Nonviolent games for kids (and reluctant role models)

Hey all.

My 7 month old son was sitting up watching me blow colorful bandits away in Borderlands 2 on the PC last night. As I murdered my way across an outpost, scooping up guns and blazing away at anything that moved, I thought about how his little neurons were knitting together and what shapes I was helping them to take. Whatever effect my gaming will have on him, his own will be orders of magnitude greater.

I'm not a 'no war toys' kind of dad, so far, but I definitely will be trying to steer his playtime away from always pretending to shoot up the 'other' while bullets bounce off of him; why, then, should his virtual experiences be cultivated in a different manner?

I guess I'm thinking about gravitating my own play towards nonviolent or minimally violent gaming so it won't be 'do as i say not as i play' when the time comes for him to engage in Murder Simulator 2020.

Obvious choices include: Sim Anything, Minecraft, most things Nintendo, Terrari, lots of platformers and puzzle games...the list starts to become thin very quickly (i think like 3 games in my Steam library dont involve shooting or stabbing other humans (or reasonable facsimiles thereof.)

What suggestions does the troper hive mind have for games/series/generes that might be less destructive or, heavens no, more constructive?

XCOM: One does not simply "shoot" a Chryssalid

There are so many puzzle games out there. Adventure games might be a good choice as well, especially those which do have enemies but restrict the player character to avoiding them.

Bringing him up on retro gaming might also be a good idea.

edited 17th Jun '13 10:00:55 PM by Recon5

I could list out a ton of them, so I'll just give you general genres to start your search in: Puzzle games, Music games, Sim games, Adventure games, Exergaming, Raising sims, etc.

Hope your son enjoys 'em.

We Are Our Avatars Forever (Now on Discord by invitation, PM)

Actually, there are boatloads of games where you're not killing humans, or humanoid creatures. In fact, even if you limit yourself to games that don't involve any killing of anything, there's still a lot to choose from.

Entire genres, even. Driving games, puzzle games, Harvest Moon type games (whatever they're called), et cetera.

edited 17th Jun '13 10:05:37 PM by KylerThatch

This "faculty lot" you speak of sounds like a place of great power...

Driving games like Mario Kart or Sonic & Sega All Stars Racing are a good choice for kids. I tend to have to look after a friend's 11 year old and 7 year old and we tend to play that because 98% of my other games are rated M or higher. (M is 15+ in Australia)

“I was thinking that work is like fertilizer in that I’m glad it exists; I just don’t ever want to get stuck in it."

Could be, too, that I'm overthinking this as well as tilting at windmills/fighting the tide with a bucket.

Realistically, even if all we play at my house from today onward is Mario and Kinect Sports or whatever, he is going to be howling for high definition blood and slaughter after he comes back from his first exposure to Call of Duty at a friend's house.

Then he will discover trolling.

...my son is going to be a Co D kiddie.

Queue Vader: Nooooooooooooooooooo!

XCOM: One does not simply "shoot" a Chryssalid

If it's not too late to add a suggestion: Kerbal Space Program.

The only killing in that game is of the accidental (or "accidental") variety, since the whole game is about building rockets and launching them into space. It takes a little patience to master, so I don't know how long it'll hold your son's attention, so you might want to download the demo first and let him play with that before you commit to the full game (unless you want to buy the full game, of course), but if he's at all interested in space, I'd highly recommend it.

The math and physics involved in successfully setting up a launch in that game tend to dissuade most adults, so I doubt a child would have the patience for it.

Another option would be to look into some of the free games available on Facebook. Some of them are very child-friendly and aren't of the "Pay-to-Win" type either. Their quality, however, is a another story altogether, but kids don't tend to notice crappiness most of the time.

Nah, I think it's cool that you try so hard to put up a good example for your son to follow. Beats the crap out of those idiots that let their kids buy and play anything, and then complain at the game company for producing murder simulators. I don't have kids myself, but I do plan on steering them away from those kind of games if I ever do. Just because it's a fight you might lose doesn't mean it's not worth fighting.

How okay are you with killing non-humanoid creatures, btw? As far as my knowledge goes, Monster Hunter doesn't feature any humanoid enemies to fight off, apart from the occasional (very) great ape. Many JRPG s in general feature very few human opponents, or the violence has been abstracted so far that it's beyond recognition apart from the significance to the plot.

Honestly, it's been years since I've played a AAA shooter, but I haven't slowed down in my gaming at all. There's plenty of options.

edited 18th Jun '13 12:21:18 AM by Kayeka

Yay encouragement!

I look at Monster Hunter sort of like Harvest Moon with crops that bite, smash, and breathe fire on you and then dont die for half an hour.

Monster Hunter doesnt have any split screen component to it, does it? I'm not terribly familiar with it, but it seems from what I have read that the game could be subtitled "If you can play this, you don't need Ritalin." ...as in, the cure for ADHD.

XCOM: One does not simply "shoot" a Chryssalid

I don't know about the other games in the series, but Monster Hunter Tri does have a splitscreen mode. And yes, the game can be pretty addictive. When you beat down one of those huge monsters for the first time after struggling for the better part of an hour, you feel like the invincible godking of Radical Land. And then you do it again and see if you can do it faster.

Lots of content for your money. Very recommendable if you think you can be into that sort of thing.

Would the Wii U version have splits play? I've considered making that my main system for family friendly reasons and later on hiding up in the mancave with my PS 4 and Destiny when junior is drooling on his pillow and wetting the bed. :D

XCOM: One does not simply "shoot" a Chryssalid

Er, if you're talking about games to play at the moment, I'd recommend games with simple design—multimodial too, if possible. Splice is a good example.

(I'd argue that Borderlands 2 has too much going on for a seven month year old to really make sense of, but it's been at least one or two decades since I was seven months, and for the life of me I can't remember a minute of it.)

Fire, air, water, earth...legend has it that when these four elements are gathered, they will form the fifth element...boron.

Guess I'm thinking about next year all the way up to around ten or so when his interested are much more developed and independent. I remember my brother's kid always going apeshit after watching Halo and Co D and running around yelling at the top of his lungs about grenade kills when he was no older than 3. Don't want that for mine, so I'm gonna have to start modifying my own behavior now.

XCOM: One does not simply "shoot" a Chryssalid

The Wii U version has split play, though not in the traditional sense. One plays on the television, the other on the Wii U tablet thingee. There was also some noise about players of the 3DS version being able to play with the Wii U version.

edited 18th Jun '13 1:39:40 AM by Kayeka

If abstract/cartoon violence is OK, then there's always the LEGO games (LEGO anything, actually. I've been really nostalgic for them lately for some reason.).

Otherwise, uou always have Nintendos backlog of titles.

Uh...
I've never really thought about this. The only really violent games around when I was little were Doom and Duke Nukem.

Professor Layton
That's on the Nintendo handhelds. Lots of puzzles and a mystery to kinda sorta not really frame them around.

The old Lucas Arts adventure games and some of the Telltale Games ones. There's no harm in Wallace and Grommit, I cant imagine.

Stuff like that?

Mega Man fanatic extraordinaire

Star Fox was one of the first games I ever played, and from what I gathered from my parents, it really didn't affect me in any way they disliked. If anything, my mom loved how the games made me take a liking to reading as a subject, since I began to ask them a bunch of complicated questions about the words inside of the instruction manual. I guess what also helped was that Star Fox was a pretty simple sci-fi game that didn't throw too many big words around either, other than the basics of military jargon and dogfighting lingo.

It did, however, cause me to start seeing parallels to Star Fox all over the place. One memorable moment was when I was watching this tape about construction and the various vehicles they used when they mentioned something about a rock crusher. I immediately thought of the rock crusher boss in the asteroids stage, and commented that they should've made a joke or comment along the lines of "oh but we're not talking about THAT rock crusher!" My dad then had to explain to me that most people wouldn't get the joke and that Star Fox isn't even that well known, let alone to adults and non-gamers.

Oh, and another funny tibit: I was probably one of the only few kids around at that time who realized that creating a base in an asteroid field to use for both mining and launching the asteroids as weapons was probably a pretty damned awesome idea. Probably helped that I also knew how powerful a meteor could be, since I was a big fan of the dinosaur era!

edited 18th Jun '13 2:14:08 AM by SgtRicko

You'd be surprised at what a kid can get obsessive over. It's just that bad teaching has a way of killing interest in intellectual subjects.

This "faculty lot" you speak of sounds like a place of great power...

Well, for a PS2, I recommend Kingdom Hearts, as it's not much worse content-wise than whatever Disney movie you happen to be playing through, and hey, it's half a Disney game.

If you were to try it and it clicks with you, though, fair warning to you about the story and how segregated console-wise they all are beyond the PS2 games, though the coming PS3 Remasters are trying to put a kabosh on that second point.

edited 18th Jun '13 4:12:04 AM by TechPowah

The New Age of Awesome is here! Not even the sky is the limit!

Okami

"Please crush me with your heels Esdeath-sama!

Animal Crossing is always fun. Better if you get someone else to play in your town.

I don't have a game to reccomend, but a book: Killing Monsters. I'm not a parent but it was sitll a pretty profound read for me, and it talks about the idea of how even violent games (this was written during the era of Doom and Quake) can be party of a healthy balanced entertainment diet (as well as violent comics, tv, etc.). I don't want to dissuade anyone from looking for or suggesting less violent games, but maybe it'll provide food for thought and let you breathe a little easier when the kid inevitably does discover Call of Duty. ;)

Katamari Damacy is nicely non-violent, and is often fun for them to watch, but the tank controls are frustrating for most adults, let alone children with limited coordination and motor control.