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“I Can Hold My Breath Forever” is a neat game created by Jake Elliott as an entry in the “10 Seconds” friendly game competition that I found in my daily browsing… You can play it here<\/a>…<\/p>\n <\/p>\n The game itself is not brilliant, with dodgy collision detection and too short of a time limit on the underwater breathing mechanism for a kid to play… and kids should play this!<\/p>\n <\/p>\n It’s the perfect example of a kid story turned into a game… It has a simple gameplay mechanic, and a moving story with a sort of moral into it…<\/p>\n <\/p>\n It’s one of those games I’d like to have created myself; it’s moving, powerful and simple. And it got me thinking of game for kids, and specially in games for kids to play with their parents (or vice versa)…<\/p>\n <\/p>\n Like a child’s book that a parent read to their children all over the world, I can imagine a parent sitting his 3-year-old in his lap and letting him explore the game, reading to him out loud the letters and the story, both immersed in this small fantasy world.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n Got me thinking on narrative-based games for children, and if I ever find the time, I want to do something similar: a game designed so that a parent and his child can play together.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n Even the bad graphics add to the atmosphere, since they leave a lot to the imagination, which is one of the parts of human psyche that are more developed in a child.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n Ultra-realistic graphics\/sound aren’t important for a child (just check the work of the well-known illustrators for children’s books, for example), it’s the story they “read” and create in their mind, sometimes with the assistance of their parents, sometimes by their own. The story should be loose enough so they can fill in the blanks and imagine their own story by giving them a “framework” to build upon… In the above case, it’s just a series of letters and some underwater caves with glowy fish. In children’s books, we have even simpler frameworks; for example, my wife (a kindergarten teacher) bought a book a short time ago whose framework was just a balloon and his travels! It had very little text, just some tidbits, and the child could create the rest of the story by itself…<\/p>\n <\/p>\n I’ll state again: I want to design something like this, if I can… I already have a base storyline for a game that has the codename “The Little King”. It should take me 3 or 4 days to create the game as I’m envisioning at the moment… I’ll probably grow it and make it megalomaniac (as I do to everything) and it will become a 2-year project, unfortunately…<\/p>\n <\/p>\n Since I’m on the topic of storytelling, check out Ben “Yahtzee” Croshaw’s article on Betrayal on The Escapist here<\/a>. Very interesting, and while he’s focused on the “Betrayal” story archetype, it’s really a good eye-opener for storytellers everywhere about the dangers of trying to make your story “surprise” and “have more stuff”…<\/p>\n