Where are the Games for Children?

Ever since its release in 2020, I’ve heard the recurring joke that “The PlayStation 5 has no games!” It’s a partial truth, a reference to the low number of exclusives that have launched on the platform, which has perhaps been over-reliant on the system’s cross-gen features. This is often blurted as a sort of online-win-button, a flippant insult that can’t be talked around without being put on the defensive. However, I think there’s a different truth at the heart of this statement.

Twenty years ago, when the PS2 was still the king of home consoles, there was a constant deluge of games being brought to the market. Big budget titles like God of War and critical darlings like Silent Hill 2 emerged on the shelves alongside games that were wonderfully mediocre. As a kid in this era, I wasn’t interested in these spectacles. Let me just spitball a few of the games that were a constant presence on my memory card: Spongebob: Battle for Bikini Bottom, Metal Arms: A Glitch in the System, The Legend of Spyro, XIII, and my main focus here, Nickelodeon’s Barnyard.

Released in 2006 as an adaptation of the mostly-forgettable CGI film of the same name, Barnyard is a game that tries to punch far above the weight of its IP. Though perhaps a large part of my nostalgia comes with getting this game in Christmas 2006 alongside my Playstation 2. In revisiting it recently, though, I was surprised to find just how much I still enjoyed it.

Let me give you a brief summary: Barnyard acts a sort of self-insert version of the movie it’s based on, welcoming the player to the farm as a new cow. The player explores a small but well-partitioned open world, gathering ingredients for recipes, discovering secrets and notes, doing quests for the various animals, and playing plenty of minigames. All of this is unified with a metagame element of making money to spend on upgrading the barn to a primo party spot. The narrative of the film continues undeterred by the new character, but it’s largely secondary to the player’s low-stakes exploration and shenaniganry.

To put it frankly, for a tie-in game for a forgettable movie, Blue Tongue Studios created a game that is quietly ambitious. Plenty of tie-ins would settle with a two-bit minigame collection, loosely themed around scenes from its source material or perhaps even inserting low-res clips as unlockables. Framing minigames which are clunky but nonetheless fun, unburdened by modern-style game-breaking glitches, with an open world makes it seem so much larger than it is. The low-stakes of the whole affair accents this further.

When people say that modern consoles don’t have enough games, these are the types of games I hope they’re talking about. The Videogame Industry is in the midst of a horrid brain drain, and I fear that we won’t feel the true impact for years to come. However, we’re already seeing the material costs – games are only greenlit if they are definite best-sellers, which means only sequels and spin-offs are able to roll out with any consistency. Game studios are constantly being twisted, culled, and repurposed, entireties of budget bet entirely on one square on the roulette table. It feels like no game is allowed to have a niche – only sanitized mass appeal or bust. And games that appeal to everyone have no resonance with anyone.

It may seem silly to precede the last paragraph with a praise for a game like Barnyard, but there is no greater void in the current market than games intended for children. I played Battle for Bikini Bottom before I played a Super Mario Bros game. I played The Legend of Spyro before I was even allowed to look at God of War. Rabbids Go Home preceded my knowledge of Katamari Damacy.

In making games that are directed at an audience of children, developers are allowed to replicate and experiment with ideas that have otherwise been popularized. Ambitious games based on children’s shows, or otherwise directed at all audiences, provide more opportunities for children to become invested in various genres. The notion that games must be a perfect 10 to be essential is a curse upon the medium.

Nowadays, if a piece of media becomes astoundingly popular, it pierces the realm of video games through a purchasable skin in Fortnite, Fall Guys (or Stumble Guys), and the rest of these live-service games that are obsessed with constant and unthinking consumption. Videogames that are appropriate for all ages have like the rest been directed towards this model of obsessive attention. How can I develop a taste for genre and style when it is all filtered through the plasticine violence of Fortnite? How can I be enthralled by adaptations when they are uncritical regurgitations of their source material, a moment of attention that is truly meaningless. The low stakes I am so fond of in Barnyard, its focus on living in the moment and embracing an otherwise mundane community, are obliterated the moment that the Kevin James cow gets his hands on a low-tier shotgun.

The death of spaces that are truly for children makes children of us all. There’s no getting around this reality. The nostalgia that we’re now burdened with, that is being weaponized by fascists, is entirely constructed on fiction. I am not desperate to recreate the media of my childhood when it still exists out there, nor am I desperate to return to the ignorance and homogeneity of my youth. What I do miss is the feeling that developers were allowed to push against the borders of their projects, to incorporate ambitious ideas in games that don’t really “deserve” them. We are all poorer off without ambitious mediocrity.

Games like Battle for Bikini Bottom, too, which were considered acceptable at their time, have developed and maintained a cult following strong enough for a release. This is largely attributable to the speedrunning community for the game, but we can’t neglect the fact that many of these speedrunners enjoyed the game as children, and their continued appreciation for it made it possible to appreciate it in a way unintended by the developers. A game’s staying power is wholly subjective – it’s bound not to critical discourse, but to the individual players.

———

Joshua M. Henson has been playing video games since Doom II at the age of four, and hasn’t shut up about them since. You can find him on twitter posting very occasionally.