Via discussion on RezEd, via The Parents For Ethical Marketing blog (Children’s online virtual worlds create dull mini-capitalists), a link to a new report on virtual worlds for children, and their (ab)use by corporate marketers.
Many online games and virtual worlds violate at least two of PEM’s standards of ethical marketing:
1. They interfere with the parent-child relationship by enticing young children to hand over an email address (and other personal information) without parental permission.
2. They take advantage of a child’s inability to understand that advertisers want their money by making the ads indistinguishable from the game itself.
Then I spotted a link to a recent interview on this in the Grauniad’s Tech Weekly podcast.
