The Kids First Approach to Co-creation

Toca Boca’s main guiding principle is simple: kids first. This kids-first approach means we consider everything we do and say primarily from a kid’s perspective rather than a grownup’s.

It’s a fine line to tread between being the true childhood ally we want to be and being someone who tries too hard to be down with kids. Luckily, we have expert help, and yes, that means kids. Since the launch of Toca Boca, involving kids in our work and world has been at the top of our agenda when creating our apps. It’s the only way we can be sure what we make is relevant and fun for our target audience. It’s also a lot more fun for us since kids bring joy, curiosity, and energy to the process.

We have an extensive framework in place for idea development and play testing that helps us get qualitative feedback and input from kids around the world in a constructive, fun and safe environment. The user generated content created by kids is extremely valuable for our understanding of how our audience actually uses our games and how we should develop the games to suit kids even better. Kids are also regularly invited to come over to our office to share their ideas and get hands-on with our game prototypes. Since our apps are designed with the intent of being as intuitive as possible, we need to check that our assumptions work. If kids start playing in a different way than we had perceived, it’s back to the drawing board to figure out if we need to change the game plan or the basic game idea.

Every game and app we create should primarily be interesting and appealing to kids and designed in such a way that they can figure out how to play them on their own. They should never have to ask an adult how to play the games (unless they want to do so).

We have other important guiding principles too. Without exception, our games are non-competitive, gender-neutral, and aim to reflect the diversity of both our player community and the world at large. If we swear by the kids-first principle, then kids must also feel seen, heard, comfortable, safe, and at home in our world… otherwise, our ambition doesn’t make a difference to the kids we want to reach.

With this in mind, Toca Life World (our biggest app to date) offers the player hundreds of characters to choose from, as well as a character creator with which the player can tailor additional characters to suit their own ideas. Our characters come in all ages and ethnicities, with a wide variety of dress, looks and aids, such as glasses, hearing aids, prosthetics, and wheelchairs. Our communication features same sex parents and all kinds of blended families, as well as households with a kid and a grandparent, since we know no two families look alike, and we want all kids to feel included. In the same way, we want kids and tweens to know and feel that social and emotional representation is just as important to us as physical representation.

Matters of inclusion and representation are crucial and lie at the core of our games and everything we do. But are we doing it right? It seems we’re on the right track. The feedback kids (and their families and caregivers) have given us regarding the diversity aspect of Toca Life World has been phenomenal.

One clear signal we’ve been getting from kids is that they appreciate and desire more ways to co-create and impact game design and development. We’ve taken that to heart and have implemented kids’ ideas into the games and asked kids for input regarding character and location design. For instance, we recently asked kids what new character expressions we should incorporate into the game. The result: four new expressions built from kid input, released in late 2021.