Child labour

June 14, 2006 on 4:45 pm | In Advergames |

My kids love testing the advergames we create.

We often found ourselves going into client meetings and telling them what kids love — like we’d have any idea! We’ll say things like “they love physical comedy”, and of course we know this is true. But then we’ll create something and show it to the kids and they’ll go “What is this, it’s stupid!” Or there’s a part of it they’ll think is really cool and you’ll go “Really? That?”

I showed them our Wolf N Swine game, which tells the story of the three little pigs — except it’s the pig’s revenge. Sick of having his house blown down, he gets hold of the wolf and whacks him.
In our first version of this game, there was a nice little story at the beginning that sets it up, and a pig who came out and told the wolf not to mess with him. We thought that was really funny but the kids said “why have you got that in there? It’s not funny. I just want to play the game.” Possibly they were right — it didn’t need a story. It was like having two sets of instructions.
It would be really nice if they said a lot of “that’s cool” when we weren’t expecting it, but it doesn’t happen as often. But whether they’re giving us unexpected criticism or praise, they’re a great sounding board. As long as I can get them to pay attention for long enough. That’s the problem with kids these days…