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9 Year-Old Raising Money to Attend RPG Camp

kickstarter.com

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Re: 9 Year-Old Raising Money to Attend RPG Camp

#41

Post by joshdotsmith »

jgerman wrote: post #27

I don't buy it at all. The text was clearly written by the mother, a self described entrepreneur. I find it very hard to believe that this woman: http://www.linkedin.com/in/susanawilson Didn't come up with this as a scheme to make money, or that she couldn't afford to send her daughter to an $800 camp. It smacks of a stunt to grab money. Anyone with any familiarity with kickstarter knows damn well that it's a lottery…

Not only is she an entrepreneur, but was supposedly one of Fortune's "Most Powerful Women Entrepreneurs." I'm guessing Kickstarter is definitely superfluous here, and it's a PR stunt. Pretty sad to see when I initially got really excited.

Re: 9 Year-Old Raising Money to Attend RPG Camp

#42

Post by RobertHoudin »

Paul_S wrote: post #8

She's not exactly a struggling mother who needs the money to make her child's dream come true. She could probably stretch to a laptop or even a 100 of them. Is this meant to be educational? For whom? There are quite a few projects by people who do actually need the money to have a chance for their dreams to come true.

Exactly. This woman was named by FORTUNE as one of the ten most powerful female entrepreneurs. There are literally billions of children who desperately need money for food, medical treatment and education, but this woman needs $10,000 for her daughter to buy a laptop?

Re: 9 Year-Old Raising Money to Attend RPG Camp

#43

Post by andrewfelix »

madsushi wrote: post #12

I hate it when an adult writes content as if they were their child. It's pretty obvious that this is being written and organized entirely by the mom, and I'm guessing the kid has minimal involvement besides wanting to go to camp and wanting to make a video game. It's great that the kid wants to make games, but having the mom "pretending" to be the kid just rubs me the wrong way.

Hate is a strong word.

I can't see anything bad coming out of this for the child in question. She's being inspired and supported.

Successful adults tend to have had a shit ton of support as children. There are exceptions, but they're rare.

Re: 9 Year-Old Raising Money to Attend RPG Camp

#44

Post by RobertHoudin »

"My goal is to raise $829 to cover the cost of RPG Camp. But my Mom just told me about the Veronica Mars campaign so now I'm secretly hoping to raise more. My Mom said I can put any extra toward a laptop. I asked her if I raised even more than that, would she let me spend another week away at RPG camp. She said if I raised the money, she'd send me to RPG Camp all summer (which would be amazing because my friends at home are great but they're not really gamers like me so it'll awesome to hang out with hardcore gamers like me that are my age)."

Secretly hoping to raise more? COME ON, PEOPLE. THIS IS AN OUTRIGHT SCAM.

Re: 9 Year-Old Raising Money to Attend RPG Camp

#45

Post by alaskamiller »

primigenus wrote: post #25
joonix wrote: post #15

Looks like a free advertising stunt for RPG Maker. I'm very weary of this. This paragraph: I play games on my computer, PS3 and KindleHD all the time and it's fun but I REALLY WANT to create my own games to play. Ultimately I want to learn to program really cool stuff, but since I'm 9 I'm starting with RPG Maker because it lets me create something awesome without having to know how to actually program everything. I'l…

Look at it like this: if the Kickstarter campaign gets attention in the media, Mackenzie and her mom (or Susan and her daughter, depending on how you want to look at it) have successfully brought positive attention to the case of videogames and computer programming for girls. Something in me, perhaps a naive, optimistic part, tells me that's a good thing. Regardless of whatever their motives for doing this are.

The experienced cynical part of me thinks that not being skeptical about things like this makes things worse.

Re: 9 Year-Old Raising Money to Attend RPG Camp

#46

Post by chii »

joshdotsmith wrote: post #40
draker wrote: post #31

The point I find interesting is that FundHer.com (the mother's company/cause) is the website on the campaign and not one specifically for Mackenzie's project. I looked at the website and the about page has the following, "Pioneering entrepreneur scholarships, FundHer is raising $1 million via crowdfunding." > http://www.fundher.com/#!about/aboutPage

Yeah, the mom is the founder of a company about crowdfunding for female entrepreneurs. And she was one of Fortune's "Most Powerful Women Entrepreneurs." Why does she need help buying her daughter a laptop? Sorry to be so cynical, but this looks super sketchy.

I have this reserved feeling about kickstarter - if only kickstarter can give out equity in the venture, instead of just act like a pre-order system where the customer takes on all the risks, but only get the merchandise, while the owner of the business reaps the reward(profits) if the risks don't pan out, but suffers nothing if the venture fails.

Re: 9 Year-Old Raising Money to Attend RPG Camp

#47

Post by ivansavz »

No pressure. No pressure at all. There is now just the whole Internet watching this little girl and layering creative interpretations.

I for one am for the interpretation that this is not a money scam, or a publicity stunt, but a parent who wanted to do a fun activity with their kid and it happens to be on kickstarter.

@jgerman said > This project has a nominal [...] I'll be surprised if Kickstarter doesn't pull it.

I think the project goal is clear. Make an RPG game that a 6-10yr old will understand. Think of it as a kickstarter summer of code project.

Perhaps the more interesting thing to notice here is that kids are orders of magnitude smarter than we were at their age in terms of technology use. They have vast amounts of information available to them. They are also exposed to a lot of noise through this technology too. Will the signal win out leading to a generation of superhackers? Or will the noise win leading to a generation of real-world-anti-social beings forever stuck staring at the social pixels?

Re: 9 Year-Old Raising Money to Attend RPG Camp

#48

Post by xkcdfanboy »

madsushi wrote: post #12

I hate it when an adult writes content as if they were their child. It's pretty obvious that this is being written and organized entirely by the mom, and I'm guessing the kid has minimal involvement besides wanting to go to camp and wanting to make a video game. It's great that the kid wants to make games, but having the mom "pretending" to be the kid just rubs me the wrong way.

Kickstarter is really not the place for these things. The mother should just chock it up and pay for the camp, no need to create a campaign -- it looks like the camp was already paid for in the first place. I don't like people asking for charity when they don't need it. The girls already got a kindle and a mac, more than I had, a shitty 386 and 14.4kb modem when I started out.
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