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"Web playgrounds for the very young"

"Forget Second Life. The real virtual world gold rush centers on the grammar-school set. Trying to duplicate the success of blockbuster websites like Club Penguin and Webkinz, children’s entertainment companies are greatly accelerating efforts to build virtual worlds for children. “Get ready for total inundation,” said Debra Aho Williamson, an analyst at the research firm eMarketer, who estimates that 20 million children will be members of a virtual world by 2011, up from 8.2 million today...."  NYT Dec 31, 2007 Retrieved 17 Jan 2008 from http://www.nytimes.com/2007/12/31/business/31virtual.html   [hardcopy kept]

• SimCity Societies - build and manage green societies to combat global warming; for PC ($44).
• Chibi-Robo: Park Patrol - water flowers, clean up trash, and help creatures in need; for Nintendo DS ($30).
• NoteNiks: Respect Our Earth - eight games for kids under 10 that challenge them to protect endangered species, save energy, and recycle; for Mac and PC ($20).
• Adventure Ecology - free, online game for kids, where they take on climate change, deforestation, and other eco-problems.
• FreeRice - free, online vocab game that donates 20 grains of real rice to the UN World Food Program for each word you get right.

"The average age of the gamer is 33 and rising, and an estimated 80% of the population under age 34 has played a video game" Beth Gallaway,

http://www.cnn.com/2004/TECH/fun.games/02/11/video.games.women.reut/ ... AOL study 2004 women over 40 play 50% more online game than males, more likely to play daily than teens. (midnight-5am, word/puzzle). Gamers more likely to form real life relationships than national average.

In the US: National Game and Puzzle Week Nov 18-24, 2007

Carnegie Mellon PhD candidate doing a study about matching guilds and players:

http://www.surveymonkey.com/s.aspx?sm=62cSjehAtSWatxljVRKOZw_3d_3d

About the disconnect between games researchers and game creation professionals -- omg! Definitely a must-follow-up.

http://gamasutra.com/features/20061110/hopson_01.shtml

"...ensuring that your work is relevant to industry game developers: Ask them.

Ask them before you do the work. If you’re doing a giant longitudinal survey of players in a particular MMO, contact someone at the company ahead of time and talk to him or her about your study. Start by contacting the game’s community rep and explaining your project, they should be able to forward you to the right person within the company. They may be able to provide you with internal data or to suggest lines of inquiry which might not have occurred to you."

John Hopson

Web 2.0   ...   what drives their appeal? Online environments albeit not virtual with avatars

• YouTube
• Flickr
• MySpace
• Blogs
• 49 Things
• other shared or collaborative social/virtual presence loci

Games

• World of Warcraft
  • some 65% of the marketshare
  • 9 million players worldwide as of Aug07 (2mil in US)
• Guild Wars
• City of Heroes/Villains
• Runescape
  • hard to be social
  • simplistic
  • starter drug=free
• Second Life
  • big thrill: buying hair
  • by not seeming like a game, is it more appealing to the non-gamer?
  • Q: does the concept of "games" have a bad rep ie "games are only for kids or fat boys living in their mother's basement til they're 40"?
  • see note in Daniel Carver about SL = toy.
• Sims Online
  • endless angst, SL for gaming mindset?
  • may need to explore -- like WoW has more directives but roleplaying is enhanced?
• LotR Online
  • reportedly WoW with diff skins
• Star Wars Galaxies
  • widely viewed as nerfed
• Warhammer 40K
  • not released, much anticipation
  • tested in beta by longtime WH player and UO player -- called "not ready for prime time"
• Everquest
  • was big dog until WoW came along; where is it now?
  • Edward Castronova extensive writing. Relevancy across game platforms?
• Ultima Online
  • was big dog until EQ came along; is it anywhere now?

"Asheron's Call, Dark Age of Camelot, Everquest, Everquest II, Final Fantasy XI, Guild Wars, Lord of the Rings Online, Shadowbane, Star Wars Galaxies and Ultima Online." (from discussion of online games at http://www.rupture.com/static/faq)

All the games have a complete "world" around them -- not just a setting (ie Doom) that happens to be the place you're running around doing whatever it is you're there to do. FPS games "stop" when you log; these (arguably) give the impression the world continues even if you aren't there. (My interpret. Others...?) (in fact, the term exists in the literaure: "a persistent world" that exists regardless of whether you are there to observe it or not. Castronova notes that this creates an artistic "reality" that goes beyond it existing as "just a game.")

Loosely related to the above, a quote from "Got Game":

p. 63-64

"Another thing gamers seem to love - ... - is experience designed to absorb all of the player's attention. When something that doesn't require much attention is replaced by something that is attention-intensive, it feels like time moves faster. The game generation has grown up with thousands of opportunities to opt for attention-intensity. ... Escaping with a silly handheld game, you feel free - not because you spend any less time in some customer service line, but because you have something else to occupy your mind while you're there.

"Part of attention management is somehow quieting the chatter, internal and external, so that we can actually think. ... these games provide an escape from clutter and deadlines and complicated thought patterns, so that the mind can return to a place that is clear, brisk, invigorating - even, in the end, deeply productive."

Note HW's observation re experience with (Tetris?) as a first-time gamer; this was actually more frightening than otherwise. "Lost" hours of her life, unaware of what was going on around her which was, by her own description, nothing, with family out of town.

CNN.com article 21 Aug 2007 -- tangentially related? Reports on falling off of readership in American public, stats.

http://www.cnn.com/2007/LIVING/wayoflife/08/21/reading.ap/index.html (hardcopy on file if link goes to archives)

       One quote: "If I'm going to get a story, I'll get a movie." NEA study (2004) "faulted" (CNN's term, sic) television, movies and the Internet.

Comment observed in-game 10/9/07 Kilrogg server Allianceside: that guilds persist across game platforms.  One player observed his guild had played together 7 years though Kilrogg (legacy server, one of first 40 servers on launchdate of WoW) has only been around 2.5 years. They had played Battlenet and other games before moving to WoW.