Patty: Well, there are a lot of games on it, and you have to save up all the Kinzcash. You can go to the W Shop [points with the mouse]; that is where you buy stuff.
Anne: Can you tell me a little about them? [Points to the W Shop items for purchase]
Patty: These are new items. Probably once a month they get a new item, like for new room themes or something. Like, you theme your rooms and there is a sale on items.
Anne: And these items are for your Webkinz's house?
Patty: Yeah, and you can sometimes get food, and then if you want the food you just click "add to cart" and then it's added to your total cost.
In this particular exchange we see how the design of the site engages Patty in the reading and understanding of numerous discourses, such as shopping and decorating. The design of the W Shop and descriptors used mimics online shopping systems, such Links Of London Friendship Bracelets(http://www.toplinkslondon.com/friendship-c-188.html) as small price tags with narrative descriptions of the items. Figure 3 shows a screen with a featured item of a cowgirl actor who is described with the phrase "Yee ha! This is one truly talented actor y'all! She'll bring her country charm to all of your shows!" The descriptor is designed to hold authenticity by using dialect common in children's television shows of cowboys and cowgirls. The labels of" + add to cart" and "check out" placed with a visual of a shopping cart are a designed combination of discourses to extend the pet owner's virtual experience of online shopping to those mimicked in artifacts representative of the real world.
We can see by looking at this site that its primary discourse is aimed at the care of the virtual pet. These discourses are enforced by a menu bar with a statistical meter, which measures the heath, happiness, and hunger of your pet. This interactivity is what draws children further into a virtual and very compelling world. Note the discourses on pet ownership and responsibility shared in this interview with Patty.
Anne: He seems very happy.
Patty: Yeah, and you can see how they're doing, how they're feeling.
Anne: Tell me a little about that. That gauge says "happy, health, and hunger," and I'm always really curious about that.
Patty: "Happy" means that they are really happy.
Anne: This is Bananas right? (The webkinz character, Bananas the monkey].
Patty: He is 100% happy and is only 91%...he is a bit hungry, so I can feed him.
Anne: How are you going to feed him?
Patty: [excited] Fruit slushy. I'm going to bring it over to him.
Anne: Oh, you bring it over to his little avatar and he goes "ummmm to the Max."
The production of this site shows how differing modes can be articulated and expressed in varying forms, forms which engage the site's readers through many different discourses. For example, the site has interactive frames, which offer trivia games, gaming, cooking shows, and pet beauty pageants. All of these appeal to children as well as the parents who purchase the pets and related items in the real world.
The distribution is a combination of the website and the real world advertising, each of which supports the other's importance to the engaged child. Another way in which gLinks Of London Charms(http://www.linksukstore.com/charms-c-181.html) the designs are chan ed is through surveys, for which the site pays participants in Kinzcash. Anne asked Patty what skills she thinks are needed to participate in the website:
You definitely need to be able to read. You need to be able to use the mouse. I think this is for really all ages. Then you can do surveys and stuff. Usually, if you are younger, you don't do the survey or have your parent do it with you. Say the survey is "What do you think of our trading card challenge game?" I played it a bit and sent in my survey, and I got 50 Kinzcash.
The use of surveys by Ganz, the toy company who created the site, shows how the design of the site attends to distribution by being attuned to its users' reading habits, within particular discourses and through particular designs accommodating the needs of users within their virtual world.
Author Resource:-
The Links London are the best choice for people , they are very fashion and beautiful.
![[Valid RSS feed]](http://www.talkinmince.com/images/icon_Rss.png "XML Feed For RSS"){kind=icon}
Category Rss Feed
Print This Article
Add To Favorites
