Thinking about the Family: Wizard 101 Subscriptions

KingsIsle Entertainment announced a family subscription plan today for its virtual world, Wizard101. While normally users pay $9.95/month for premium content in the free-to-play world, now families can create accounts for $6.95/month each charged to the same credit card. The goal according to the company is to make it easier for siblings to play together [...]

Play is important to learning!

The Importance of Play and its Relationship to Learning
The next speaker who I thought did a fantastic job of providing an overview on the importance of play and the learning opportunities that come from play was Nancy Schulman, the director of the 92nd Street Y Nursery School in New York City (link to [...]

Passing this along: Marketing & Children, some reading

On Mondays I feel like I have all the time in the world to read — not skim — anything and everything.
Even long, complicated articles.
You too? Here’s some recommended reading:
At Sea in a Marketing-Saturated World: The Eleventh Annual Report on Schoolhouse Commercialism Trends: 2007-2008. From the Commercialism in Education Research Unit at Arizona State University. [...]

Monday Morning Chuckle: Sing to Me Walt Disney!

Following a meeting of New York City Opera’s Board of Directors, Gerard Mortier, General Manager Designate today announced that City Opera is commissioning Philip Glass to compose a new opera, The Perfect American which imaginatively explores the life and career of Walt Disney. Based on the recent novel Der König von Amerika (translated into English [...]

Bloggers Issue: Rights vs Rights

Bloggers are getting more attention from lawyers, these days. They’re “starting to receive legal letters when they upset someone with enough money to hire a media lawyer,” the Financial Times reports, and “defamation, offensive messages, incitement, compromising intellectual property, linking to illegal websites, and inaccurate reporting can all get you into hot water, regardless of [...]

The Trouble with Forums

Forgive me, folks, if you’re HUGE forum-adorers. I have loved forums in the past (nothing could beat the irreverent, rude yet hilarious folks at the brokenlizard.com forum in early to mid ’00s), and there are some forums that do a solid job for teens (the-leaky-cauldron.org and mugglenet in particular).
But, if you’re building a virtual [...]

Interactive Play, Metaverse Mods Squad, and Minyanland

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
September 22, 2008
MinyanLand to Kick Off Month-Long Halloween Social Fun Finance Clues and Chat-Enabled Moderators To Help Critters Hunt for Virtual Collectibles at “Halloween in MinyanLand”
• NEW YORK – MinyanLand, a virtual community that teaches kids and their families the basics of money and finance, has announced a month-long “Halloween in MinyanLand” social [...]

Spore and More

While I haven’t seen much in the way of marketing aiming Spore specifically at the child gamer demographic, its makers (including Wright himself) have described the game as purposefully inclusive in terms of the design and difficulty level of gameplay – they wanted to appeal to that larger Wii audience, to appeal to casual gamers, [...]

Community Games and Civic Calling

Breaking news: Teens play video games. A lot.
But it might not always be so bad for them.
That’s one conclusion of a new report examining teens’ gaming habits, socializing, and civic engagement.
While the study found that 99 percent of teenage boys and 94 percent of teenage girls play video games, it didn’t find that those who [...]

WoW, that’s kiddy citizenship?

What’s this? An article on a mainstream news site proclaiming that gaming will not turn our children into mini Charles Mansons? It’s true! According to a story published at MSNBC, the Pew Internet & American Life Project is discovering that online games are positively affecting our children’s civic experiences. The research doesn’t simply track how [...]