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I don't know how old your kids are, but you may want to give Disney's ToonTown a try. Asshattery is absolutely verboten there. Although it's kind of a "kiddie" game, you can have quite a bit of clean fun and foolishness with cartoon avatars.

Tell her to check out Toontown Online available NOW.

Use an IE browser, for now.

1. Many problems are well-understood and well-implemented. If you find yourself spending much of your programming energy re-inventing the wheel, you are wasting your time and your employer's money. HINT: Memory management is a terribly well-understood problem, as is capturing keyboard and mouse input, as is reading and writing a file or network socket.
2. High level languages let you get to the trouble-spots of a design more quickly so that you can address them earlier in the implementation phase. During development, we found the framerate started to drop precipitously. However, the profiler showed the issue was not in the game logic, but in the render loop. A quick trip through Panda3D's 'analyze' tool told us that we were asking the graphics card to handle 500MB of texture per frame; we simply hadn't placed a limit on our texture sizes. If it had taken us twice as long to get to the point where we realized this mistake (say, if we had burned a lot of time coding memory management and file I/O, or even if we'd burned time making sure our .h files were aligned with our .c files or tweaking our Make scripts), we'd have been in twice as much trouble.
3. While we never had to optimize to native code, if it was necessary it could have happened. Python has tight native bindings allowing you to expose a C or C++ interface as a Python type, which means that the "workhorse" part of that type's function is happening in native code. It is worth noting that large chunks of Panda3D are in fact written in C++; however, other chunks (the chunks that are better expressed as metamorphic constructs where components can be easily added or removed, such as the "direct" GUI widget system) are kept in Python for easy subclassing and modification. Much as C allows you to slide into assembly if you must, good high-level languages make it easy to transition to a low-level implementation where needed. I'm not sure the same can be said of the ease of accessing high-level features from a low-level language.

So there's one programmer's experience with hig

The developers who created the "Aladdin" and "Pirates of the Caribbean" games at DisneyQuest have spent the last few years making MMORPGs. They created Toontown Online in 2003, and they're now working on a Pirates of the Caribbean MMORPG that is scheduled for a 2007 release. That probably explains why DisneyQuest hasn't gotten any new, original games in a long time.

The way this legislation was described, a lot of kid sites and gaming sites could also be affected. For example, I gave my 9-yo daughter a membership to Disney's "Toontown" (http://www.toontown.com)site. It lets her create profiles and chat with other players. Is this what they had in mind?

Disney's is called ToonTown. I used to play it for a little while, but it got old after a while. And all words in English are banned by default--you can only say a few canned phrases to other people unless you meet them elsewhere, agree on a "codeword", and both type the codeword into the game. Then, IIRC, you have unrestricted access to speak to that person.

Developed originally by Disney VR Studio for Toontown Online, we use the Panda3D game engine at the Entertainment Technology Center at Carnegie Mellon University for our Building Virtual Worlds class. A lot of the projects result in machinima-like content.

There's an exporter for Maya and 3ds Max models and animation, which makes it quite easy to do a world in Maya, then dump it straight into a realtime engine and add basic or complex interactivity. Scripting is done in python so it's easy do create and expand.

It's pretty versatile too - we've used it for motion-tracked virtual reality, dome projection, 3D polarized projection, desktop pets, and integrated things like MIDI, all sorts of physical interfaces, show control, etc...

I know it is not *as* popular as some of the others but Toontown Online http://www.toontown.com/ is doing quite a few things for halloween with special house decorations, special outfits to buy, halloween decorations throughout the enviroments, and special Skelle-Cogs to fight! Very cool.

My uhm...son told me that Disney's MMO game, ToonTown will also be having a massive Bloodsucker Lawbot invasion sometime(s) this weekend. Yeah my son, that's it!

I believe CoH to be the only MMORPG since the original EQ that has been able to draw new players into the market.

toontown.com

Disney have entered the mmorpg market with their cartoony game aimed at children, its a pretty simple game

http://www.toontown.com/

(doesnt support other browsers than IE)

My wife and I played ToonTown for some time. It's a MMORPG aimed at the 5-12 year old set, but lots of fun for anyone working in a major corporation or can understand the inside jokes. AFAICT there were more people my age on than kids :)

http://toontown.com/

Also make note of the fansite http://toontowncentral.com. There you can get tips, learn more about it, and trade secrets. You need a secret code exchanged outside the game to enable full keyboard chat, to help protect the kiddies.

You can play for free, altho to customize your character you have to pay. Chatting is controlled using Multiple Choice, so no chance of Evil Perverts Arranging Cross-State Meetings(tm). Only works with IE, however.

Oh, you play a toon character that has to play practical jokes on Evil thingies.

Even today, at 31, I'm nuts about games. I have two consoles, a gaming PC, and two laptops that play legacy games. I can't get enough. I've even written for Player2Player because I can't shut up about them.

I'm a gamer. I'm a parent. My kids are gamers. Games are art & entertainment on the same level as music, film, and television. They are not so passive, but they are there to fill idle time and give pleasure to the consumer. Not all games are for children. I screen what my kids see, and play adult games after they sleep. On the same level I don't let the kids listen to my Slayer CD's, or watch the latest Horror flick that my wife rented, or watch The Man Show with me.

There are games that are not meant for children. I have no problems with the government forcing retailers to enforce the ESRB ratings. When I buy a case of beer, I get carded. If I can't provide the card, I get denied the sale. If a kid brings GTA3 up to the register, he/she should be carded, and denied sale if not 18.

> IM - is a world of divided standards, so you can only talk to AOL users if you're an AOL user, MSN if your an MSN user, etc

Goodness forbid we get a little competition in the IM 'biz'. Look ma, no ICQ number! Anyway, there are multi-network clients out there.

> email - is a world where you need to sift through 20 spam messages to find your one message. Also the monoculture of email clients created a nightmare reality of viruses.

Don't know about you, but my spam filter catches virtually all of the crap; but maybe I'm just lucky. Can't do anything about Outlook usage, though.

> nntp - spam is certainly a problem, as is the bulk of news services no longer carrying binaries.

There are more efficient ways to distribute files nowadays. I hope I'll never have to uuencode anything ever again.

> Search - pay per search, or commercially-supported search (ie - paid-for results placement).

Only an issue when the engine doesn't tell you it's a paid link. Don't know about others, since I mainly use Google.

> Stock Trading - find me a stock worth investing in today

I forget, were hugely inflated IPOs part of the original Internet spec?

> WEB - commercial consolidation funnels most people to portals.

I've yet to see statistics showing how many people use these portals, instead of switching to something else instantly. I know my 12 year old sister doesn't use her default portal.

> Nobody can afford to host anymore

Has it really gotten more expensive? I thought prices were going down, if anything.

> 70% of the URLs were dead

Creating and hosting a web page costs time and money. Did it used to be different?

> Free Music - the age of napster is finished.

Darn, why am I the last to know these things? I'd better disconnect from Morpheous then. Thanks for the heads up.

> Free Software - I'm not talking about Free Software, I'm talking about that which the BSA is making extinct. Warez.

Hasn't the BSA been making Warez extinct for about 10 years now? (Since the BBS days?)

> Marketing - ah yes. If you're an advertiser, the internet is your friend

Last I heard advertisers were leaving the Internet in droves. Of course, marketers are idiots who aren't used to getting any feedback on the "success" of any of their drivel^H^H^H^H^H^H ads.

> there's nothing out there for them but advertising and crap

I notice you're still here.

There seems to be a backlash against the Internet since the dot-com stock crash. People have gone from proclaiming it as the best thing since sliced bread to saying it's the worst thing since New Coke. I'm one of the unreasonable heathens who thinks it was something in between. I also think the average user does like having broadband. Web pages are getting bulkier (and flash-ier) all the time, music is still popular online, and nevermind all those online games.

Hate to burst your bubble, but I think this inter-net thingy might be around for a while.