Chris Suellentrop's saved articles

I am facing this same issue and have chosen to start out on Scribblenauts. She can enjoy the cute animation, help provide the answers to the problems, and we can work on spelling/vocab while we play. Read more

“I don’t listen to the same music as a 12-year-old or read the same books, but we both play The Witcher 3” Read more

I might not be a good test subject, as I don’t have kids, not even a girlfriend.... (wow, this turned really sad really fast) But I think about this a lot for some reason, and I’ve got a few ideas that seem logical in my head. Read more

This is something I’ve been thinking about and working with for a while now. My son just turned 4 and we’ve been playing some form of controller based games for 2 years now. We started with Super Mario Bros 1, he would watch me play and then want to press buttons. Over time, he started controlling the jumping while I… Read more

Clearly, you have to MAKE the games you want them to play! Read more

Totally feeling this right now with my daughters, ages 6 and 3. The 6 year old is curious, and definitely wants to try games. I have no problem with starting her on mobile games - I’m sure she’ll be able to adapt to a controller when she’s older. One problem I’ve found is that she just doesn’t have the coordination… Read more

I have two kids, almost 6 and almost 3. The older one has been doing interactive things on a tablet from 2 (think “The Monster at the End of the Book” app), but the idea of separate controls I held off on. I let the older one try some NES games first (Mario, mostly) at about age 3.5. While he was certainly taken by… Read more

My wife and I introduced games to our 4-year old niece via Mario 3d world. She watched us play, and would get excited and wanted to do it too. So, we would hand her a controller and have her join us. It was a great launching point because you can literally carry someone through that game; we would challenge her to do… Read more

Before my son was born I said, like every gamer parent before they have kids, “He’s going to start with Super Mario Brother, like I did, and work his way through the different generations....” Read more

I don’t write often on Kotaku, but being a father myself now I feel a need to get involved :). I think personally the best thing you can do is let your child decide. When I was a kid, the games I played were the games I picked out. Nothing was more fun than deciding a game to get! I didn’t get them often so it left me… Read more

I had an experience kind of like this this weekend. A friend and her two kids (3 and 7) were staying for the weekend, and neither had played a console game before (although the 7 year-old was really familiar with tablet games, especially Minecraft). Read more

Your parents didn’t want you playing M.U.L.E. because they didn’t want you killing your friends for raiding your Crystite deposit. Read more

I kept my original Nintendo for the purposes of having “training wheels” for entry into the video gaming world. A D-pad and two buttons takes way less coordination than two thumb sticks, a D-pad, four buttons, two shoulder pads, and two triggers. Also, who wouldn’t want the experience of replaying Zelda for the first… Read more

Just play games. As they get older. They will want to be more involved in what you do. At that point. It’s up to you to determine if they are old enough to experience a game that has a higher rating than their age. Read more

I think many of the early hallmarks are important (for younger children, I would avoid many things from the 80s as they require far too much patience) but something like Zork (which is one of the first games I played other some than my radioshack tandy) but it involves a whole lot of imagination and creativity! I grew… Read more

My five year old LIVES to watch me play Doom. Read more

Yeah, this was a problem for me. We picked up a Wii when the kids were really little (5 and 3), and that worked out fine. Read more

One thing I won’t do: Take the bananas approach prescribed by Andy Baio in Medium for his son. He methodically required his offspring to play through each generation of video games as he experienced them, in chronological order, from the arcade age to Atari to Nintendo (Famicom to Super to 64 and beyond) to Sega and… Read more

Totally agree. Wouldn’t the ideal design choice be the full array of Bat-toys, but a limited number of slots on your utility belt? You can choose 5 toys, but can swap them out under limited circumstances - at waypoints, or caches, or mission starts - for a given mission. Read more

The smartest and the richest superhero ever... Allegedly the worlds greatest detective... And his strongest suit is punching people! Seriously, despite loving the Arkham series, I want so much more than punching people to take them out in a Batman game. Read more