I ummed and ahhed over whether this belongs in Off Topic or Gaming, and decided to go with Gaming...
My eldest kid is about to turn 5, and I've been wondering about the best way to introduce her to gaming. We have an old iPhone 4 that she is allowed to play with sometimes, and there are some simple games that she plays on that (a Duplo game, Sarah and Duck - based on the BBC TV show), but since I've started getting back into gaming I've been wondering about the best way to introduce her to "proper" gaming.
I have an Xbox One S, and a Raspberry Pi with RetroPie installed (and some PSOne and Amiga games loaded). I showed her some of the games on RetroPie e.g. Crash Team Racing, which she liked, but she didn't really understand the controls. Maybe it will take a while, but she was clearly having difficulty translating the movement on screen to the controller - for instance, she would simply hold down the left d-pad and just crash into a wall, and didn't understand that she has to use both left and right to steer. I did try to help and explain it to her, and demonstrate it for her, but I could tell that she hadn't quite cottoned on to the concept, so maybe she's a bit too young still.
A week or so later I showed her one of the Lego Star Wars games on the Xbox. I figured that would be a good place to start, as she could play around in the lobby and get used to the movement of characters with the controller stick. She had more luck with that, and even enjoyed pulling out the lightsaber and smashing stuff (even cutting into a few of the lobby patrons, and starting a bar brawl! That's my girl! :) But the Xbox controller is a bit too big for her small hands, and trying to control movement with the left stick and actions with the buttons is a bit on the clumsy side with an adult-sized controller. She ended up getting frustrated, and I managed to persuade her to turn off the console and do something else. We came back later and tried a racing game, but again the steering concept eluded her.
I think there's a few things going on here: one, the controllers are too big for child-sized hand; two, the spatial concept might be a bit tricky for her age; three, she just needs more time to practice and get used to the concept.
Given there's bound to be a few people here who have kids, how did you go about introducing gaming to your kids? Did you start earlier or later than 5 years old? What kind of games did you use? How did you get on with the size of controllers?