Design Like a Kid: How My Son Taught Me to Create Games in Seconds

My 9-year-old son was bored, and I had a deck of cards (game designer!) so I told him to design 3 Little Pigs Poker.

He got quiet for about thirty seconds, then said “I’ve got it.”

He dealt out three poker hands for the pigs and one for the wolf, and we were playing an asymmetrical poker showdown in under five minutes.

That story is completely true, and it perfectly captures something I’ve been thinking about a lot lately as both a parent and a professional game designer. Here I am, teaching college students at an elite university about rapid prototyping and iterative design, while my 9-year-old just demonstrated both concepts faster than most development teams manage in a week.

This wasn’t an isolated incident. Over the past few months, I’ve started paying closer attention to how my children approach game creation. What I’ve discovered has fundamentally changed how I think about the design process.

Every child is a game designer, but kids don’t design games the way most people understand that concept. They just start playing and let the game design itself.

No Attachment to Bad Ideas

A few weeks after the poker incident, my son designed a Minecraft-themed scavenger hunt for his brother’s birthday party. The concept was simple: hide paper blocks around the house for kids to find.

But then he added what he called “decoy blocks” similar looking blocks but of different types that didn’t count toward the goal. Suddenly, finding blocks wasn’t enough. You had to identify the right ones.

By the end of the party, kids were forming alliances to combine their blocks, then throwing each other under the bus to win better prizes . What started as a simple treasure hunt had evolved into a complex social game with emergent strategy and betrayal mechanics.

The interesting thing is that the decoy blocks weren’t part of the original design. The package of grass blocks just also game with dirt blocks. Instead of sticking to his guns, he rolled with the new components.

Compare this to my professional experience. I once worked on a mobile game where we spent three weeks debating whether to remove a tutorial step that 60% of users were skipping. We had data showing it wasn’t working, but removing it felt like admitting failure. Eventually we cut it, and retention improved immediately.

Kids don’t suffer from the sunk cost fallacy because they haven’t learned it exists yet. They also don’t overthink elegance. My son could have created elaborate rules about block combinations or point values, but he recognized that the decoy mechanic alone was doing all the heavy lifting he needed.

Iteration Happens in Real Time

Adult game designers iterate in cycles: design, prototype, test, analyze, redesign. Kids iterate within the same sentence.

“Let’s race to the mailbox! Wait, that’s too easy. Let’s hop to the mailbox! Actually, hop backwards! But you can run if you see a car coming!”

Three major design changes in fifteen seconds, each one responding to immediate feedback from the experience itself. They’re playtesting while designing while playing.

This approach feels reckless to those of us trained in formal development processes. Where’s the documentation? How do you track changes? What if players get confused by shifting rules?

But here’s what I’ve noticed: confusion rarely happens. Kids communicate changes naturally through play. “Oh, we’re hopping backwards now” gets absorbed instantly because the rule change emerged from the play experience itself.

When I’ve tried applying this approach to professional projects, starting with the simplest possible version and evolving rules through play rather than planning, I consistently end up with more engaging results than when I design everything upfront.

No Fear of Looking Stupid

Back to that poker game. When my son announced his solution, my first adult instinct was to think through potential problems. “Wait, how does asymmetrical play work with poker? What if the hands aren’t balanced? Should we establish betting rules?”

He was already dealing cards.

Kids don’t care if their ideas sound silly to others. They care if those ideas are fun to play. This gives them access to design space that adults avoid due to professional self-consciousness.

Some of the most successful games break conventional wisdom. Katamari Damacy has you rolling a sticky ball around collecting random objects. Fall Guys is basically tag with obstacle courses. Among Us is lying to your friends.

All of these concepts probably sounded stupid in initial pitch meetings. Kids would have built prototypes and tested them immediately.

Start with What’s Available

I’ve watched my children create games using:

• The pattern on our kitchen tile (jumping game)
• Shadows on the sidewalk (avoid the light spots)
• Shopping cart wheels (steering challenges in the parking lot)
• The number of steps between streetlights (counting games)
• A deck of cards and a fairy tale (asymmetrical poker)

They don’t wait for the right tools or optimal conditions. They see game potential in everything around them and build from there.

Professional game development often begins with technology or platform constraints. “We’re building for mobile, so let’s think about touch controls.” Or “We have this amazing graphics engine, what can we do with it?”

Kids start with immediate experience. “This thing is interesting, how can we play with it?”

When I’ve approached commercial projects this way, starting with the most basic materials or constraints available rather than waiting for ideal conditions, I consistently ship faster and with more creative solutions.

Pure Fun as the North Star

Here’s maybe the most important lesson: kids design games because they want to have fun right now. Not to hit engagement metrics, not to satisfy stakeholders, not to demonstrate technical capabilities.

Just fun. Immediate, undiluted fun.

This creates a natural filter that eliminates features, mechanics, and complexity that don’t directly serve the play experience. If something isn’t fun, it gets cut immediately because there’s no other reason to keep it.

The Three Little Pigs Poker game lasted exactly as long as it was entertaining (about twenty minutes), then we moved on to something else. No post-mortem required.

In professional development, we often optimize for metrics that correlate with fun rather than fun itself. Daily active users, session length, retention rates. These metrics matter for business reasons, but they can lead us away from the core experience that makes people want to play in the first place.

Rapid Prototyping Without the Process

The most striking thing about watching kids design games is the speed. They move from concept to playable prototype to iteration faster than most professional teams move from concept to first meeting.

This isn’t because they’re cutting corners or producing lower quality work. It’s because they’ve eliminated every step that doesn’t directly contribute to discovering whether something is fun.

No documentation phase (they communicate through play) No extensive planning (they iterate in real time) No stakeholder approval (they are the stakeholders) No technical debt concerns (they’ll abandon and restart if needed)

Obviously, professional game development involves complexities that kids don’t face. Multiplayer networking, platform certification, content ratings, monetization strategies. But underneath all those necessary complications, the core challenge remains the same: create something that’s fun to experience.

Kids haven’t forgotten that this is the fundamental goal. They’ve never learned to optimize for anything else.

The Design Lesson

I’m not suggesting we abandon professional development practices and wing it like nine-year-olds. Technical rigor, user research, and iteration cycles exist for good reasons.

But I am suggesting that we’ve perhaps overcomplicated the core creative process. The best professional designers I know can still access that childlike directness when they need to. They can look at a design challenge and immediately start playing with solutions rather than planning approaches to eventually consider playing with solutions.

Next time you’re stuck on a design problem, try asking: “How would a kid solve this?” Not because kids are better designers, but because they haven’t learned to overthink the process yet.

Sometimes the fastest path to a good game is to stop trying to design one and just start playing.

And sometimes all you need is a deck of cards and thirty seconds of quiet thinking to create something that works perfectly for the moment you need it.

Sam Liberty is a gamification expert, applied game designer, and consultant. His clients include The World Bank, Click Therapeutics, and DARPA. He teaches game design at Northeastern University. He is the former Lead Game Designer at Sidekick Health.