Game Design Is Storytelling: What Kids Learn by Making Games | C.Lab

“My kid already spends too much time playing games.”

I hear this from parents constantly. And I get it. When you walk into your living room and your child is glued to a screen for the third hour in a row, the last thing you want to hear is someone suggesting they spend more time with games.

But here’s the thing I want you to consider: making a game and playing a game are fundamentally opposite activities. One is passive consumption. The other is one of the most complex creative acts a child can undertake.

Let me explain what I mean.

What Actually Goes Into Making a Game

When an adult hears “game design,” they might picture a studio full of professionals with computer science degrees. When a nine-year-old hears it, they picture the coolest thing they could possibly do on a Saturday morning.

Both are right, in a way. Because game design — even at the simplest level — requires a child to engage with an astonishing number of skills simultaneously.

Storytelling and narrative structure. Every game needs a reason to exist. Why is the character moving? What are they trying to do? What happens if they fail? A child designing a game has to think about beginnings, middles, and endings. They have to create tension, stakes, and resolution. This is narrative craft — the same skills they’d develop writing stories, except the story is interactive and the audience gets to participate.

Mathematics and logic. How fast should the character move? How many points should a coin be worth? If the enemy moves two steps for every one step the player takes, is the game too hard or too easy? Game design is applied math. Kids who claim to hate math will spend forty-five minutes tweaking physics values in Scratch without realizing they’re doing arithmetic, ratios, and basic algebra.

User empathy. This one surprises people. When a child makes a game, they inevitably want someone else to play it. And the moment another person picks up their game, the young designer discovers something crucial: what makes sense in your head doesn’t always make sense to someone else. The controls feel obvious to the creator but confusing to the player. The difficulty spike that seemed fun to design is frustrating to experience. Game design teaches kids to think from someone else’s perspective — to anticipate how another person will feel.

Art direction and aesthetics. What should the world look like? What colors set the right mood? Should the character be big or small? Cute or scary? Every visual choice is a design decision, and kids take these decisions seriously. I’ve watched students spend an entire session perfecting the look of a single character because they knew it had to feel right for the game to work.

Real Kids, Real Games

Let me tell you about two students who changed the way I think about game design as education.

Minjun’s Pet Adventure

Minjun was ten years old and obsessed with his hamster, Bongbong. When I told the class they could make any game they wanted, Minjun didn’t hesitate. He wanted to make a game about Bongbong.

The game was simple in concept: Bongbong had escaped his cage and was exploring the apartment, collecting sunflower seeds while avoiding the family cat. But what Minjun built was surprisingly sophisticated. He drew every background himself — the living room, the kitchen, the hallway — each one based on his actual apartment. He programmed the cat to patrol in patterns, getting faster as the levels progressed. He added a scoring system, sound effects, and even a little victory animation where Bongbong did a backflip.

What struck me wasn’t the technical achievement, though it was impressive for a ten-year-old. It was how personal the game was. Minjun had taken something he loved — his hamster — and turned it into a story that other people could experience. His classmates played it and loved it. One of them asked, “Is Bongbong a real hamster?” and Minjun beamed. He’d communicated something true about his life through a game he’d built himself.

That’s storytelling.

Soyeon’s Quiz for Her Little Brother

Soyeon was twelve and had a six-year-old brother who was learning to read. She decided to make a quiz game to help him practice. Each question showed a picture and three Korean words, and her brother had to tap the correct one. If he got it right, a cartoon character would cheer. If he got it wrong, the character would shake its head gently and let him try again.

What fascinated me about Soyeon’s project was how much she thought about her audience. She tested the game on her brother repeatedly, adjusting the difficulty after each session. “The words are too hard,” she’d say, or “He gets bored if there are too many questions in a row — I need to add a mini-game between rounds.” She was iterating based on user feedback. She was doing UX design without knowing the term.

Soyeon wasn’t just coding. She was problem-solving, empathizing, designing, and creating something genuinely useful for someone she loved.

The Opposite of Passive Consumption

Here’s what I wish every parent could see firsthand.

A child playing a commercial video game is following someone else’s rules, someone else’s story, someone else’s world. There’s nothing wrong with that — it’s entertainment, and entertainment has value. But it’s consumption.

A child making a game is doing the opposite. They’re inventing the rules. They’re writing the story. They’re building the world. Every single element — from the way a character jumps to the color of the sky to the sound that plays when you collect a star — is a decision they’ve made.

When a child designs a game, they’re not consuming creativity. They’re producing it.

And they’re doing it in a way that combines skills no single school subject covers. Game design sits at the intersection of art, writing, math, logic, psychology, and technology. There is no other creative activity I know of that pulls from so many disciplines at once.

”But Won’t They Just Want to Play More Games?”

This is the second most common concern I hear, right after “they already play too much.” Parents worry that teaching kids to make games will deepen an unhealthy obsession.

In my experience, the opposite happens.

Kids who learn to make games develop a different relationship with the games they play. They start noticing the design behind the experience. “Oh, the developer put a checkpoint here because the next part is really hard.” “This menu is confusing — I would have designed it differently.” “The music changes when you enter this area — that’s so smart.”

They shift from being passive consumers to being active, critical thinkers about the media they engage with. They see games not as magic but as something someone built — and something they could build too.

That’s not obsession. That’s literacy.

What Game Design Actually Teaches

Let me be concrete about the skills a child develops through game design, because I think they’re worth spelling out:

Computational thinking — breaking a big problem (make a game) into smaller, solvable problems (make the character move, add a score counter, create a win condition)
Iteration — making something, testing it, finding what doesn’t work, improving it, testing again. This is the fundamental cycle of creation, and games teach it naturally because you can playtest instantly.
Communication — a game is a conversation between designer and player. Kids learn to communicate ideas not through words on a page but through interactive experience.
Resilience — games break constantly during development. Characters fall through floors, scores count backwards, levels become impossible. Kids learn to debug, to troubleshoot, to stay calm when things go wrong.
Collaboration — many of our students end up working in pairs or small teams. One draws the characters, another writes the code, a third designs the levels. They learn to divide work, merge ideas, and compromise.

The Creative Act That Has Everything

I’ve taught art classes where kids drew and painted. I’ve taught cooking workshops where kids measured and mixed. I’ve taught pure coding where kids learned variables and loops. Each of these has value.

But game design is the only activity I’ve found that wraps all of it together. It’s art, because you design visuals. It’s writing, because you craft narrative. It’s math, because you balance systems. It’s code, because you bring it to life. And it’s play, because at the end, you actually get to experience what you’ve made — and so does everyone else.

When a child finishes a game and watches a friend play it for the first time, the look on their face is something I never get tired of. It’s pride. It’s excitement. It’s the realization that they made something real, something that exists in the world because of them.

That’s not screen time. That’s creation.

See It in Action

At C.Lab Academy, game design is woven into several of our programs — from simple storytelling games in Scratch for younger kids to more complex projects for older students. If you’re curious about what your child could create, you’re welcome to book a trial session and see for yourself.

Because the best way to understand what game design teaches isn’t to read about it. It’s to watch a child build something and light up.

C.Lab Academy offers coding and digital art programs for kids aged 3 to 16 in Seoul. Classes are taught in French and English, with small groups of six students maximum.