Its not what you can do for your avatar…

BUT! What your avatar can do for you! As virtual worlds strive to find ways to open new doors to your wallet… Zwinky steps up with a unique idea: make your avatar as kick butt as possible, and then take that instruction to enhance YOURSELF. It’s like a road map on looking how you wish you looked. Model your avatar, then model yourself. Interesting, yeah?

Zwinky has announced a partnership with Zazzle, a custom clothing and tchotchke company, to allow its users to export their Zwinky avatars to real-world gear. The in-world Zazzle kiosk users to buy customized t-shirts, mugs, posters, postage stamps, and more featuring their avatars, which can be created and shipped to the buyer within 24 hours. Users can select from a display of their avatar on various options and switch between previously created and saved avatar outfits.

Virtual Worlds News: Zwinky Partners with Zazzle for Real-World Avatar Merchandise

Wowza, what an approach.

I’ve taken many steps to avoid speaking regularly about the news for Habbo, Zwinky (especially Zwinky with its creepy download and browser stalkers), Gaia, and other such teen-based sites because I’m sticking to my tween guns, and rather concentrate on sites that purposefully aim at this specific demographic– which Habbo, Zwinky, Gaia, etc may appear to do, but don’t (Ahem: if it looks like a duck, and it acts like a duck, but it’s REALLY a fox– how can other ducks know to stay away??). However, I found this bit of news to be a possible future trend.

Why?

Because, as I mentioned first– you want to make your avatar look appealing (whether for good looks, humor, popularity, diva-ness, etc). So, if you have created an avatar who’s style is ideal to you, but not how you dress… after a while you might actually want to dress just as your avatar (after all, it IS a little version of you, or a side of your personality).

I LOVE my outfit at Stardoll… and if I could buy those exact items to make that exact outfit? Heck yeah, I might just pull out the wallet. Kids & tweens are easily swayed by this stuff too. They play dress up — whether it be dress up like a Naruto character, a wizard, fairies, goths, etc… they have MUCH more room to be expressive. And in virtual worlds– where your clothing IS your expression… why wouldn’t they want to transcend their successful virtual style to real life?

Okay. Meh. There is the whole “materialism” thing, and that’s bad. I’m pretty sure such an concept wouldn’t be pleasant to those trying to protect children from such ideals. Which, I agree to– when thinking about the “overall educational behavior results.” Then again– kids/tweens can’t buy a darn thing on the internet without the aid of an adult. Kids “want” all the time– from the grocery store toy isle, to book fair day, to candy at the gas station. It’s something we all struggle with– but it’s really the parents guidance that helps a kid recognize the empowerment BEHIND the wanting.

At 12, I had an American Girl doll (back in the day, when they JUST came out, and there were only 3)– Samantha to be precise. Oh, those darn magazines came TWICE monthly, enticing and spoiling me with all the things Samantha COULD have. However, I didn’t have a credit card or a check book. If I wanted it, I had to show my parents, and THEY had the power. My sister and I would clean the entire FINISHED basement to our mother’s inspection (she’s the cleaning attila the hun… no spot, corner, side, or crevice unchecked) for $10 every Saturday. And we saved, and had to wait, and learn patience, and then finally when we were able to spend our hard earned money? We’d see something bigger, or more expensive in that darn magazine– and we’d end up holding out, etc.

We can’t always shout down a moving train. But if you jump on board and guide it where you want it to go… well, you know the rest.

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Tags: Zwinky, virtual world economy, virtual worlds

OT: Okay…Okay…Okayokayokay. Lost.

Never watched LOST before? Watched it a little, but didn’t watch much of last season? Then ABC has a deal for you. Tonight you can see the season 3 finale with added pop-ups to explain exactly whats going on in the episode. Disney’s calling it “LOST, Enhanced.” Even though I’m an avid LOST fan, or perhaps because of that, I’ll certainly tune in myself.Then get ready for the Season 4 premier tomorrow night. First there’s a 1-hour recap episode and then the real fun begins. I can’t wait.Sadly, the studios inability to settle with the striking writers means we have an extra short 8 episode season. Let’s hope these recent talks between the parties brings swift resolution and allows the LOST team to start production on the next 8 episodes ASAP.

The Disney Blog: LOST Season 3 Finale to play tonight with annotations

Sorry for the big OT (off topic) post.  But I’m so darn excited about Lost tomorrow.  I actually thought it was last Thursday, and go all propped up on the couch, surrounded by blankets and munchies and filled my aura with bliss… only to check out the main website and see that the premiere is scheduled for TOMORROW.  Boo.  Nothing turns bright yellow to purply-black so quickly as that aura-disappointment.

However, I just saw this on the Disney blog and started gigglin’ like a mad …person? hatter? giggler?  Who giggles like mad?  Except for me and that Indian man who giggles for exercise?  Ah well, anyway.  Let’s just say I was publicly giddy.  It happens a lot these days, and my co-workers are now immune.  It took them a while to get used to my Sound-Effects Tourettes Syndrome (which isn’t a medical term, but something an old Star Farm friend labeled me with… oh Drew, you are missed, buddy!, lolzbot)– let’s just say, I react out loud to things I find on the web.  You should have seen me when I first realized I could tickle my moshi monster.  I nearly fell from my chair.  Or when I watch those HORRIBLE PSA commercials from Canada (which won’t link to, but you can find via youtube).

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Tags: Lost

A Safety Concern in VW

Normally we report on who’s new to virtual worlds, not who’s avoiding them. But like Yahoo, it’ just odd to see FAO Schwarz without a virtual worlds play. With toy companies like MGA Entertainment, Mattel, Ty, and Hasbro making pushes for toy-based tie-ins, not to mention the recently successful Build-a-Bearville, you’d expect one of the largest toy brands in the world to be leading the pack. However, Internet Retailer reports that while FAO is big on expanding its website, “[CEO Edward] Schmults says he has considered community features for kids, including adding a virtual world feature, but is concerned about the potential for abuse by predators.” He says, though, that he has plans to meet with an interactive marketing firm to hash out community features, so the concerns might be only a temporary delay. [via Internet Retailer via Virtual Economic Forum]

Virtual Worlds News: FAO Schwarz Worried About Safety in Virtual Worlds

It’s nice to see that companies are concerned about the results of deciding to introduce a community to their online presence.  That’s a responsible thought process from a company that has good intentions and a wish of welfare for their audience.  That’s great.

Now to the truth.  Creating a safe environment isn’t nearly as difficult as making sure you can scale it– that you have the CONTINUING funds to sustain it, and improve it. 

If you hire the right people and build the right landscape, you have most of the control in your hands, and there should be no cause to worry about the audiences’ safety.    Set up series of checks and balances, ensure that all programs within your world reinforce your safety concerns, as well as the staff who maintains it.  Build strategies and theorize the perimeters of your environment.  Hire a staff of well trained professionals who not ONLY have worked with children and understand communities online… BUT ALSO have represented brands before.  Take the necessary time it takes to create your army and playground, test all walls and rules, and enhance improve and then finally– open your doors.

Wouldn’t you RATHER create a safe online community playground, where you KNOW your audience would be safe… then say, leaving them to NON SAFE arenas????

I’d rather compete with 100+ new virtual environments for youth that are safe… then be the solitary king of the mountain with nothing but unsafe teen+ environments for U13 youth to explore.

Trust your team, trust your brand… yes, there will always be creeps out there trying to bust the system… but have faith in what you built, and that the people who built it also have the best intentions as well as a true obligation to safety. 

I’ve spoken to a LOT of youth community managers over the last few years.  All of us have safety as the first and foremost speaking point.  It is our obligation to work our arses off to ensure the audience is safe and our staff is on guard.  It’s a hard, long hours job, but it’s worth it.

But you know what makes a healthy community the easiest– especially for youth?  Execs & companies who are socially responsible.  Organizations that have the safety of the audience high high high on their priority scale.  Cartoon Network has done a BRILLZ job.  They hired an exec level professional who’s sole purpose is to ensure social responsibility for all their products.  I can’t wait to see FusionFall this year– everything I’ve seen and heard about it has suggested it to be extremely safe MMO. 

Okay, end of soap box rant.  Clearly I love my job, and I love this market.  So many possibilities for awesomeness.  I dig FAO Schwartz is cautious about this playfield (too bad they pulled their store from Chicago– boo!), so I hope that when they DO enter this market, they bring some amazing new safety techniques & general super-fun-yay. 

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Tags: FAOSwartz, virtual world, virtual environment, safety, parents, toys, web, youth, children, tweens, entertainment

Parallel Lives: MMO players IRL

This looks like a GREAT movie ahem documentary. I can’t wait to see it:

Kids + Imagination + Ingenuity + Snow = Pure Awesomeness

Forest Pearson is a 10-year-old who saved $500 to build a snow-making machine from scratch.  Forest Pearson is also our hero, who will probably grow to build a 100-person Jacuzzi on top of Everest. This real-world Calvin put together the machine using a 30-gallon air compressor and a pressure washer, with spray noozles that throw perfect snow powder. The machine may look simple in the following the image, but the results are stunning Update: now with video

His mom said: “He’s watching a molecular process happening here, he’s creating a climatic event. It’s incredible.” I don’t know what’s more incredible: her mom being cool about Forest creating a huge mountain of snow in their backyard or the fact that she’s talking about it all as “molecular process.”

Gadgets: Real-World Calvin Builds Snow Machine, Creates Backyard Mountain Overnight

There really isn’t too much more to say than AWESOME. 

Kids and snow.  I’m telling you– it could be colder than cold, but if a kid sees a pile of fresh snow?  The chill factor doesn’t have much power.  Kids will spend hours digging tunnels and building up forts– making their OWN world… and in the end, isn’t that kind of what kids always reach for?  Their OWN world?

Virtual environments, playhouses, dolls, toys, kid-sized toilets (there was a restaurant I was obsessed with as a kid because it had a me-sized toilet. Yes, I know I was weird), kid-sized passage ways, etc.

A world where they don’t feel the smallest, the weakest, the littlest, the under appreciated child….

My sister and I had this side yard growing up (we creatively called “the side yard” lolzbot).  It was an elevated mound of wilderness stretching the border length of our 5 acre property.  On both sides it had drainage ditches, but we considered them “moats”.  We built the CRAPPIEST wooden-plank bridge to cross (but loved it because WE made it).  We would yank skinny branches off the Willow behind the pond and sit on the high side yard with the rope-y willow branch dipping into the imaginary moat, and we’d catch imaginary fish.  There was a large gray boulder we used as a table, and smaller boulders as seats.  A hallow trunk we called the toilet (but was really a rabbit burrow) was about 20 feet away in the side yard, and the northern part of the side yard with all the baby trees marked out our “bedrooms.”  As any good story, or adventure, we never EVER went to the northern tip of the side yard (near the road) because there was another huge boulder that resembled (from a distance) an enormous snapping turtle.  As I mentioned earlier, we had a pond with some unfortunate snapping turtle residents– which, thanks to the help of snapping-turtle-stories told by concerned parents who didn’t want their children falling into the pond– provided MANY nightmares.  Did you know snapping turtles can bite a child’s leg in half?  Yes. Frightening.  Anyway, I digress… we never got near that boulder.  It gave our side yard world some excitement.

This side yard was our Neverland.  We never managed to make it look very hospitable, since it was wild, it was a never ending project.

Our neighbor had a kick-butt treehouse.  Of course we coveted it when he first got it.  But, after the initial two-weeks of “ooo treehouse!”, we realized there wasn’t much to do except picnics & going in and then going out.  Woo?  It wasn’t long  before we were back in the side yard having true adventures in our own world.  Granted, sometimes our epic playdays would include some storyline about the Treehouse, where we’d have to flee the side yard for higher ground, thanks to that snapping turtle rock.

My parents moved out of that house (where I lived my entire life) about 4 years ago.  It tore me apart.  unfortunately, due to the stupid market, my parents have been unable to sell the place.  Last year, before I moved to LA, I went back to the old house, found the bridge (which somehow still exists), and crossed into our side yard world.  Everything was EXACTLY the same.  The place we tried to build a garden was still dry and empty, the table rock and the wooden toilet were still there, although much smaller than I remember, and the snapping turtle rock still hid just below the surface of the weeds growing in the ditch.  The trees were a little bigger, the weeds a lot longer (no longer trampled by small feet), and the ditches still brimming with imaginary fish. 

Oh, what a gift children have… uninhibited imagination.  What I wouldn’t give to have that every day.  Since they can’t have what they think they want– they go about making it for themselves… whether it’s pretend or in some giant snow machine. 

Last Friday we were sitting around the office, and the gentlemen I work with rambled about how to make things bigger, better, brighter.  All of which are great when competing– out shine the others, right?  Well, I seemed to be the only one showing restraint (typical).  And yesterday my coworker told me about how he had an “iz-piphany” (I have epiphanies all the time at work, and I never realized how often I used that term).  Anyway, my cowork’s son played in a brown 4×4 cardboard box all weekend.  All. Weekend.  Apparently he slept in it too. 

Don’t underestimate the simple things that stir imagination.  Club Penguin, for as ‘young’ looking as it is, does a GREAT job at making an open environment where kids have to take the socializing into their own hands… but ALSO provides community events like “Rockhopper crashing the boat” that gets kids’ imaginations stirring and provokes them into accepting the realness of the world.  They have a static iceberg island page on CP.  There is NOTHING about it that’s flashy, or even gives the hint of movement.  And yet, somehow, kids got it in their heads that if they crowd the iceberg and collectively gather on one side of it– they could tip the iceberg.  Of course it didn’t happen– but the point is, kids BELIEVED it MIGHT.  They believed enough in this world where they thought they could impact it– despite the fact that everything about that page said it wasn’t going to happen.

Now THAT, my friends, is pure awesomeness…

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Tags: weather, youth, kid empowerment, imagination, izzy neis

Monday Funny: Predictive Text

 Lolzville.  Many thanks to Jennifer for this gem!

Curious: A Review of the XO $200 laptop

Kate, my neighbor across the hall, brought over her XO for me to try. She had taken advantage of One Laptop Per Child’s $400 “Give One Get One” offer in November, and while a child in the developing world was presumably exploring the donated XO, we now had her matching XO to investigate ourselves.

In my apartment, the sight of an electronic device that was built to last was almost jarring. My trembling, delicate, temperamental laptop suddenly seemed like a dying tropical bird, while the XO is a happy, healthy puppy. A tough puppy. The XO is said to withstand desert heat, direct sunlight, thick humidity, distressing falls, dirt, rainstorms and (I’m not kidding) assault by cats. Kate and I invited some preschool-age kids, including hers and mine, to come beat it up. They squealed and crowded in cinematically to glimpse the holy thing.

It was hard to open. That killed the communitarian buzz for awhile. I had charged it — with a standard AC jack, though it can also run off a custom-designed solar panel — but ignored the (online) instructions. Antennas, which I mistook for kickstands, needed to be raised. An enticingly big button that looked like a latch turned out to be a hinge.

Sarah, my upstairs neighbor, came down with her two daughters. Seeing my bewilderment, she was the first of us to mention “The Gods Must Be Crazy.” That 1980 comedy has lasted: the indelible image of a tribesman coming upon a Coke bottle in the Kalahari seems in retrospect like the last word in any number of 1970s arguments about cultural hybridization. I wondered what promises and threats the XO laptops, air-dropped like propaganda leaflets (or trucked to Catholic schools by the thousands, whichever), would conjure for students in poor countries.

Virginia Heffernan - The Medium - Television - Internet Video - Media - New York Times

This is a fun review, and I’ve always been curious about this project. 

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Tags: XOlaptop, youth

LA Times on Disney & VWs

Now, Disney is spinning its tales in the newest mass medium — online virtual worlds, where children adopt cartoonish avatars and play games.Disney and other entertainment companies are rushing to capitalize on the latest Internet phenomenon: the rise of virtual worlds for kids. Online haunts for grown-ups, such as Second Life, grab the attention of corporate marketers. But digital playgrounds for the juice-box set — such as Disney’s Club Penguin and Ganz Inc.’s Webkinz — are drawing bigger crowds.

Disney adds fantasy lands - Los Angeles Times

This article doesn’t say anything overly new, but instead reinforces the fact (and gladly so) that Virtual world environments (or MMO’s, in Disney’s case), cost a LOT of money to  build AND CONTINUOUSLY MAINTAIN! 

They’re not easy, and they take a lot of people to run. 

Check out the article if you’re interested. 

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Tags: Disney, MMO, MMORPG, virtual world, online community, youth, kids, tweens, technology, web, internet, entertainment, game, gaming, theme parks

BBC’s new community & safe people-less communities?

The BBC is getting ready to launch MyCBBC, an online social network targeted to K6-12, an audience that is not served by competing sites all of which require members to be older, this April 2008. The BBC, a publicly funded broadcast service, is being disparaged for this move, according to This Is London, with critics saying that commercial online outlets are already providing like services and that the public broadcaster should focus on programming. The BBC says MyCBBC will be a safe site for kids, with full protection against predators, and users will not be able to make contact with strangers.

Cynthia Turner’s Cynopsis - Cyn Kids 1/25/08

This should be interesting. Are they using notable consultant help? (Yes, they are! Yay!) Hope so– because users who cannot chat with other users (because technically, they’re all strangers) kinda defeats the whole concept behind COMMUNITY, yeah?

That’s something I’m noticing about this trend of “we’ve got a community too! and it’s safe!”… and that trend is “taking the community out all together.” Strictly IRL friends is great– but to be honest, most of the cyberbullying comes from kids who know each other offline.

There’s this great new artsy community called Kerpoof. (Thanks for the spot, Anastasia!) I like the aesthetics, the concept, the usability, etc… but the community? Not really there. You have to know each other to form some sort of community. Nicey nice, sure, but again– cyberbullying usually comes from a kids’ reality. School chums gone bad, friendship circle power struggles, friends of friends, etc.

So, although I’m ALL ABOUT SAFETY, and think its nice for friends to be able to create & play with STRICTLY their IRL budz, I also think it’s important for SAFE social outreach… letting kids interact from any which direction under the guidance of a rock star staff. Sometimes even kids need escapism from their everyday.

UPDATE: Thanks to Catherine for clarifying what CBBC is doing (see the comments).  As she points out– it’s NOT a social networking service in the sense of an overall online community, but a personalization tool that allows for small groups of IRL friends to interact.   I look forward to seeing how it enhances the overall experience.

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Tags: kids, virtual worlds, friends, communities, peer groups, chat, youth, BBC

Passing this tidbit along: Ty Inc

Andy asks Ty, Inc., makers of the Beanie Babies line whether they are “evil, selfish, or stupid?” I’m wondering if it’s not all three.

CHICAGO (AP) — A popular toy maker is refusing to pull a lead-tainted doll from store shelves across Illinois, challenging a state law governing lead content in toys, the state says.

Community Guy - Jake McKee » Bad PR vs. Legal Compliance

Oh no they di’ ‘int!

Head over to Jake McKee’s site and read some more about this.

Naturally, being FROM Illinois myself (lay off the ’s’ sound my out-of-state darlings), I was mighty proud of the fact we have such high safety-expectations from our toys. Nice.

As for Ty Inc… interesting events. Interesting events indeed. At least the toys are down now… kinda odd that they’re still sticking to their “yeah, well we think its safe” guns when they’re fighting a gov department & bad press. (:|) <my not-so-amused face.

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Tags: TyInc, toys, kids, lead, illinois