

Well, you can play the game without it, as others have stated, you should really leave it on. First of all, all of that work needs to happen then later when you’re playing the game, which is just going to lead to a subpar experience with random framerate drops that cannot be explained. From Software’s Elden Ring had a problem at launch with that. Every time a new effect or literally anything in the game was done, you’d wait for half a second and that would sometimes make your game into a slideshow for seemingly no reason. Or the Nier replicant remake wouldn’t play the pre-rendered cutscenes if you didn’t enable it. Most games don’t care, however. But for the sake of stability, my recommendation is to leave it on. It only takes a long time when you boot something up the first time, and with modern games being unoptimised as well, do yourself a favour and leave it on.

Recommendation
I think the Raspberry Pi has a suit of prepackaged games and things like that, which you could use. Give your Raspberry Pi a good casing, and it will be indestructible.
Tangent
I would still warn them from the dangers of the modern digital world, in the sense of surveillance and censorship of social media, what is posted on the internet stays there forever, how proprietary software tricks the user and is oftentimes malware (Gmail, Windows, etc.) and things like that.
I mean, computers are cool, but the mainstream computer world is filled with so much nonsense or outright malice. And if I had a child, I wouldn’t want them to be harmed by that. Like, I don’t want my child to be indoctrinated into the sexist manosphere, just because the Instagram Algo said so and will do literally anything to keep them on the platform as long as possible. Software and computers are cool, but there’s so much vile and genuinely dangerous stuff even for adults. For a child it must be hard to navigate. If you say, for example, that Apple devices literally scan every single picture on your device and send the result to Apple, you’ll sound like a crazed tin foil hat lunatic. But this is quite literally what happens with MediaAnalysisD. In the USA, a young family got harassed by police because they sent a picture of their sick child to their doctor via Gmail.
Edit: typo.