"Nuturing Maker Culture for Young Girls: privacy, safety and MMOs for girls"
panel title: Maker Children: DIY culture and perspectives on social technologies
Alexandra Bal, Alison Gaston, Jason Nolan, Kate Raynes-Goldie and Yukari Seko
DIY Citizenship, Toronto, Canada. November 12-14, 2010
video: http://hosting.epresence.tv/MUNK/1/watch/199.aspx
11. Barbie Girls (Mattel)
Freemium, but giant Barbie ad
Only female avatars
Shopping, fashion, boys
No explicit age limits, but aimed at tweens and
early teens
12.
13.
14.
15.
16.
17. “By submitting or sending Your Submissions to Mattel, you grant Mattel a non-
exclusive, royalty-free, worldwide, perpetual, irrevocable, and fully transferable,
assignable and sublicensable right and license to copy, reproduce, distribute,
publish, transmit, modify, adapt, translate, display, distribute, sell, license,
publicly perform, prepare derivative works based upon, and otherwise use or
exploit Your Submissions throughout the world in any and all media. You
represent and warrant that: (a) you have the right and authorization to make the
foregoing grant without the consent of any third party, and (b) Your Submissions
are accurate and, as permitted to be used by Mattel in this User Agreement, do
not and will not infringe any right of any third party.”
18. Webkinz (Ganz)
Must by toy for 1 year access
Strongest focus on virtual goods
Minigames
Pet can be different gender than child
19.
20. “...Ganz shall exclusively own all known or hereafter
existing rights to the User Content of every kind and
nature throughout the world, and shall be entitled to
unrestricted use of the User Content for any purpose
whatsoever, commercial or otherwise, without
compensation to the provider of the user content.”
expanded and evolved since the abstract to cover more examples\n
what are the words we associate with maker culture? now since this is a maker conference, i don’t really need to talk about this too much, but i want to empathize these areas, especially mentoring, autonomy, critical thinking and creation rather than consumption\n
i want to look at MMOs in this context of maker culture\n
but the main reason for their existence and the rationale for their design is preventing stranger danger!\n
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in world currency is coins “Non-members cannot purchase clothes, furniture, wigs, hats, or igloo upgrades and in some games can only play some levels” nag factor, addictive\n
these kind of chat safety levels is standard in most mmos for kids\npull down menus, filters, moderators\n
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From 2005 to May 2010 Club Penguin had “Secret Agents” who were encouraged to snitch on users (not co-monitoring but few monitoring everyone) avatars had to be at least 30 days old and anyone who is banned for any reason is prevented from being a secret agent\n\ndiscourages parents from mentoring rather than outsourced surveillance - the majority of employees of these companies are usually employed to monitor the users activities (in 2007, 70 out of 100 of Club Penguins employees were tasked with monitoring users online activities.\n
Heteronormative\n\n
be nice, or else! invisible monitoring - who is we?\n
earn b bucks as basic, but can’t spend them!\n
i looked like a dork in gym glass\nsomeone made fun of my outfit\nmy crush found out who i feel\n\ndoes anyone remember ‘math is hard, let’s go shopping?’\n
Hip new headband, girl!\nwow, trendy top!\nsassy shorts, luv em!\n
Q: Where did you get that hairstyle? A: It’s from the club beauty makeover game?\n
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only one that isn’t freemium\nKinzcash\nDeluxe membership\n
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designed to be highly addictive\n
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“The type of information we collect and maintain may include your name, mailing address, email address, telephone number, gender, date of birth, purchase history, credit card number, chat room communications, complaints you may have about our products or services, a record of promotions offered to you, your Ganz product preferences, such as favorite pets and themes.”\n\n“Cookies also help us to tailor messages that better match your needs and interests, and they allow us to better understand how users in general use our sites, which in turn helps us to focus our resources on features that are most popular with our users.”\n
expand on last slide\ntalk about research with jason here\nautonomy and privacy needed to build these faculties\n
towards a solution\n
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creativity rather than consumption\n
my dreams, my inspiration\nnot fashion, appearance, boys and buying things\n\n
counterpoint to focus of barbie girls - shows barbie girls is furthers the sense of insecurity\ncomentorship\n
real privacy, information not datamined or resold. kid’s work does not become property of new moon girls\n
doesnt tell kid they’ll be monitored\n
concluding thought - role of parents, why arent they involved. not just problem of mmos, larger social problem. spending time with kids is priviledged\nhelicopter parents as counterpoint\n
