From Player to Creator How Game-Loving Kids Can Start Building Their Own Games
Family Friendly Gaming News
My son asked me something last spring that I didn't have a good
answer for. He'd finished a run in one of those side-scrolling
platformers, sat through the credits like he always does, and
said, "Who makes these?"
Not how. Who.
I told him I wasn't sure. Then I felt a little embarrassed about
it, because the truthful answer was that in fifteen years of
buying games for this family, I'd never once stopped to wonder
about the people on the other end of the disc.
That question stuck with me longer than it should have. We spend
a lot of energy in this house deciding what our kids are allowed
to play. We read the reviews. We check the ratings. We turn off
the chat. What we'd never really considered was the other
direction entirely: what happens when a kid stops being an
audience and starts being an author.
The distance is shorter than most parents assume
There's a mental picture a lot of us carry around, where making
a video game involves a studio in California, a team of two
hundred, and about four years. That picture isn't wrong for the
big titles. It's just wildly unhelpful for a ten-year-old at the
kitchen table.
The reality is that a child can write their first working line
of code in an afternoon. Not a whole game, obviously. A
character that walks three steps and turns left. That's it. But
something moves on the screen because they told it to, and for a
kid who has spent hundreds of hours on the receiving end of
somebody else's design decisions, that little moment lands
differently than you'd expect.
My nephew went through this and described it almost exactly the
way you'd hope. He said it was like finding out the magician's
trick and liking the magician more, not less.
Why gamers, specifically, take to this
Here's the part I found genuinely interesting. The kids who
resist a maths worksheet will sit with a broken piece of code
for forty minutes without being asked twice.
It isn't that coding is easier. It's that the feedback loop is
one they already know by heart. Try something. It fails. Adjust.
Try again. Every gamer under this roof has died on the same boss
fight fifteen times and come back for a sixteenth without anyone
lecturing them about persistence. Programming runs on that
identical rhythm, and children who've logged serious hours in
games arrive already fluent in it.
There's a second thing, less obvious. Games have taught these
kids to read systems. A child who has worked out that a certain
enemy pattern repeats every eight seconds, or that two items
combine into something better, has been doing informal logic for
years.
Coding just gives that instinct a name and a keyboard.
What I'd tell a parent to look for
The tricky part, as usual, is the environment rather than the
subject. Plenty of "learn to code" apps are fine. Plenty of
others are a chat room with a compiler attached.
The things I now check before signing our kids up for anything:
Is there open chat with strangers? If yes, we're out, and I
don't much care how good the curriculum is. Is it stuffed with
ads, or does it run the same psychological tricks as a mobile
game, with streaks and pop-ups engineered to keep a child on the
screen past bedtime? Does the difficulty actually climb, or does
it dump a kid into raw syntax on lesson three and lose them? And
plainly: could I let this run in the living room with the sound
on and not wince?
One that's held up well for families I know, including a
homeschool co-op two towns over, is
codemonkey.com. It starts younger children on drag-and-drop
blocks and moves them along to real typed Python as they're
ready, and the whole thing is framed as solving puzzles and
building small games rather than sitting through lectures.
Schools use it, but parents can run it at home just as easily,
which matters when your afternoons don't look like anybody
else's.
I'm not suggesting that's the only reasonable option. I am
suggesting you apply the same scrutiny to educational software
that you'd apply to a game, because the marketing on educational
products tends to get a free pass it hasn't earned.
Manage the expectations, including your own
Your child probably isn't going to become a software engineer.
Mine likely won't either, and I've made my peace with that.
But there's a difference between a kid who consumes and a kid
who occasionally makes something, and I've watched that
difference show up in places that have nothing to do with
computers. He's more patient with things that don't work on the
first attempt. He asks better questions about how ordinary
objects function. When a game frustrates him now, he's just as
likely to say "that's a bad design choice" as he is to throw the
controller, which is progress of a sort.
There's an older idea underneath all of this that I think our
readers will recognize: we were made by a Creator, and the
impulse to build things is part of what we inherited from Him.
Consuming isn't sinful. Our family plainly enjoys games or this
publication wouldn't exist. But a life spent entirely on the
receiving end of other people's imagination is a thinner life
than it needs to be, and children feel that even when they can't
articulate it.
The first one will be terrible
Set this expectation early, for both of you. The first game your
child builds will be about ninety seconds long, the collision
detection won't work, and there will be a sprite that walks
straight through a wall for reasons nobody can determine.
They will be immensely proud of it, and they should be. Play it.
Let them explain the parts you didn't ask about. Then watch what
happens the next weekend, when they open it back up because
something about that wall has been bothering them all week.
That's the whole thing, right there. Not the code. The
bothering.