The Pitfalls of Passive Creation

I recently started teaching my 12-year-old student to make games using AI (“vibe coding”). We’ve made a few projects together - a platform game and an endless runner/obstacle course.

At first, he was very excited, but that excitement quickly faded. I was miffed. This should be a really fun activity - building and playing his own games. We switched from math lessons to this… I mean, come on!

It feels like he found the learning of math more engaging, which is a surprise as he didn’t always look forward to our lessons. Given we’d switched to what is essentially play, he should be having a blast. 

Freedom isn’t fun

In the spirit of play, I thought it’d be fun to let him take the reins and create whatever he wants. With boundless possibility, he chose to build a game he was familiar with.

This was fun initially, but replicating a game becomes tedious once you’ve gotten over the initial buzz of ‘look at what I made’. There’s no creative tension - it’s essentially copying, not inventing. And copying isn’t much fun. 

Why did he choose to replicate a game? When possibilities are limitless, the brain naturally seeks safety. Boundless freedom feels exciting to us conceptually. But to the brain, it’s actually anxiety-provoking. There’s no structure to hold on to. When you tell a 12-year-old “make any game you want,” he suddenly faces infinite choices with no clear criteria for what’s good or achievable. To reduce that uncertainty, the mind automatically reached for something familiar. A pattern it already understood. I.e. A game he’s played before.

I made the mistake of equating fun with freedom, but psychologically, fun is about progress toward mastery within a framework. When there’s no friction, there’s nothing to master. Which explains why he was actually finding the math more engaging. A subtle irony for this to be missing in a lesson on building games, when this is a core principle of good game design.

What I did find however, is that he seemed to re-engage when he could hack or subvert the game once it had been created. He started skipping levels and only playing levels that scored higher points so he could earn more points than if he worked through them sequentially. He also made levels impossible for me by making the platforms spaced apart by 999999999999 pixels. Suddenly he had a constraint - the game architecture that we had replicated. Now the fun can begin.

Friction Fuels Engagement

Even without the creative element, I thought he’d be engaged through problem solving. Tweaking the prompt and refining the output. But the problem was, AI is pretty damn good at making games. You’ve got a working game with a single prompt.

Can you please make a about jumping on platforms

Note that he didn't even include the word 'game'.

Well, that’s not quite true. Creating an initial, playable version is easy. Making sure it works with all the bells and whistles is not. That last 20% of perfect is very difficult to solve for, too difficult for a 12 year old. So I settled on accepting good enough solutions, which means the only thing he had to do is prompt AI to implement a checklist without worrying too much about all of them working.

With AI instantly producing results, there’s no struggle. There’s no friction. The trial and error cycle is shallow. He’s not being pushed to think or strategise - just to describe changes. There’s little sense of mastery or discovery. He’s not facing interesting dilemmas or receiving emotionally satisfying feedback. So his brain isn’t getting the dopamine hit that comes from overcoming a challenge - it’s just issuing commands and getting results, like a passive God mode.

Conclusion

He’s not bored because he dislikes games or AI - he’s bored because the creative stakes are too low and the problems too shallow. Im not pushing him hard enough. To either create a novel game, or to create a game really well.

By making games with him, I thought my job had just became much easier and more fun, but as it turns out, I overlooked some crucial elements of engaging learning.