Parent-friendly multiplayer games

I'm not a parent. I just have a lot of friends in MMO's who seem to be becoming parents. There seems to be a common pattern: the pregnancy, wherein everyone makes a lot of jokes about how the baby is already becoming an excuse for afk's and how we are recruiting new guild members through breeding. The birth, where the couple disappears for a time. The infancy, where the couple may return to sporadic playing, with some significant amount of unpredictable afk time. Then when it's a couple playing together, they tend to stop playing altogether, during the toddler phase. I'm not sure exactly what happens after that when it's a couple, but the cases where only one parent plays, we see that player come back once the child is old enough to not be watched closely every minute, or to follow a regular early bedtime.

In every case, a parent must be allowed to go away from the keyboard immediately, in case of emergency, or even the child requesting/demanding attention. Usually they have time to say something on vent or chat, "AFK kids!" In the guilds and groups I play with most, we like the people well enough to tolerate this, and we adapt as best we can, either continuing our dungeon run without them, or calling a break for the whole group, or both (if their emergency takes long enough).

As I get into the age range where a lot of my friends are having children, I see more and more of a potential market for parent-friendly social games. The housebound parents, I think, appreciate having a social outlet during naptime without trying to find a babysitter. And I want people making big MMO's to bear them in mind, so I can keep playing games with my longtime parent-friends and others with schedule restrictions. There are some basic issues to bear in mind when making games to support them:

1. Unpredictable play-time

Games should allow the player to come and go as needed. Sure, it's nice to try to be sure everyone's present when you get to the boss fight, or some cinematic special event. But sometimes it's not feasible, when the 2-year-old is bleeding profusely and the parent realizes a hospital trip is necessary, and he forgets to say so on Vent.

I'd suggest mechanics such as non-linear storylines -- don't require players to have completed X & Y quests before they can participate in Z, at least not very often, because if you have to go afk during Y, you won't always catch up before everyone else is in the middle of Z. Consider using semi-randomly generated, perhaps semi-reusable questlines. If someone jumps into the middle of a group's questing, give them a story blurb about what's happened so far with this group and begin including them in the activities & rewards as a late joiner. Try to set it up so they aren't excluded from going back and experiencing gameplay from earlier in the questline ever again, after participating in the later stages.

Also, scaling difficulty with group size: let the group leader choose a difficulty setting, rather than presenting challenges like "Can you do this 10-man dungeon with 8 people?" Instead, let the dungeon adjust itself for 5 to 10 players, or 9 to 16 players. If someone has to go afk, let them "pass out" and lie around on the floor, out of the reckoning of difficulty. Don't force everyone to rely on one specific person, but do allow them to be included and contributing when present. Offer equally challenging tasks for different general group sizes, so if you walk into a dungeon knowing 2 people are prone to sudden afk's, and 2 more people might happen to join in the middle of a run once the kids go to bed, you can include them all, rather than having to switch between something requiring exactly 10 people and something requiring 5.

Similarly, flexible roles -- if it is the only healer who keeps having to run afk in a game like WoW, you're in trouble. Let people easily change what they're doing to fill in, in a pinch.

2. Limited play-time

Multiplayer games should support players who can only play an hour every week in being able to play meaningfully together with players who play a couple hours every night. People change over time, and so do their schedules. But with the internet, those of us who build lasting friendships can stay in touch, and some of us would like to play with our friends who have different amounts of time to spend than they used to. This applies not only to parents, but anyone taking on new and different elements of life outside MMO's -- school, work, dating, personal projects.

See my post on levels for one aspect of how to address this -- grinding 85 levels before you can reliably play together is only going to hurt the occasional/casual players playing because they miss friends.

Also, prioritize the ability to jump in and start meaningfully playing together with other friends who are already in the middle of something. Don't make them wait for 5 minutes of travel time -- let them warp in right away, or after a brief orientation to what's going on.

3. Child-friendly games

Looking ahead, someday my friends who are parents of young children will become parents of older children. And those children may be interested to try playing the same games -- already, one young son plays WoW on a low-level, chat-blocked character. I don't know what I think this should mean; I don't have that much experience with children. All I know is that if you can rig it so that a guild of mature players can comfortably play in a way that includes children, and everybody still has fun, that would be nice for families. Good luck!