March 2011 – bengarvey.com

GeekDad Reviews the Dungeon Adventure

So the response to Dungeon Adventure have been pretty overwhelming. A few key highlights:

1. Sales of Dungeon Adventure exceeded my wife’s lifetime projection for it in about 12 hours.
2. I told Sasha, “Hey we sold 10 copies!” and she said, “cool! What’s a copy?”
3. I’ve already heard from a number of people who have played the game or who are excited to try it out, and so far the feedback has been awesome.

The best thing so far has been the awesome post at Wired’s GeekDad blog by Dave Banks.

As a father, I’ve waited patiently for nine years for my son to be old enough to play Dungeons & Dragons with me. But, if I’d been more enterprising, I could have invented a full blown RPG for young kids like Ben Garvey has done.

The Dungeon Adventure: An RPG for Pre-Schoolers

A while back Sasha and I were playing with some toys and I built a maze out of blocks. With the blocks we had, you couldn’t make a decent maze but it occured to me that our maze would make a decent D&D style dungeon. We had some of her figures walk through the maze fighting simple monsters, and I thought to myself, “I could make this work into a real game.”

Kids Dungeon Adventure RPG — The Dungeon Adventure RPG for Kids

Soon after that, the Dungeon Adventure was born. It’s simple enough for me and my 4 year old daughter to walk through a dungeon and complete a quest. Here’s how it works.

1. You build a dungeon out of blocks you already have.
2. You fill the dungeon with monster cards and treasure cards.
3. Set up an overall quest for the kid(s) to complete.
4. Have them walk through the dungeon and complete the quest.

The game uses a super simple battle system using normal, 6 sided dice and hitpoints.

After playing 5 or 6 times with more complex dungeons and more interesting stories, I decided we would try and sell a version of the Dungeon Adventure online as a download and print game. I set up a website for it this week and registered a domain name. Let me know what you think!

Everything Bad is Good For You

Parents can sometimes be appalled at the hypnotic effect that television has on toddlers; they see their otherwise active and vibrant children gazing silently, mouth agape at the screen, and they assume the worst: that television is turning their child into a zombie. The same feeling arises a few years later when they see their grade-schoolers navigating a video game world, oblivious to the reality that surrounds them. But these expressions are not signs of mental atrophy. They’re signs of focus.

2005’s Everything Good is Bad for You by Steve Johnson is a challenge to the idea that pop culture is ruining our brains. Mainstream television shows are quantifiably more complex and mentally demanding than the shows of previous decades, and video games test and develop our problem solving skills better than ever before. Definitely worth reading.