Why We're Building This

I've been watching my children disappear into 3D worlds for years now. The magnetic draw these open worlds have on young minds is undeniable. They'll spend hours building, exploring, collaborating with friends they've never met in person. The engagement is real. The creativity is genuine.

But so is the discomfort.

My co-founder Ian and I have both felt it. That tension between wanting our children to have the experiences they love and wanting to trust where those experiences are taking them. We've both hovered nervously. Set limits that get negotiated, bargained, quietly resented. Had conversations with other parents who feel the same pull in opposite directions.

That tension bothers me.

The dominant open worlds weren't built for children. They were built for growth, for engagement, for keeping people coming back. Safety arrived later, often after problems became headlines. Moderation became the answer, except moderation doesn't scale when you're dealing with millions of children and even more user-generated content.

I started wondering: what if you built an open world from the beginning with both things in mind? The engagement children want and the trust parents need. What if developmental value wasn't something you bolted on afterwards, but something embedded in the architecture from day one?

That's not a small question. It's also not one I claim to have fully answered. I'm not a child development expert. I'm not a safety specialist. I'm someone who's read enough research to know there are better ways to do this, and someone who cares enough to try building them.

The research on immersive role-play shows genuine developmental benefits. Children working collaboratively in structured environments learn differently than children playing alone. Time spent inhabiting different perspectives builds empathy in ways passive consumption doesn't. These aren't theoretical benefits. They're measurable.

But those benefits only matter if parents can actually trust where their children are spending time.

So we're building oodlü. An open world designed around how children develop, with safety embedded from the architecture up rather than retrofitted after problems emerge.

Are we going to get everything right immediately? No. Building something this complex takes time, and we're learning as we go. But we're trying to build something different from the start. Something that respects both what children want and what parents need.

This blog is going to be a running reflection on that process. The things we're noticing. The problems that bother us. The research that's shaping our thinking. The questions we're still wrestling with.

Not because we have all the answers, but because we think the questions matter.

We'd love to hear your thoughts on this. Find us on the social channels linked at the top of the page.