[The following is an article I wrote for the September 2011 issue of Children’s Technology Review. If you’re interested in the new 360KID Q2 2011 virtual world report, you can purchase the full report, which includes an expanded Wizard101 interview, by emailing me at scott (at) 360KID (dot) com with “Virtual World Research Report” in the Subject line. The next quarterly report will be completed in late October, 2011.]

Being the number one virtual world for kids is no small thing, especially in these days of Disney, Nick and Cartoon Network. But what’s interesting about Wizard101 is that 60% of visitors are playing with another member of their family (at least, according to a recent Trinity University study). What’s are they doing right?

To find out, CTR correspondent Scott Traylor interviewed head wizards at KingsIsle: Josef Hall and Todd Coleman, on a quest for their magic formula. Note that portions of this interview have been condensed, and this interview is part of a larger report that is sold separately.

Where did the Wizard101 idea come from?

Josef Hall: We started talking about it seven years ago. I have three kids, they were young then, and I wanted them to have a safe and high-quality online game. Todd and I thought the children’s space really seemed underserved. We wanted to make something that was triple-A, super high-quality. Something we could feel comfortable with our kids and other kids playing.

Todd Coleman: Josef and I were founders of another game company that made hardcore fantasy games with violence and mature themes. We were interested in going in a different direction, a more lighthearted approach to gaming through storytelling.

So the founders of KingsIsle brought you on and charged you with developing a virtual world product for them?

Todd: The story goes back earlier than that. Elie Akilian, our CEO and primary investor had an idea to create a new kind of game company. He talked to a dozen or more game companies to find a partner. At the same time he was searching for a partner, Josef and I were out talking to big publishing houses about a new kind of game we wanted to create. What’s funny about both sides of that story, neither of us were finding traction. Elie found that game companies were mostly interested in making shooters or army games or post-apocalyptic games, hardcore games for hardcode players. When Josef and I were talking to studios, those were the same types of games they wanted to fund. We stumbled into Elie who looked at us, having come out of the hardcore game space, now pitching a wizard game for the family, and it became apparent we should join forces.

From the beginning the idea was to create a family-based wizarding world, even before KingsIsle was formed?

Todd: Yes, in fact if you go back and read the high concept document that Josef and I put together, it’s amazing how much of that original vision is exactly the same as what we created.

How long were you in development?

Josef: About two and a half years before we went into alpha with friends and family.

Todd: And another eight weeks before we went live.

Did the masses come right away?

Todd: It took time. It was about six months of steady growth, but we hadn’t yet hit the tipping point. That was in December 2008 when it started to pick up steam.

Josef: We did some national television advertising, then things really took off. We started growing quickly around that time, and we knew we had something special.

How has Wizard101 changed since you launched?

Josef: The game has stayed true to what it was when we launched, but we’ve added a lot of things, like a housing system and gardening. Everything has kind of the wizard slant. The gardening’s not a normal gardening system. You grow funny plants that have a lot of character and personality, like Couch Potatoes which are little spuds sitting on couches watching TV and talking to each other. It’s all very tongue-in-cheek. We’ve added a pet system where you can own pets and grow them through different in-game mini games. We’ve also added a lot of new worlds, some are pretty big departures from the existing world, like Celestia, which is underwater.

[CTR Editor’s note: Most of these are premium features, available only with a code that costs up to $39. That’s the magic of Wizard101’s business model.]

Have you learned anything surprising about your audience?

Todd: It’s a wider age spectrum than we expected. We started hearing grandparents were getting into the game, using it as a way to stay connected to their grandchildren. This was really surprising and just really cool to us. It’s something you can’t predict going in. You sit down, make the best game you can, and what you don’t really have control over is player behaviors. Players come into this empty world you crafted. They bring their own hopes and expectations and experiences and relationships. Then the world starts to take on a life of its own. It’s an amazing thing to watch.

How has the business of virtual worlds changed in the last few years?

Todd: Back when we started Wizard, the biggest game at the time was EverQuest, having amassed 400 thousand people. The prevailing thought in the industry at the time was any new virtual worlds to come out would simply carve up the same base of 400 thousand players. Then World of Warcraft launched and started racking up millions upon millions of players. All of a sudden people realized there was a new market. After that, the free-to-play model started in Asia. When it first came to the US, people thought that model would never fly, and of course that was not the case. Today you’re seeing these very casual games pop up on Facebook, and people who never considered themselves gamers, hundreds of millions of people, are now playing on a daily basis. Using those games as a way to connect with their friends.

What was your single biggest moment in the Wizard101 history?

Josef: One that jumps to mind was early on in development I came home and all the computers were taken over by my wife and kids. They were so deep into the game nobody noticed I came in the door. They were laughing and talking to each other, running around in the game. I knew at that moment we had built something that was a lot of fun for my family and would be fun for other families too. It was a wonderful moment.

Todd: My biggest moment was during development. I remember we had our first milestone, an internal test. We had created the art pieces and had engineering working on the code and a design group working on the players and the characters and pulling it all together. We fired it up, and Josef and I were able to jump in for the first time and play. It was that vision we had, taken from a “Wouldn’t it be cool?” conversation to actually seeing it on the screen. It was buggy, the sound wasn’t working, the cinematics were too long, the cameras weren’t working, but looking past all those warts and seeing it, at that moment I knew it was going to work. Josef and I were like, “Okay, we’ve got something here.” I think it was two in the morning. But that moment, you turn that corner and know you’ve gone from an idea to an actual game. Nothing beats that.

(Photo and images © KingsIsle Entertainment)

[The following is an article I wrote for the July 2011 issue of Children’s Technology Review. If you’re interested in learning more about my recent virtual world research, you can purchase an expanded report by emailing me at scott (at) 360KID (dot) com with “Virtual World Research Report” in the Subject line. My next quarterly report will be completed on July 20, 2011]

It’s been amazing to watch the virtual world (VW) space grow by leaps and bounds over such a short time. Using unique user traffic as a yardstick, the virtual world and massively multiplayer online (MMO) space increased more than 50% last year. Compare that with 15% for the prior year (in the US). The first thing to note is that traffic patterns seem to follow a seasonal rise and fall. Traffic increases from spring to early summer only to drop significantly when school starts in September. Then, as the holiday season approaches, it peaks before dropping off again in the new year.

WHAT’S HOT? The most popular destinations for both kids and adults are “casual gaming” destinations. For kids and tweens, that means Wizard 101, Poptropica, Club Penguin and Moshi Monsters (which was just valued at $200 million). While social and chat-based destinations like IMVU and Hi5 fall in second place for the young adult and older crowd, destinations that have a toy tie-in or real world connection, like Webkinz and Build-A-Bearville hold second place for kids and tweens. However, this VW/MMO type has been on a slow two-year decline, largely as a result of Webkinz loosing significant marketshare over that period, to newcomers like Wizard 101 and Poptropica. While Club Penguin has dropped in placement on the best top 10 list for kids, it has done a surprisingly good job of maintaining marketshare, loosing only a small percentage compared to Webkinz.

Two destinations have really taken off. Minecraft, a “better than LEGO Universe” online building (or “crafting”) world that appeals to both boys and girls is growing at an amazing rate globally. The funny thing about Minecraft is that it is still in public Beta! It’s not even a fully released product yet. (Note to execs, learn from this product’s creative expression thinking AND business model!) If you are not yet familiar with this low res, yesteryear looking world, tonight’s homework is to get familiar with it, NOW. Educators should note that teachers are beginning to create lesson plans around Minecraft’s in-world building activities. The second destination of note is Nickelodeon’s latest virtual world offering, Monkey Quest. This new 3D world is also growing quickly since its launch earlier this year and you can’t miss the advertising on Nickelodeon cable channels throughout the day. It’s a world that spent more than a couple of years in development and the polish shows now that it’s ready for prime time.

As we head into the summer months, the kids VW/MMO industry typically assumes that as the dog days of summer drag on, kids will become bored and start to gravitate to virtual world activities from the indoor comfort of an air conditioned room. If you watch any amount of children’s commercial television during the summer you can’t help notice the number of virtual world advertisements. However, while it is unclear if subscription rates actually rise during the summer months, unique traffic to kids VW/MMOs actually falls through July and August, especially in the casual gaming sector and in the toy and web connect space, an interesting trend that goes against popular belief.

What about education-based destinations? You might imagine these kind of sites have some appeal with younger audiences and kids, right? While the casual gaming space has captured almost 34% of all VW/MMO traffic, educational destinations hold less than 6% for all ages, and only 4.4% of all traffic for the top 20 kid and tween educational destinations. Out of this list, a majority share of traffic goes to Knowledge Adventure’s JumpStart and their new and fast growing world Math Blaster. Almost all other destinations show small numbers in comparison.

As I look back on the virtual world and MMO data I have collected over the past five years one thing is certain; expect to see many more virtual worlds launching in the months and years ahead. I remember a few years ago hearing one day there will be over 300 virtual worlds globally. I remember thinking “that’s impossible, we will never have that many.” Well, that day has recently come and gone. I continue to add another ten destinations to my list every month. Adding more new worlds to the existing list of players will create challenges for everyone in this field, pushing all players to continually improve, build out, and try to hold onto market share. Ultimately it will be the children and their parents that will benefit. Each new world that launches raises the bar for quality, engagement, innovation and ultimately, access. That’s the good for kids, but it presents an ongoing challenge for publishers who choose to play in the virtual space.

[The following is a piece I wrote for the Joan Ganz Cooney Center‘s 2011 Leadership Forum, Learning from Hollywood, a cross-industry event that will explore new ways of bridging the perceived gap between entertainment and education. The event will be held in Los Angeles at the USC School of Cinematic Arts on May 16 & 17. ]

If you were challenged to define what math is, what would you say? How about science? What makes the two different, or maybe even the same? I started exploring the idea of what makes up these educational disciplines as a result of hearing the term STEM more and more in the news. STEM is a short-handed way of referring to science, technology, engineering and mathematics, but is this term simply a collection of separate items, or could there be something larger at play here because of the overlaps between these disciplines? Is there greater benefit to the whole than simply its parts and could this concept be applied to other similar examples outside of education as well?

While noodling with the idea of categories and boundaries, I remembered a discussion I had with Vinton Cerf from Google many months ago. Vint is frequently cited as “the father of the Internet” a title he will quickly point out involves the contributions of many of his fellow colleagues, and not just those of his own.

During our meeting we talked about how Google looks at the world of content. Vint shared with me the following:

“In the academic world it has become traditional to speak of disciplines, and that’s an organizational artifact; geology, history, English, physics, chemistry, medicine, and so on. Yet when we dive down deep we discover this is all a continuum. These things are not really broken up with such hard walls and barriers between them. Understanding that those disciplines are actually related to each other in a very intimate way is an important thing. I want to be careful about the idea of organizing information into categories. That can be helpful abstraction but it’s dangerous if you actually believe these things are segregated from each other.”

Upon reflecting on Vint’s words, I immediately thought of a quote by the great media thinker Marshall McLuhan, who famously said:

“Anyone who makes a distinction between entertainment and education doesn’t know the first thing about either.”

Connecting the dots between the two statements came over me like a tidal wave. Could we as media creators, educators, researchers, whatever the industry, be carrying with us artificial boundaries that prevent us from making real breakthroughs in our field? If we look for new ways to engage audiences through media creation wouldn’t it be in defining new boundaries that reshapes society’s thinking about these boundaries?

Simply being aware that we have the ability to redefine those boundaries may actually be the first step in creating something larger, something that is truly breakthrough. How would you define the boundaries between education and entertainment? Or should we instead define the overlaps, or maybe even define how we wish those boundaries to be drawn? The overlaps appear to change and grow with every advance in technology. Their sum is greater than the parts. To separate the two diminishes our ability as creators to discover new opportunities and reach audiences in ways never before dreamed possible.

Ever wonder what you can do with those 3D glasses after you go to see one of the latest 3D movies? Yes, you can recycle the glasses, but what if you wanted to do something creative with them? Well, here you go, make your own Kermit the Frog glasses!

I’ve had the idea to create froggy spectacles for a couple of years now. Whenever I have a creative idea, I try to capture it in my “Idea Book.” The idea behind an Idea Book is to try to jot down some unique idea, at least one a day, in your idea book. I’ve been keeping an idea book for a long time, and I encourage others, especially young children, to keep an idea book too. If a child can’t write yet, suggest that they draw out an idea, and then you as the parent/caregiver ask about their idea, then jot a few lines of text and a date underneath the sketched idea. Going on a long family trip? Bring along your idea book! Kids want to play another 15 minutes of video games? Okay, after you have come up with three new ideas to put in your idea book. It’s a lot of fun to look back on ideas you have sketched out. Sometime, long after you have captured your idea, you might realize you have the materials laying around to make your idea a reality!

To get started with your own glasses, click here to download a PDF template I made with a few different designs. I’ve added stars, hearts and dollar signs. After you print out the page, use a pair of scissors to cut carefully along the inside of the thick gray line. If you’re really good, you can also try cutting out the inside shape using a sharp X-Acto knife, which will allow you to see through your glasses after you have applied the paper cut outs on top of the frames. I’ve found you can just slip the paper cutouts under the plastic rim to hold them in place. If you want the paper to stay in place more permanently, use a glue stick or rubber cement.

Enjoy making your own glasses, and take lots of photos to remember the fun! You can even paste a photo of your completed creations into your very own idea book to show others you can made your ideas come true!

[This post first appeared on the Joan Ganz Cooney Center website, where I was invited to be a guest blogger for the day.]

Last week I attended Back to School – Learning and Growing in a Digital Age, an event which explored federal policy, e-learning, and digital literacy, sponsored by Common Sense Media, PBS Kids, USC Annenberg’s Center on Communication Leadership & Policy, and The Children’s Partnership. The session that impacted me most was Empowering Parents and Kids with Technology. What was fascinating about the speakers on this panel was that collectively they described the evolution of Internet and its perceived challenges facing parents and kids over the last ten years, from a social perspective.

In the early online days, parents’ concerns about the Internet were largely about preventing children from stumbling upon inappropriate content online. As time passed, the concern shifted towards one of a fear of online predators. Today, the focus of concern is more about a child’s privacy, cyberbullying, and what constitutes appropriate behavior online. If you think about it, our social perceptions of the Internet and how kids will experience positive as well as negative aspects of the online world have changed a lot in a very short time. The changes we see looking back, and the changes we have yet to realize, still point to the amazing potential the Internet offers our children. Here are a few noteworthy comments from the panel that capture this change:

Mandeep Dhillon, CEO & Co-Founder, Togetherville

“There are many sociological changes occurring … If you look at the last couple of years, computing has become more social. We’re just now starting to see the first generation of tech-savvy parents know more about technology than their kids. In the past it was common for a parent to turn to their kid for help with technology. That’s no longer true. Now parents can actually say something meaningful about the technology their kids use. As a result, this is changing attitudes about how kids should be engaging with technology.”

Marian Merritt, Internet Safety Advocate, Symantec

“It’s been remarkable, over the last several years, seeing the dialog shift from fear and panic and a real lack of understanding on the parent’s part to discussions like this where we’ve moved the conversation to one that’s more realistic. However, I still think our parent community is lacking a bit, still focusing on mythology rather than the real world of their children. This gap prevents our children from being honest about what they are experiencing in the digital world, be it cyberbullying, be it downloading inappropriate content, running into things they don’t understand on the Internet. I think there’s some old fashioned issues we still need to contend with. Parents have been educated to protect their children from the Internet by placing the home computer in a central location. That was great information for a generation ago. Today, as our children increasingly have full access to the Internet on a device that fits in their pocket, these rules need to be adapted for a changing environment.”

Catherine Titlebaum, Director of Child Safety and Product Policy, Yahoo!

“I’ve been watching online behavior for more than a decade now, In the past the conversation ws all about what kids consume, what they search for, and what they find. Over the years, as kids become increasingly more social online, we’ve had concerns about who they might connect with and speak with, and now it’s really about how are your children behave online. How are they living in these digital spaces as opposed to their real spaces? The challenge for parents to recognize is that this extension to digital life is real. It’s a real extension to real friendships, real learning, and there’s real interaction back and forth between these two spaces.”

During the opening remarks of this event, FCC Chairman Julius Genachowski spoke to the challenges all parents and children face:

“It’s striking how much technology is part of kids’ lives today. Children are using multiple devices to consume 11 hours of content a day. They send a text message an average of once every 10 minutes they’re awake. There’s a lot to be concerned about here, and I don’t know a parent who isn’t. We need to find common-sense strategies to mitigate the risks of the new technologies, including the safety and the privacy of children online. We need to establish new norms for families; new strategies for the home and for when kids are on the move. Technology can and must be a key part of the solution to the problems technology creates. Real solutions that address real and growing needs that honor the First Amendment. Because here’s the truth: We can’t slow technology, and we shouldn’t try.”

Though the Internet is not a perfect place, Genachowski went on to describe the benefits that are almost within our reach:

“I believe that the opportunities of new communications technologies for our kids far exceed the risks. Indeed, I think it’s mandatory in the digital age – in our global digital economy – that we seize the opportunities of technology for our children; that we ensure universal access and digital literacy for all our kids; that we ensure that all our children, no matter the town or the school district they’re from, have the tools they need to be full participants in our digital economy and 21st century democracy.”

This vision took a huge step forward last week as the FCC voted to modernize the current E-Rate program, a mandate which was originally established by Congress years ago to bring the Internet to all schools and libraries in the US. This update will now guarantee these same institutions the very best and fastest broadband access to pave the way for innovative high-tech tools that are essential for a world-class education.

As we begin to see the National Broadband Plan advance this country’s digital infrastructure, the changes in social perceptions mentioned above only help propel this promise, complete with all of its widening educational possibilities. What an exciting time to be involved in the digital universe on behalf of children (and everyone one else too!) Yes, very real concerns will continue to exist in this digital future, perpetuated by media outlets looking to capitalize on shocking headlines, but it’s truly amazing how our collective intelligence about the Internet is changing from one of fear and reservation, to one of infinite possibilities.