Editor's note: Alex thinks that video games geared toward children have gotten too easy, so he tried a little experiment with his niece to find out. Can she handle the old-school difficulty of a NES game? Find out in the latest Generation Video Game. - Aaron

 
I don't know about you, but to me, games used to be much more difficult than they are today. When I was a kid, I struggled my way through games like Mega Man, and I enjoyed every second of it. But these days, it seems as though the term "kid's game" means that it will hold your hand the entire way through.

Why are so many "kid's games" so easy? Perhaps developers have misjudged the abilities of our children to navigate and understand game worlds.

A "kid's game" shouldn't mean a walk through the park. It should mean a simple enough set of controls for them to easily pick up, and a friendly storyline. Those two things have nothing to do with difficulty. I've witnessed the obsessive lengths a child will go to when playing a game -- a child doesn't ever blame the controller, or the game design. They just try, try again.

My 8 year-old niece was over a little while ago, and I felt the urge to play some NES games. We popped in Darkwing Duck, and traded the controller back and forth for awhile. As the day went on, it became more interesting for me to watch her play, and I didn't speak up when she had died several times in a row.

She would play the same level over, and over, and over again. Sometimes she would die at the exact same spot, but this never discouraged her. I got sick of watching her die several times at the beginning of the level, when she had made it pretty far just a few minutes before, so I experimented a bit. I took the controller and got her back to a part of the level I knew she would be able to get through on her own.

I probably watched her play the same level at least 50 times within an hour or so, and she slowly picked-up on the controls. The part that blew me away, was that I wasn't saying a word to her. I wasn't telling her to keep trying, or anything. In fact, at one point I said that maybe she should try another level and she just scoffed at the notion. In one hour, she had made leaps and bounds in her skill at the game.

Before this experiment, my niece she was used to playing Hannah Montana games on her Wii. When I was playing Dr. Mario and she wanted a turn, she failed so horribly that I put in Boom Blox for her after 10 minutes to end her misery. But in that hour with an NES game where I refused to hold her hand, she had become more of a gamer then ever before, and it was entirely of her own determination.

We are raising our children in a scary new world of knowledge. We know about more things that could hurt them than our parents could have ever imagined. We truck out all of the gravel in playgrounds and replace it with recycled rubber; we ban games like dodgeball; and we freak out at every bump and bruise.

In our fear, we've begun to treat our children like Faberge Eggs, and just as we assume they won't be able to handle a scrape, we also assume they won't be able to handle a challenging game. Chances are, they would be better at games than we could ever be -- if we'd just stop assuming.