Most of the virtual worlds for kids are tightly controlled, with restrictions on user-generated content - as you'd expect, given the age of their target audience. However, Shidonni is a new service that takes a different tack - letting kids create their own virtual worlds, create animals for them, and then share them with friends.
It uses Microsoft’s Silverlight technology, is aimed at 4-12 year-olds, and is the work of a company also called Shidonni. It sounds like a treat for creative kids: they start by drawing a creature, then drawing its environment (for example, mountains, the sun, sky). The idea is that it’s as easy to use as the easiest painting / photo-editing applications.
Tamagotchi elements come in when users create babies for their animals and then look after them. This is where the sharing comes in too: children can send their animals to the worlds of friends to visit, while also using them in various mini-games. Shidonni is due to launch commercially this Autumn, and CEO Ido Mazursky explains how the company is looking to win parental approval:
“Most of the games that are out there today are very violent. We want to create a world that is based on several principles. The first is creativity. Today children play mostly copy/paste games, or adaptations of existing things they see. We want kids to create for themselves. Because we believe that if the world doesn’t continue to develop products that teach children to create, we will become stagnant - people will stop creating, and we want to stimulate this.”
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