Why We Need to Build More Online Playgrounds for Kids

For all the debate about kids and technology, the question of what young people actually need online rarely gets answered. And so tweens are caught exactly where the internet leaves them: too old for the protected simplicity of single-player games, too young for the adult platforms they move to instead. What they actually need — social play spaces designed for where they are developmentally — barely exists online.

Katie Salen Tekinbaş is a designer, researcher, and professor at UC Irvine, where she is on the steering committee of the Connected Learning Lab. Katie has spent her career creating playful communities with and for kids, co-founding the Institute of Play, Quest to Learn, and Connected Camps. In this Q&A, she makes the case for the playful spaces kids need, and what we should do about it.

Question: What’s the critical issue?

Katie Salen Tekinbaş: Kids need to play. They need spaces to try new things, to mess up, to fail. Tweens in particular need a more socially supportive and forgiving play environment than older teens and adults — one rich in opportunities to experiment, take social risks, and develop their identities in safe, low-stakes settings. Tweens need spaces that offer some privacy, room to try on different versions of themselves. They need to be given the chance to be around peers who bring different experiences but share similar interests. They need play spaces that are safe enough to face risks, learn from them, and keep going.

At the same time, there’s a global push to restrict youth access to social media and games. Tech companies don’t want to take responsibility for the needs of young people on their platforms, so the policy solution seems to be: keep them off it. Ban them from social media platforms, take away their phones in school, and then hope that they’ll magically figure it all out when they turn 16.

This approach is short sighted and serves adults much more than it does kids. Rather than banning access, we instead need to address the gap for online play spaces tailored to the specific developmental and social connection needs of tweens and teens. We would all benefit from these spaces, not just young people, because even grown-ups don’t know how to behave online with each other. We all just got thrown into Facebook and Instagram with no training wheels to guide our interactions. So what do you see online as a result? Terrible behavior, right? And business models that incentivize terrible behavior. 

Young people see that behavior too. They absorb it. They emulate it.

Q:  What could be different?

Katie: Imagine a playground: kids have lots of freedom to play in an environment that’s been built especially for them. There are always groups of caring people around, kind of paying attention, kind of not. Some are grown-ups and some are near peers. There are eyes on the playground.

And when you take your kid to the playground, you don’t wrap them in bubble wrap or tell them to play by themselves. You expect them to deal with both risk and other kids. They might fall down, get hit with a stick, accidentally throw sand in another kid’s face. When that happens, we encourage them to get back up or ask if their friend is ok or we might even refrain from saying anything at all.

Physical playgrounds are beautiful models for what we might aspire to in online play spaces.

Take ExperienceCraft, a Minecraft community built specifically for kids who were grieving the loss of a loved one. It gave them a place to come together online. A place to play, to connect, to simply be around others who got it, without anyone having to say so out loud. The space was designed to support them, not just host them. When one player accidentally killed another’s beloved virtual pet, some adults worried the moment could be harmful. Instead, the player took it upon herself to build an elaborate virtual cemetery and give the pet a proper burial. This was an act of apology that became something much more. The cemetery wove itself into the life of the server, part of the ongoing story of its pets and players. A mistake had become an act of care.

That’s only one story. My colleague Mimi Ito and I have many more examples and research through our work with Connected Camps on what supportive play spaces for youth look like. We have been building and researching governance systems for young people, escalation systems to manage risks of real harm, guidance for hosting a digital clubhouse.

Others are doing this work too — Sonia Livingstone and the 5Rights Foundation, the RITEC initiative led by the LEGO Foundation and UNICEF, the Joan Ganz Cooney Center at Sesame Workshop. And there are allies outside of gaming, like the Responsible Technology Youth Power Fund, the Prosocial Design Network, and Rachel Kowert’s work to support volunteer Discord moderators at scale.

And young people are building spaces on their own. We know that especially young people from minoritized communities are fleeing mainstream platforms to create their own spaces of refuge online.

Q: What misconceptions get in the way?

Katie: Two concerns often come up when I make this argument that block progress in building online playgrounds for kids. The first is that I’m saying kids should be exposed to harm online. I’m not. Harmful design — like loot boxes, unmoderated interaction with strangers, or content that is age inappropriate — has no place in spaces built for young people. But there’s a meaningful difference between harm and risk, and we need to make a distinction. Research on platforms like Roblox, for example, shows that safety is often produced through smart moderation and youth-driven norms — young people learning to navigate risk, not simply being shielded from it.

The second concerns addiction. The fact is that games are really fun and it can be hard to get your kid to stop playing. That can create some real friction at home, especially when it’s time to eat dinner or go to school — I am a parent who knows this struggle very well. But that doesn’t necessarily mean a kid is addicted to games. It might just mean that we need to have a different strategy for helping them transition out of the game.

Q: What should we do next?

Katie: We need many more spaces for kids, a diversity of options rather than relying on a one-size-fits-all approach. We need options that are culturally responsive and designed to meet the needs of specific communities of young people the way many neighborhood playgrounds are.

We know a lot about how to build these spaces. Now we need funders to invest in building more examples of them. We need researchers to study what gets built and integrate these learnings into design. We need designers to create them — and to create them with kids, not for kids. Not with a youth advisory board you check in with every once in a while, but actually in the work with young people, in all parts of the process. Seed the “neighborhood” community with a group of kids who are invested, who meaningfully contribute to it, who will eventually become the stewards that lead and sustain the play spaces. Because in the end, my goal isn’t just to build better online play spaces, it is to create communities where kids can belong, play, and grow.