The claim is that 10,000 hours of effort is required to truly become a master of a skill. Interestingly there is also a claim that kids now days will have played 10,000 hours of video games by the time they are 21 years old. That is 10,000 hours of video games, but what if you add the time spent on card games, and board games, and sports, and just plain old pretend-play. That’s a lot of time playing games. What are kids learning during this time? Should games give a thought to this during the design process?

Taking turns
One of the fundamental things kids need to learn to play games is how to take turns. This often does not come naturally but is a very important social skill that relates to how to wait in line and how to play fair and so on. But there are some down sides to taking turns. I remember watching my son when he was six years old playing soccer on a local team. The kids didn’t understand the nature of the sport – rather than running and try to kick the ball they were taking turns kicking the ball. They misapplied the “take turns” meme to the sport.

What about life? Should you always “wait your turn”? No. The life story of most successful people is not a story of someone who merely waited for success. The good news is that there are simple game mechanics that can teach kids that they don’t always have to wait their turn. There are many games with some sort of card that says “play at any time”. You can play these special cards even if it is not your turn. Most commonly these are defensive cards played in response to some sort of attack by another player. Occasionally these cards can be used offensively (let’s say proactively – sounds better).

The “play at any time” card is important because it is vital to teach kids that there may be opportunities or threats in life which require immediate action – even it is not your “turn”.

Follow the Rules
Games are defined by their rules. Rules are the bricks used to create games. If you watch kids play you will notice that rules are paramount even in pretend-play. Fundamentally games teach kids to follow the rules. This is a valuable social skill. If kids didn’t learn this then prisons would become even more crowded. On the other hand you don’t want kids to grow up to be sheep who meekly do what they are told. Kids have to taught to break the rules or to play with the rules themselves. How do you design a game that allows for rule breaking?

One simple mechanic is “shoot the moon”. The basic game rules may be that you don’t want points – but if you get ALL the points you win. That is: you can win by playing by the normal rules or by doing the exact opposite. This is beautiful! The existences of this mechanic allows for more creative strategies.

Early versions of Dungeons and Dragons were so poorly constructed that players were essentially required to create their own rules. This ethnic persisted in that gaming community for some time. Players played with the rules themselves. I don’t think that it is entirely accidental that many successful computer programmers were also D&D fanatics.

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Most video games have game levels: what does that teach kids? .. or boss fights, or power ups, or the grind required by most online role playing games? When designing games we should give a thought for what behavior the rules are teaching.