Build a Text Adventure Game With Your Kid

Ask a child to describe a game they want and an AI will happily build it for them. Ten minutes later they have something to play, and they have learned approximately nothing.

This workshop inverts that. Your child does not request a game — they design it. They write the rules, decide what happens when you lose, name the world, and set the difficulty. The AI is the engine that runs their rules, and nothing else.

The distinction sounds small. It is the whole difference between a wish machine and a workshop.

Last verified: August 2026. Runs on any assistant on a parent's account.

Why a text adventure specifically

Of everything you can build with an AI in an hour, this one has an unusual property: the AI is genuinely good at the boring part and genuinely bad at the interesting part.

It is excellent at improvising descriptions, keeping track of where you are, and reacting to unexpected player input. That is the machinery — and it is exactly the part that would take a child weeks to program.

It is bad at knowing what makes a game fun. What the stakes should be. Whether losing should be possible. What the twist is. Those are design decisions, and they are the part a nine-year-old can genuinely do — and enjoy doing.

So the division of labour is real, not artificial. Your child is not doing busywork while the AI does the clever bit. They are doing the clever bit.

What you need

Accounts: as of August 2026, Claude is 18+, ChatGPT and Gemini are 13+. Under-13s do this on your account with you at the keyboard — which suits this workshop anyway, since you will be reading the game aloud.

The shape