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Winter/Spring 1999


FROM TELETUBBIES
TO
MORTAL KOMBAT
in 3 easy steps
by Daphne White, Executive Director

The five-letter word that had toymakers losing sleep at this year's Toy Fair, the annual industry trade show in New York City, is KAGOY. KAGOY means "Kids are getting older younger."

Many of us have noticed that children are losing their innocence sooner. Psychologist David Elkind first described this process 18 years ago in The Hurried Child. But few of us really paid attention as a "hurried" childhood became frenetic.

"We're seeing kids going from Teletubbies to Sesame Street to Barney to Power Rangers," according to Michael Tabakin, director of trend merchandising at Toys 'R' Us. "There is a natural progression. But from Teletubbies to Power Rangers, there isn't an awful lot of years there," he told KidScreen magazine.

Toy executives call this phenomenon "age compression." They are concerned that children stop playing with toys such as dolls and action figures at age six -- two years younger than a decade ago, according to one market study.

The reason children are abandoning toys, according to the experts, is simple: toys are for children. Since today's six-year-olds consider themselves practically pre-teens, they naturally want to play with older-kid stuff -- such as video, hand-held, and computer games.

As a result, toy sales remained stagnant in 1998 while the video game market grew by an astonishing 24 percent, pushing sales up to $6.3 billion (compared with the $22 billion total sales for the toy industry.)

In order to hold on to market share, several toymakers have taken the "if you can't beat em, join em" approach. They have decided to create toys -- including both action figures and hand-held games -- that are based on video games.

But the problem is this: the games that are being cross-marketed as children's toys include some of the most violent adult-rated games. There will be action figures based on Metal Gear Solid, Quake, Resident Evil2, and Duke Nukem. As video games, all of these are rated M for Mature and are recommended for players ages 17 and up (see The Ratings Game on page 3). The action figures will probably be "recommended for children 4 and up."

In addition to the action figures, Tiger Electronics -- which last year brought you Furby -- is coming out with the following hand-held games in 1999, intended for children ages 8 and up: Resident Evil 2, Mortal Kombat, Metal Gear Solid, and Duke Nukem. These hand-held games will all be available on Tiger's new product called "game.com", which will compete with Game Boy. Even though each of these games is rated M in the video version, the hand-held games will carry a convenient T-13 (Teen) rating.

A Tiger spokesperson said that the basic game pattern and objective of the game.com version is the same as the original: the hand-held Mortal Kombat requires the same amount of carnage as the video game. The lower age ranking reflects only game.com's smaller, black-and-white screen. The hand-held version is "not as graphic, not as detailed, not as shocking as the actual video game," said Allen Richardson, game.com's producer.

"Parents would be concerned about an M-rated game, and we couldn't get it into the retail stores," Richardson added. People have different expectations of the toy aisle and the video aisle, Richardson said -- toys are expected to be less violent than video games.

Richardson added that while software for game.com will include many nonviolent titles, it's the violent titles that "hit our audience squarely. The violent games are definitely our best sellers."

What does this mean for parents? It means we must work harder to influence the culture our children are growing up in. We need to learn more about the "toys" and "games" that are marketed to them. We need to spend as much time as possible playing with our children -- after all, they prefer their parents to any toy.

We also need to learn about the ratings systems and whether we agree that "mild violence" is appropriate for a six-year-old. Otherwise, we may all one day wake up from our collective cultural nightmare screaming KAGOY!!!


   

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