Massively

Wizard 101 has been a big hit with my brother's kids. I played it with them for a long time. It took me about a day to complete all the free content, but those kids are still working on it months later. :P

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Gonna have to agree with Wizard 101. Great for kids and has lots of build in features to help keep them safe. And good change of pace even for parents, since it's combat is turn and card based and is very unlike the normal EQ style mmo.

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Off topic but you have no idea how excited people in Omaha will be that one of their "landmarks" made it on to a blog.

On topic, I don't have kids to play games with. Maybe some day my brother will have some and I can corrupt his kids. Nah he'll do that just fine on his own. :)

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I define "family-friendly" based on three criteria:

(1) Content. Obviously, the content in some games (e.g., Age of Conan) is not appropriate for younger players. Even though I am an adult, I prefer "PG/PG-13" content as a general rule anyway, but I also like to play games that I can play with my kids.

(2) Cost. Families that want to play together cannot always afford multiple subscriptions, unless the subs are cheaper than the usual $15/month.

(3) Game design. Games set up based on a minimum group size can work against couples, small groups of friends (say, three people), and/or families that want to play together but do not want to group with random strangers and PUGs.

I prefer games where you can accomplish a lot with just one or two family members.

Unfortunately, LotRO's "magic grouping number" is 6 and WoW's corresponding magic number is 5. I really wish MMOs would open up ways for smaller groups, e.g., parent/child/child or husband/wife or friend/friend/friend, to take on the group content on their own. Why does it always have to be five or six players for the instances?

GW1 was uniquely designed to accommodate this kind of play, since you could simply use Heroes to fill in any empty party slots. In WoW and LotRO, to their credit, however, small groups (3 to 4 people) and player-pairs can still accomplish quite a lot on their own if they are willing to skip the instances.

F2P type games, I think, are the wave of the future for people in these types of situations, for whom paying for multiple subscriptions is just not financially practical. I suspect, however, that certain subscription MMOs on the horizon -- such as SWTOR, GW2, and STO -- are going to be designed to be more accommodating to people in this type of situation, allowing players to accomplish all or most content either on their own, with a partner, or perhaps with a small group of three players. I am looking forward to that.

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In some ways its getting harder to play together. So many console games for the PS3 and 360 don't have split screen multiplayer modes, only online modes. One of the reasons games like Rock Band are so enormously popular is the ability to have up to 4 people playing in the same room.

When it comes to MMOs, I'd love to see more of them offer discounts for family accounts. In a way, I think this is one of the things that has contributed so much to the growth of the Free-to-Play model with microtransactions. The up front and monthly costs for families are so much less for a game like Free Realms than it is for something like World of Warcraft.

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Discounted family accounts will make it easier for my son to embarrass me in PvP.

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