Some of you who know me probably won’t be terribly surprised to learn that somewhere between work, family, technology, AI, projects, Home Assistant, and everything else I somehow decided I needed another project. 😄
That project is Cranky’s Game.
Cranky’s Game is a family-friendly online game that I’ve been actively developing around a pretty simple idea:
Kids should have a fun place online that is built for them without asking parents to give up visibility, privacy, or common sense in the process.
And I think there is room for a very different model of what “social” can mean in a game for kids.
First, Meet Cranky
Cranky isn’t just a character somebody dreamed up for a game.
Cranky is based on a real rescued three-legged Eastern box turtle, and that little turtle eventually became the inspiration for an entire game world.
What started fairly simply has grown into something much larger: individual sanctuaries, places to explore, friends, visits, messages, family controls, different visual experiences, and a growing collection of things I probably hadn’t planned on building when this all started.
That also means an important disclaimer:
Cranky’s Game is still in active development.
Things are being added, tested, changed, broken, fixed, redesigned, and occasionally stared at while I wonder why something that worked perfectly five minutes ago has suddenly developed opinions. 😄
But the basic philosophy behind the game is becoming very clear.
A Kids’ Game Designed With Families in Mind
A lot of online experiences treat parental controls as something bolted onto the side after the social system has already been designed.
I wanted to approach Cranky’s Game from the opposite direction.
The family is part of the architecture.
Children have their own game experience and identity, while parents and guardians have a separate Family Center for the things adults should be responsible for: family relationships, approvals, privacy choices, friend connections, communications, reports, and other controls.
The intent isn’t for a parent to hover over every click a child makes.
It’s to make sure the adults haven’t been designed out of the experience.
That becomes especially important when kids start making friends.
Kids Make Friends. Families Connect.
This is probably one of my favorite ideas in Cranky’s Game.
When we say two kids are “friends” online, there are really more people involved in that relationship than two usernames.
There are families behind them.
So I’ve been building Cranky’s Game around a family-connected friendship model.
A child can have a public player identity without needing to expose their private real-world identity. Friend discovery and connections are designed around privacy and approval, and the parents or guardians responsible for those children remain connected to that relationship through the family side of the game.
I tend to describe it this way:
If our kids are friends, the parents are friends too.
Not “friends” in the Facebook sense where suddenly everybody needs to exchange vacation pictures and political memes. 😄
I mean something much more practical.
The adults responsible for each child shouldn’t be invisible strangers to one another while their children are interacting.
Parents should know that another family exists on the other side of that friendship. They should have visibility into the relationship, be able to approve and manage it, and have an adult-to-adult path around the children’s experience.
To me, that feels much closer to how childhood friendships work in the real world.
Your kid makes a friend.
Eventually, you meet the parents.
The families become connected too.
Why should we throw that model away just because the playground happens to be online?
Privacy Means Separating “Who You Are” From “Who You Play As”
Another design decision I care about is separating a child’s private identity from their public player identity.
A child doesn’t need to broadcast their real name to participate in an online game.
Cranky’s Game is designed so that the family can know exactly who the child is while other players interact with the child’s chosen player identity.
That separation sounds simple, but I think it matters.
One of the best ways to protect children’s personal information is to avoid exposing information that never needed to be public in the first place.
Privacy shouldn’t depend entirely on teaching a seven-year-old to make perfect cybersecurity decisions.
We adults can design better systems.
Building Around COPPA Requirements From the Beginning
Because Cranky’s Game is intended for families and children, privacy isn’t something I can treat as a paragraph buried at the bottom of a Terms of Service page.
The game is being built around the requirements and principles of the Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act (COPPA), including meaningful parental involvement and control over children’s information.
That has influenced a lot of architectural decisions: how child and parent accounts relate to one another, what information is private versus public, how parental approvals work, how communications are handled, what parents can see and manage, and how much information the game actually needs from a child in the first place.
I’m deliberately treating COPPA as a design requirement rather than something to think about after the game is finished.
And because Cranky’s Game remains under active development, those protections continue to be tested and reviewed as new features are introduced.
That last part matters.
A privacy model isn’t “done” just because you wrote one good privacy policy.
Every new social feature has the potential to create a new privacy question.
Social Without Creating Another Open Social Network
I also don’t want Cranky’s Game to turn into another giant anonymous social network with a turtle painted on top of it.
There are already plenty of those.
The social parts of Cranky’s Game are intended to support known, approved relationships.
Kids can visit friends, communicate, and share parts of the game experience, but those features are being developed inside the larger family and privacy model.
That creates an interesting design challenge.
I still want kids to have independence.
I still want the game to feel like their world.
I still want friendships to be fun rather than feeling like Mom or Dad is sitting six inches behind them reading everything over their shoulder.
But I also want parents to have the tools and visibility appropriate for a game being used by children.
Finding that balance is a big part of what I’m working through.
No Dark Patterns Required
There’s another part of this experiment I’m increasingly interested in.
What happens if you build a kids’ game where the business objective isn’t to extract every possible minute of attention from the child?
No endless psychological pressure to log in.
No need to turn every interaction into an advertising opportunity.
No reason to collect a mountain of personal information simply because somebody might eventually figure out how to monetize it.
Just build something fun.
There’s a surprisingly radical idea. 😄
Cranky’s Game is still evolving, so I’m intentionally being careful about making grand promises about every aspect of what it eventually becomes.
But the design philosophy is pretty firmly established:
Collect less. Expose less. Give parents meaningful control. Give kids room to play.
Two Generations of the Game Are Already Taking Shape
One of the fun complications of developing Cranky’s Game is that I’ve also been experimenting with what the game itself should look and feel like.
There’s a more traditional Classic experience, and I’ve been developing a newer, more immersive Living Sanctuary experience alongside it.
The underlying family, identity, privacy, and social architecture is shared even as the game experience evolves.
That lets me experiment pretty aggressively with the visuals without having to reinvent the rules for protecting kids every time the graphics change.
And yes, this occasionally results in an unreasonable amount of time being spent deciding exactly where a three-legged turtle should be standing. 😄
This Is Very Much an Active Development Project
I want to emphasize this because I actually think it’s part of the fun.
I’m not announcing a finished commercial product.
I’m sharing something that is actively being built.
There will be bugs.
There will be features that change.
There will almost certainly be things parents or kids try that make me say, “Okay…that is absolutely not how I thought anyone would use that.”
That feedback is valuable.
Some of the best changes to Cranky’s Game have already come from watching real people use it rather than simply deciding from behind a keyboard how I think they will use it.
That’s exactly how I want the project to develop.
What I’m Trying to Build
If I had to boil the whole thing down, it would probably be this:
I want Cranky’s Game to be a place where a kid can log in, see their sanctuary, explore, make friends, visit somebody else’s world, send a message, discover something new, and just play.
Meanwhile, I want their parent to know:
Who their child is connected with.
Which family is on the other side of that connection.
What information is being shared.
Where parental approval is required.
And that someone actually thought about these questions while designing the system.
That shouldn’t be unusual.
For a game built for children, I think it should be the baseline.
Come See What We’re Building
Cranky’s Game is available at CrankysGame.com, and development is continuing pretty much constantly.
If you’re a parent, I’m particularly interested in your reaction to the family model.
What would you want to know before allowing your child to make an online friend?
What controls would make you more comfortable?
Where should kids have independence?
Where should parents be involved?
And what have other games gotten completely wrong?
I’m building this with my own family in mind, but the goal is bigger than building something that works for us.
I’d like to see whether we can make an online game where family-friendly describes more than the artwork and vocabulary.
Where it describes how the system itself works.
Kids make friends. Families connect. Parents stay in the loop. And Cranky gets to keep being Cranky. 🐢
That seems like a pretty good place to start. If you’ve read this far, let me know how much of this you think was built with AI, but it’s not 0 and not 100.