You’d be pretty hard-pressed to find any research that benefits players more than companies. Companies are inherently more organized, research-savvy, and resourceful than players.

If you want to “benefit” players, then you should start an advocacy group to take any and all research and use it as ammunition to assert player rights. Not that you’ll be thanked. Players will hate you for it, naturally.

Brain development studies don’t support that. For example frontal lobes aren’t fully developed until almost the end of the twenties.

I’m well-aware of the neurobiological research. Yet, there’s no evidence that supports that assertion that people begin life as cocooned butterflies.

Experience is acquired differently with mediated experience …

I’m referring to similarities between core behaviors. Experience is fluff. Many children have experienced more than many adults can imagine. If experience determines adulthood, then age is irrelevant.

Ola Fosheim Grøstad wrote:

It shouldn’t come as a suprise to you that I don’t find subscription based time-sinks that treat people as rats in cages particularly ethical either.

Subscription ≠ prescription.

It shouldn’t come as a suprise to you that I don’t find subscription based time-sinks that treat people as rats in cages particularly ethical either. In fact, I’ve canceled a research project on player motivation on the realisation that primarily companies would benefit, not the players.

First hand, something I discovered is the tendancy as I age to return to mediated events as a source of inspiration. For example my tastes in music were set by early folk and folk rock. Right now I’m going through a Judith Durham phase (Judith was the little chestnut haired singer for The Seekers). I teethed musically on the Seekers, Kingston Trio, Peter Paul and Mary, Gordon Lightfoot, etc. A difference now is whereas my parents would have trolled old sheet music, I can go to YouTube and watch the videos of my childhood heros when they were twenty somethings themselves. There is a marvelous quality to the sound when people actually had to be able to step up in front of two live mics and just do it at the level of quality broadcasts required.

That feeds back into the skills I have today and the results are quite a bit better and still magical.

Mass markets have very long cycles at different coupling strengths. That is one critical difference between selling to kids and selling to adults.

They want going to mcdonalds to be a habit.

Of course they do. Blizzard wants consumers to make subscribing to World of Warcraft a habit, too. That “habit” starts out as repeat purchases and gradually becomes what’s called brand loyalty.

Kids are the perfect target. Period.

Oh, I see. Kids are the perfect target because they work 9-to-5 jobs and drive, are individuals with the freedom to travel alone, and have sufficient disposable income to spend on fuel to make regular trips to McDonald’s and to spend on the expensive food and drink items. Perfect! They are just so…. perfect!

as that it’s harmful to the development process that they go through.

The commercial environment is probably the most significant aspect of life. Failing to introduce children to commerce, and educate them about business and consumption, is a major failure in child development on behalf of parents and society.

Kids are not the same as adults, they don’t think the same way as adults

Children and adults behave exactly the same. They might speak differently, concern themselves with different interests, but ultimately, adulthood doesn’t change our core behaviors. We’re still fearful of loud noises. We’re still fearful of darkness. We still beat each other over the head with some sort of toy when we don’t get our way. We’re still brats. We’re still cranky when we’re hungry. We still want to have fun. We’re still boastful. We still gossip. We’re still tattle-tales. We still cry when we’re sad, smile when we’re happy, ashamed when we’re bad. I could go on…

Their brains haven’t even fully finished developing.

You assume that because the brains of children are still developing that they don’t possess the same or even greater level of intelligence than adults.

Guess what: scientists don’t know much about higher cognition. We don’t know where intelligence comes from. We’re not very knowledgeable in this area. And I say that as the son, nephew, and grandson of scientists.

You can’t guess here. You have to observe. When you look carefully at the patterns of behavior of adults and children, once you peel back the fluff of adulthood, you see that they’re exactly the same. You see that nobody ever really grows up. And this actually makes a lot of sense when you consider our primal nature and how we’re nurtured, how we learn by imitation, observation, and experimentation.

You’ve got a personality that hasn’t yet settled, one that has a harder time differentiating fantasy from reality, and one that tends to believe what adults and other authority figures tell them. The fact that certain methods are applied to adults as well is irrelevant, it has a different effect on a child. Kids are not the same as adults, they don’t think the same way as adults, and they haven’t developed the same tools and contexts that adults have. Something that an adult can brush off or even be affected by but that doesn’t shift their view of the world all that much can be a huge shift for a child. They haven’t been so deeply imprinted that they’ve got the ability to deal with certain things without it *changing* them to a much greater level. Social stimga advertisment is more *harmful* to a kid than it is to an adult.

And it’s not that they’re inferior, or that adults are superior, that’s bull. It’s that they’re inexperienced and not fully developed. Their brains haven’t even fully finished developing. You can’t treat them as if they can brush off the same stuff. They aren’t the same.

Kids simply are not equiped and cannot be equiped to deal with certain things.

Going back to the study I mentioned, the study’s author argues the same thing. He says that because children are unaware of the persuasive intent of marketing, that children as a market segment are an “unfair playing field.”

Like I said, people who attack marketing in the name of defending children always get their facts wrong. They get their facts wrong because they don’t understand marketing and they don’t understand consumer psychology.

The consumer, regardless of age, is supposed to be unaware of the persuasive intent of marketing. If they were aware, marketing would be useless in the same way that knowing how a magician performs his tricks would ruin the performance. Great marketing is subtle. Consumers are oblivious to great marketing.

A young enough kid will not sufficiently question the statement that if you don’t buy this product all the other kids will laugh at you behind your back.

Adults are funny in that they believe themselves to be superior to children. Using social stigmas in marketing isn’t a tactic reserved for children. As Made to Stick authors Chip and Dan Heath recently pointed out in Fast Company, even soap and shampoo manufacturers use social stigmas to sell their wares. Children are people, and because they are people, they behave like people, like adults.

@Ola, eh, no. McDonalds services just as many child-less adults in need of quick food. Sorry, doesn’t wash.

You’re not going to get anywhere with someone who thinks business is greed and marketing is pure evil. In some countries, the McDonald’s brand is so powerful that some natives think that McDonald’s is undermining their way of life.