The design

Why our games look like the 90s on purpose

By Ryan King · Updated June 2026 · Why we made this call.

Most modern kids games look like a slot machine designed by someone who has never met a calm four-year-old. The visual choices have a cost.

What 'high stim' means in practice

A high-stimulation interface is one with a high rate of visual, auditory, and reward events per minute. Bright saturated colors. Constant character animation when nothing is happening. Sparkles on every tap. Music that does not stop. A reward chime for any action, including pointless ones. A countdown on screen at all times.

These choices are not accidents. They are the result of years of A/B testing for what holds a child's attention longest. They are also the result of testing without measuring downstream effects on attention regulation, emotional regulation, and the child's ability to disengage from the app on a parent's request.

What the research suggests

Dimitri Christakis's experimental work with toddlers and rapid-paced cartoons (Pediatrics, 2011) found measurable decrements in executive function immediately after a fast-paced episode, compared with a slow-paced or unrelated control. The effect is small in the experimental sense and large in the parenting sense: a child is harder to redirect for a while after the screen ends.

There is a wider literature on what is sometimes called the orienting response. Children attend automatically to motion, color change, and unexpected sound. The more of these per minute an interface produces, the more the child's attentional system is being directed by the app instead of by the child. Sustained over an hour, that pattern is not free.

What 'looks like the 90s' actually means

Pixel art is what every game looked like before the slot-machine school of design. It carries some visual properties that turn out to matter: a finite palette, sharper edges, fewer animation frames per second, and a slower default pace. None of that makes a game less fun. The boys still cheer when a treasure block breaks. They also put the iPad down when asked.

We did not choose the look because it was nostalgic. We chose it because, after watching what the boys did with apps that did and apps that did not have constant glitter, the difference in how they came off the iPad was visible.

What we will not do

No auto-playing celebrations longer than a child needs. No looping background music that resumes when paused. No 'streak in danger' notifications. No surprise stickers awarded for actions that are not the lesson. No haptic buzz on every interaction. The reward for finishing a phonics level is the reading they just did, plus a calm acknowledgement. The reward for being good at the game is being good at the game.

If a feature in a Cairn app feels engineered to hold attention rather than support learning, it is the wrong feature.

Sources: Christakis et al., 2011, The Effects of Fast-Paced Cartoons, Pediatrics; Bavelier and Green on attention and media, Annual Review of Neuroscience (2019).