When working with Stardoll I got amazed by the users almost every day. They did the most surprising things, maybe not what you expect 11-year old girls to do. When getting the right incitaments million of young girls get extremely high tech and business minded.
In the beginning there were no ways to get Stardollars but through paying real money. Only a few percentages can convince their parents that it is worth it and millions of girls stood stone-broke. This made them very creative. There was a flood of valuable and great suggestions on how they could earn Stardollars. Mini games was a model they knew from other communities, but they also suggested starting own stores, sell their old stuff, get ads on the site, write styling and gossip blogs, become an in game profession or just to get some money every day for logging in. (This was long before any Facebook games). Very few girls asked to get presents as it is part of the game to choose your purchases to create your own identity.
As soon as they got the feature to sell their old stuff and more, they became the world's best promotors and marketers. They used all forums available to announce their sales, to present themselves, to get friends, to make themselves interesting. They try out different messages and learn the effects. They soon learned how to use gift cards to offer eachother real money in purchases instead of Stardollars only as intended.
When starting local campaigns offering special items to different markets, the girls showed advanced tech skills. They easily found out how to track and use a proxy servers and vpn's to take advantage of all offers. Bloggers scan all local version and report where to find what. Through this work they get lots of readers on their own blogs, lots of pageviews and money through ads.
When offering Stardollars in reward for playing mini games, there were soon girls connecting systems/bots for cheating. Overall we learned that if there was a chance that anyone would be able to do something unintended, they would. Sometime they found out an extremely tricky pattern of logging in and out and clicking different buttons to get blue hair and so on.
This is only positive! They are devoted and engaged and it's extremely important to see how the right incitament can get any girl interested in technique and business. It only tells me that education in schools have not yet understood this.
White clothes and furniture are for the luxury ones - those who have hired people taking care of the household and the kids. Else they are doctors with demands to display their cleanness. The futuristic bacteria free style was seen on the catwalks this spring, but right now the white trend is reflecting the hard upcoming winter. Snow and Ice are the inspirations. No idea to complain. We can't change the weather - or yes we have - but we can't change it right now. Let's just embrace it. The winter is here to stay.
