Fun With Polls: shinigumi's Game Creation
My sister, shinigumi, wants to create a WoW-like game for kids. How cool is that? Go here to answer her poll and tell her what you think.
I think the idea is fabulous. I play WoW. shinigumi and her fiance play. dawnshine and her husband play. My nephew, dawnshine's son, is seven, and he wants to play. I can totally understand that, because most of his family plays. We play together quite often, so it's a family event-y sort of thing, and I imagine that in addition to just wanting to play a cool game, he wants to be part of the group. When he is allowed to play and I'm on playing with him, I go into babysitter mode, watching the characters who approach him and making him ask his parents for permission every single time we do something new.
"Aunt trista, will you buy me a dagger?"
"Ask your dad if it's okay for you to have one."
"Let's leave Undercity and explore!"
"Is it okay with your mom?"
There's a lot of violence. There's a lot of truly foul language used. (I swear like a sailor when I get going, and some of the stuff I see on my screen makes me blush. I certainly don't want my seven-year-old nephew reading that!) It's definitely a game more appropriate for teens and adults than for little kids, but I can see the appeal that it has for kids and understand why little kids are drawn to it. It's an entire world that is completely different from their own, where magic is real and people have pet dragons and fly on bat-things. They're drawn to all the same things in the game that I am.
shinigumi wants to create something for them that has all of the elements that makes WoW so exciting and fun and fascinating, while making it more appropriate for their age group and trying to limit the creepy stalker factor as much as possible. I would love to have something like that available for my nephew. Something that would let him interact with a game world that he could lose himself in for a while the way I can with WoW, and would let him play with other kids his age rather than having to hang out online with Aunt trista or Mom or some other adult.
So. Go take shinigumi's poll. Tell her what you think, and give her any suggestions you have. You could contribute to something really cool. You know you want to.
I think the idea is fabulous. I play WoW. shinigumi and her fiance play. dawnshine and her husband play. My nephew, dawnshine's son, is seven, and he wants to play. I can totally understand that, because most of his family plays. We play together quite often, so it's a family event-y sort of thing, and I imagine that in addition to just wanting to play a cool game, he wants to be part of the group. When he is allowed to play and I'm on playing with him, I go into babysitter mode, watching the characters who approach him and making him ask his parents for permission every single time we do something new.
"Aunt trista, will you buy me a dagger?"
"Ask your dad if it's okay for you to have one."
"Let's leave Undercity and explore!"
"Is it okay with your mom?"
There's a lot of violence. There's a lot of truly foul language used. (I swear like a sailor when I get going, and some of the stuff I see on my screen makes me blush. I certainly don't want my seven-year-old nephew reading that!) It's definitely a game more appropriate for teens and adults than for little kids, but I can see the appeal that it has for kids and understand why little kids are drawn to it. It's an entire world that is completely different from their own, where magic is real and people have pet dragons and fly on bat-things. They're drawn to all the same things in the game that I am.
shinigumi wants to create something for them that has all of the elements that makes WoW so exciting and fun and fascinating, while making it more appropriate for their age group and trying to limit the creepy stalker factor as much as possible. I would love to have something like that available for my nephew. Something that would let him interact with a game world that he could lose himself in for a while the way I can with WoW, and would let him play with other kids his age rather than having to hang out online with Aunt trista or Mom or some other adult.
So. Go take shinigumi's poll. Tell her what you think, and give her any suggestions you have. You could contribute to something really cool. You know you want to.