figure and my wife’s hairy Wonder Woman doll into the Pony mix. When she watches ponies on the tube, both Godzilla and Wonder Woman consistently fail to make an appearance.  Yet here she is playing with dice already and she just wants to add two more. Sheesh, what’s the big deal?

Why when young kids cheat, it ain’t cheating

Back to my game and imagination – that’s why when I made a game for young kids, I built into it the ability for the person running the game to say “yes” as much as possible. Mixing atomic age giant monsters with golden aged comic people and talking ponies who have no hands yet somehow still build trains and stuff is perfectly okay! In a young kids mind there’s no barriers formed yet between what is, what should be and whatever. They’re still learning all this stuff about the world around them and what’s possible – to a 6 year old, just about anything is possible.

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