Why a game for a three-year-old should contain no text
It sounds like laziness — no translation, no copywriting. In practice, taking the words out is the hardest constraint we work with, and the one that improves the game most.
A pre-reader does not skip the text — they stop
An adult skims an instruction and moves on. A child who cannot read sees a grey shape where meaning should be. They do not guess and continue. They wait, or they tap something at random, or they call you.
Text in a game for this age is not a helpful extra. It is a closed door.
What replaces a sentence
The picture carries the problem. In our robot game the child meets a hole in the ground, a wall, soft sand. Nobody has to say choose the right leg — the hole says it.
A voice, not a caption. Nova, the companion in two of our games, asks the question out loud and says well done out loud. Fourteen obstacles, each with its own two spoken lines.
Shape and colour do the sorting. Spring legs look springy. Wheels look rollable. A child matches the shape to the job without a single label.
It forces better design
When you cannot write tap two cards to find a pair, you have to make the board so obvious that the sentence is unnecessary. The rule pushes every screen toward being self-explanatory, which is what you wanted anyway.
It also removes a whole class of failure. There is no mistranslation, no reading level, no wall of text a child learns to dismiss without looking.
Where words are still allowed
Two places. The first is the parents' area, behind a multiplication question — that part is written for adults, so it is written plainly and in full.
The second is deliberate teaching. In our hide-and-seek game there are four signs on the library wall — ENTRANCE, BOOKS, READING, TOILETS — and touching one makes it say its name out loud. Here the word is not an instruction to get past. It is the thing being learned, and it is spoken as well as shown.