Video Games, Difficulty, and Children

Background

I was tasked recently with watching two young boys, ages eight and six, to essentially ensure they don't kill each other while their parents were at work. The boys and I have known each other as long as they have been alive, so the babysitting was more fun than it was work. As we were sitting around playing some games, I began to observe something interesting in their behavior.

The Observations

In addition to observing the six-year-old play the original Sonic the Hedgehog, I watched the boys play Super Smash Brothers: Melee on the Gamecube (a game and a system that are both older than the boys themselves). Starting with the latter game, the experience went as follows. Initially, the three of us played free-for-all. After complaining from the boys that life wasn't fair, I put them on a team against me. A couple close games followed, but the boys still cried foul. This was fascinating to me because they killed themselves more than I had killed them, but they did not recognize the difference. So I used the fourth spot in the game to give them a level 9 bot. Soon after my rapid destruction, which happened solely based on the efforts of this bot, the boys became elated. They appeared to enjoy watching a computer-run character beat the life out of me more than they enjoyed the challenge of playing against me.

After observing such a peculiarity , I set the game aside and changed my slot to a bot slot. I started to set this bot's level to nine, but the older boy complained and set the bot level back to level 1. I let them play in this way (the two boys and a level 9 bot were matched against a level 1 bot) and noticed that their overall joy had increased even though this level one bot was far worse than I was.

At this point, I was naturally confused and decided to do a little experiment. In an attempt to get the boys to challenge themselves, I changed the levels for both of the bots to be 5. This way, the fight was more fair. It was not completely fair, but the level of difficulty had gone up relatively significantly and I expected the boys to appreciate this challenge. This was not the case. The boys simply refused to play the game in this manner.

What's Interesting About This?

I personally find this observation fascinating. Though far from purely scientific, the boys' actions in relation to Super Smash Brother: Melee threw me into a storm of thought; I could not help but wonder why these young boys refused to challenge themselves with this game! So here are some thoughts: Does enjoying challenge comes with maturity? And if this is the case, how can video games better challenge children yet still allow them to win?

I am not a psychologist in any regard, so I will not attempt to answer my first thought. In regards to the second question, however, I have a solution. Games accessible to children absolutely need to reward challenge. Once the children understand the reward in challenging themselves, the in-game reward should be slowly taken away in an effort to help the children recognize the worth in challenging themselves. In Super Smash Brothers: Melee, winning was winning no matter how the boys came across it, the boys were not enjoying the game unless they were winning, and the boys soon learned the fastest way to win and stuck to that because that was the most fun for them. In no way did the game reward the boys for challenging themselves, so when it took longer for the boys to win they had less fun.

Perhaps I am just biased towards challenging oneself. This observation might just be an outlying case and I am making a big deal out of nothing, but my thoughts still stand. I might just be an older generation of gamer crying foul over the newer way of playing the games.