Why Kids NEED Video Game Design
Let's talk briefly about a couple of different reasons why kids need to learn video game design.
At first, you might not want your kids to spend more time in front of a screen but let's make that time productive and useful rather than a waste. Kids can learn to code, build a community, and unleash their creative potential right within video game design.
Unlocking a Kids Creativity
One of the first skills that kids can gain when learning video design skills is the ability to have unlimited freedom to create whatever they want.
If you want to make a brand new city in a video game, you can do that.
If you want to make a new character, you can do that.
If you want to make a great storyline, you can do that.
If you want to make an action-packed shooter, you can do that.
If you want to make a side scroller like an adventure game, you can do that.
Whatever you want to create or whatever you want to do, you can do within a video game.
It's a great time because 10 to 15 years ago, you couldn't even dream about making a video game like that because it would just take so much knowledge of coding and you would have to have a whole team to hire.
You would need to have several artists, coders, and designers in your staff but nowadays you can create a video game by yourself. It's great because there are so many game design-builders and online classes (and in-person classes) that help you along that process so you can start designing your video games right away.
Teamwork Makes The Dreamwork
The second reason why I believe that kids need to learn video game design is that it allows students to design games together with friends. So now two people (or more) can come together and make a fun story, make their own shooting game, make their own weapons, or whatever they want to come up with.
It cultivates this idea of teamwork, this participation, and delegation and allowing people to have "jobs" such as "you're the weapons person, you're the story person and you're designing the characters." This gives kids more opportunities to grow with design skills because they are not only working as a team but it allows them to focus on only certain aspects of the game.
Coding is The Future
Did you know that oftentimes video game design and coding work hand in hand? They are synonymous in a lot of ways. Video Game Design is mostly visual like creating the sprites, the characters, the buildings, the trees, and all the visual side of things but coding a lot of times it's behind the scenes.
Coding is "the thing" that says what happens when a weapon is picked up.
What happens when you press the space bar with a weapon? Does it shoot a gun? Does it shoot a bullet?
How far does the bullet travel?
How much does that weapon hurt the opponent?
Those are all coding things. Those are scripts behind the scenes that have to be written to tell the game what to do when this person shoots the gun and how much damage to cause to the other person that is getting hit.
A coding script makes all that magic happen.
Build a Community
The fourth reason and what I think is the most important is the fact you can build a community when it comes to video game design. The video game community is very accepting because they're all doing this together, they are a small community, they're all trying to build a game, sharing ideas, and having fun doing it.
So you can build this great online community of like-minded people. On top of that, if you have a couple of friends physically around you (not online), you can build both an in-person community and an online community that can help you along with your video game development. If you really can't find that in-person community there's always online as well.
Growing Industry
The last reason I believe that kids and students need to learn video game design is because the industry is not going away anytime soon. It is, in fact, exploding. The good kind of exploding. There are so many people getting into video games. Obviously, kids have been playing games for years, but even adults are playing more video games than ever before. So let's say 20 years ago video games were geared for younger kids between the ages of eight and 18, but nowadays you can have kids from five years old and adults up to even 50 or 60 who are playing video games.
The actual range of people playing video games is so much wider than it ever was before. The fact that there's a lot more money involved with video games means there are plenty of jobs as well. To start a career in video games you can make your own video game, or become an artist, you might want to become a designer. You could also become more of a technical person behind the scenes.
There are so many opportunities for people to get into video game designing that did not exist 20 years ago.
Final Thoughts
Those are just a few reasons I think kids and students need to learn Video Game Design. Obviously, there are a lot more reasons that we could talk about but just those few thoughts should help you understand the importance. If anything, just making "screen time" more valuable is a good enough reason to see if your student would love Video Game Design.
Digital Creators Club in Fayetteville offers classes for kids in Video Game Design, YouTube Editing, and Coding.
