by Eric Brosius
I have a few observations about children and gaming:First, the ability to learn a game is highly correlated with how interested you are in it and therefore with your ability to focus your attention on it. The reason children often find it hard to learn complex games is that they don't tend to pay attention to a single thing for a long time (it certainly isn't because they aren't intelligent.) When a game captures a child's attention, it's often not that hard to learn.
Second, many games require balancing one approach (e.g., going for fame) against another (e.g., killing your opponents.) This is a good feature. Children often learn the tactics of pursuing the approach fairly easily, but don't learn the balancing skill until later. Thus, it's typical to see a child pursuing a single approach monomanically even when it's obvious that a different strategy would be better.
