My Eight-Year-Old Is Now My Game Designer

I have a new coworker.

He's eight years old, has very strong opinions about dinosaurs, and thinks my website needs more weapons.

Honestly, I've worked with worse.

I've been building out Be a Dinosaur lately, which is a little project I've been working on for years in various forms. The idea has always been pretty simple: a colorful, fun place where kids can play games, learn things, and generally enjoy being kids.

And now that my own kids are getting old enough to actually play with it, something wonderful has started happening.

They're giving me feedback.

Specifically, Will has become very invested in the dinosaur customization game, where you can dress up your dinosaur with different outfits and accessories.

He loves it.

But apparently, my original selection of dinosaur accessories was not quite up to his standards.

He wanted more options. Cooler options. More armor, more superhero gear, more things that an eight-year-old boy would consider essential equipment for a properly dressed dinosaur.

Fair enough.

So we started talking about what we could add. Knight helmets. Ninja outfits. Rocket boots. Pirate accessories. Glowing swords. All the things I probably should have realized a dinosaur needed in the first place.

And then we started talking about an entirely new idea: dinosaur competitions.

Not fighting, exactly. More like silly challenges where you create a dinosaur and enter it into contests for the best superhero, the funniest outfit, or the most ridiculous combination of accessories.

He loved that idea too.

And somewhere in the middle of this conversation, I realized that something I'd wanted for a very long time was actually happening.

I was making something with my child.

Not making something for him, although that's wonderful too. Making something with him.

He was coming up with ideas, I was figuring out how to turn them into something real, and we were both genuinely excited about what we could build next.

I've spent a lot of my life making things. Websites, stories, photographs, recipes, projects that worked and projects that absolutely did not.

Sometimes I've wondered what the point of all that making was, especially when I look back at old work and immediately think of seventeen things I would do differently.

But then my eight-year-old sits down next to me, starts playing something I created, and tells me exactly how we could make it better.

And suddenly I remember.

This is the point.

It's the fun of having an idea. The satisfaction of making it real. The possibility that someone else might love it enough to want to help make it even better.

I don't know how big Be a Dinosaur will ever become. Maybe thousands of kids will play it. Maybe it'll mostly be my own six kids, which would honestly be a pretty respectable focus group.

But I do know that Will and I are having a wonderful time.

And I think I might have found my favorite collaborator yet.

Even if he does keep asking for more weapons.