About the rating system
The five principles rating system: intrinsic motivation, self-confidence, teamwork, freespace, and age appropriate.
These are the qualities I want to cultivate in my kids.
A little more about each:
- Intrinsic Motivation: I don’t want the games “gamified”. That might seem like an oxymoron. I’m seeking games that have a price tag so I can avoid having them resort to tricks to suck my child into playing more often. They’ve already taken my cash so I want to remove the motivation to create a dopamine rush cycle.
- Self Confidence: I want these games to help build self confidence. I don’t need the games telling my kid “good job!” I need them helping to build skills they can use and feel successful about.
- Teamwork: it’ll be challenging since nothing can isolate people like a tablet or cell phone. But, an aspirational goal is that these games would connect my kids and my family.
- Free space: can they get into the background of the experience enough to allow my kids to be creative or will they bulldoze them into a specific boring path of thinking inside the game?
- Age appropriate: let’s not make six year olds think about war. There are plenty of options for that everywhere else.
Each review has a radar chart with the rating for the game or app. The closer the chart gets to a perfectly filled hexagon, the better the app/game!
These are, not coincidentally, the opposites of all the things you see in many games for adults and sadly children as well: “gamification”, “advertisements”, “excessive praise”, and “reckless individualism”, and “child soldiering”.