Seems like a serious concern would be protecting the kids in this virtual world, lord knows the other "Kid" playing the game may be a 30-year old creep in his mom's basement. (Of course I worry about this when I play WoW as an adult, lol!)
I'm sure you've thought about this in depth, but my first thought was, that if you could make it a game that a child could play WITH a parent, and both coud enjoy, then that would be something I would buy for my family!
Consider movies... everyone knows the highest grossing movies are the kids movies that ALSO appeal to parents, (Shrek, Bee Movie, Shrek II, Everything Pixar, anything with the word Shrek it in...)
I know it's not exactly a Hacker Startup, but my wife and I have been building www.realphotography.com steadily over the past year
We've tried to leverage the internet and digital media as much as possible: the business has a blog, the vast majority of our promotion is on the internet, we sell the digital files, all proofing is done online. But I'd happily solicit any feedback from the resident hackers as to how we could do this even better.
And I'd like to head off the comments about Flash, yes we're aware of the disadvantages, and you'll see we do off a non-flash site for weddings. ;)
Agreed! The first thing I thought when I saw that phone is, "that's EXACTLY the phone I need!"
I work in a secure facility, where cameras are not allowed. Do you know how hard it is to find a phone w/o a camera in it these days? It's actually a PITA! And that's just silly... :)
I know some folks working in secure facilities who actually drill out the camera lens with a drill press and fill the hole with a drying cement. It's effective, if a bit... draconian.
Though I heard a month or two ago that the regulations for some secure sites have been changed to allow cameras on phones. Several people I know who have not gotten cells are now looking at getting them because they can keep them when at a secure site.
This is all experience with military contractors in St. Louis, so your mileage may vary.
In the 5th grade my teacher had all the students play a "game" where he drew a massive map one wall and we all picked starting locations for our "countries". Our countries grew in population with a random roll of a dice each day. Our civilization's developed by having to write little reports on various inventions. If we could figure out a good way to build an axe or how to make a boat, we worte it up and submitted it for approval. In essence it was a pen & paper style (ala D&D) game of civlization. Us kids benifited because we had to go out and research simple things like, how people actually smelt ore, and how thread is actually made.
So my idea (albeit a poor one) is a civilization-style web-based massively multiplayer video game. Map is randomly generated and number of players per map is limited. There are no pre-existing technologies or units, technologies and units are created by players and must be approved by other players (possibly players from other maps) before entering the game. The idea is the game could be open ended and vastly repeatable. The open ended nature of the game would allow for a lot of exploitation, so conquest would be minimized as a practical course of action. I imagine the focus being on economics and diplomacy.
That's pretty vague and not well thought out, but for some reason I found myself pondering it recently. Since the involvement by the developer could be minimized, by placing game management on players, the game could be free and monetized by ad revenue.
The page doesn't factor in Splits.
Entry Price: 52.00 (Mar. 8, 2000), Exit Price: 48.88 (Apr. 5, 2000)
Comes out to a 6% loss, but there was a SPLIT on the 21st! I should be up nearly 100%.
I'm not one to tell anyone how to raise their children (see arguements below about spanking, yikes). This is just my experience... take it or leave it YMMV. My son is only two, and we find that if we let him watch too much TV his behavior takes a dive... more tantrums, less respect/listening to me and mom. As an experiment, we unplugged the TV for several days and the results were immediate and dramatic. Since then, we try to limit his TV time even more so than before. The danger is that he enjoys it, and us parents enjoy the opportunity to take care of other projects around the house without interruption. So if we find the family slipping into TV reliance, we pull the plug for a couple days. Sometimes he's upset at first when he realizes it doesn't work, but he's over it in SECONDS and moves on to something else. I'm not going to bother guessing why this is the case, but our experience is very clear to us.
My personal philosophy is all things in moderation. So if it makes him happy to watch the Wiggles or some old-school Fraggle Rock on DVD, he gets to. But it's the responsiblity of me and mom to keep it reasonable and keep the house a happy place for everyone.
Wow, I should read my threads more often. Keep it up! Care to share any updates? More or less TV now? As for us, now, I don't think anyone bothers to open the giant wood box in the living room now unless company's over. I'm thinking about putting a planter in there.
My philosophy is more like "all things thoughtfully". We should care about why TV seems to cause various effects, and what effects unplugging it may have.
For example, suppose a child wants to read a good book, you take it away, and he "gets over it in seconds". Does that mean all is right with the world? No. Whether or not he remains upset about the book, he's still missing out on a wonderful book that could have benefitted him.
One also ought to think about how to correct errors. For example, pulling the plug on the TV avoids any input from someone who might know something you don't (like, your child might know more about how important it is to him to see a particular show). Wouldn't it be better to reach an agreement? The more right you are, the easier that will be, won't it? But if you have made a mistake one time, then getting others to agree will be harder, so you get an opportunity to avoid that error.
I think I agree with you on most counts. Although I'm a little confused by your proposal about the importance of reaching a consensus with the child. Are you refering to older children? As I'm sure you're aware, a child under 2-3 (depending on the child) doesn't have the vocabulary to reach a complex agreement with anyone.
The less a child knows, the easier it is to reach a (simple) agreement. Objecting requires having ideas, not ignorance. I don't think there's usually any reason for a very young child to disagree with his parent frequently since he generally won't have any better ideas than they do. But there are sometimes cases of serious disagreement and it's important not to gloss those over.
The first sentence is an unsubstantiated assumption and, as a parent, I can tell you it's wrong. The less a child knows, the less context they have, so the less room you have to negotiate an agreement. Plus, their knowledge level is intimately tied to their memory span, their language, their capacity to understand their own emotions, and all the things you and I still grapple with, but at least we have more context and language. And even then, if you subscribe to the ideas of George Lakoff, our life experience may be sufficiently divergent that we still can't arrive at an agreement. I think that divergence is what led you to make the original statement, that the less you know the easier it is to reach a simple agreement. It's tempting to follow that one variable, divergence of life experience, back to a singularity, but that neglects the many other variables at play in real life.
In our case, we asked friends and associates who were familiar with our product to provide descriptive keywords. We ran through those until we had a short list of names we liked. Of course most addresses were taken, but we didn't stop there, we made the effort to contact the current owners. Which required a /whois + some creative googling.
We actually found one owner who said he might be willing to sell it, but he didn't have a clue how to transfer it or even price it. We walked him through the process and he even offered it to us at a fraction of the assessed value because he said, "that price was just too much!"
I'm sure you've thought about this in depth, but my first thought was, that if you could make it a game that a child could play WITH a parent, and both coud enjoy, then that would be something I would buy for my family!
Consider movies... everyone knows the highest grossing movies are the kids movies that ALSO appeal to parents, (Shrek, Bee Movie, Shrek II, Everything Pixar, anything with the word Shrek it in...)