Anyone else see that the BBC are planning to launch a Second Life for kids? CBBC world is intended to be a safe, secure world where 7-12 year olds can create avatars, interact with familiar characters and ‘have an opportunity to make that world a more fascinating place with their own imaginations.’ With safety and public service remit in mind, there are to be no chatrooms, commercial third party input or facilities for building new parts of the virtual world, though they will be able to create and share content.
The BBC have the investment and the intellectual property to make this very big. My 4 year old loves the CBeebies website. The reason she loves it is because it has characters on it she recognises, and you can play simple games on it. God forbid they ever do a CBeebies world – I’m not sure who I’d be more worried about her meeting – a young hoodie with an ASBO or PC Plum from Balamory…
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