03 August 2007

Over the next several days we will be reorganizing the web site to improve your experience. The Home page will become your central point to reach any of our games. News items, which were originally displayed on the Home page, will be moved to the News page, which will also contain the archive of old news. Important announcements will appear on the News page, and will be added to the Community page. The Products page will be updated to contain a link to a dedicated page for each of our products.

Of far greater scope is the launch of DigiWiki, which will store all game documentation and other game-related content. We will also use DigiWiki to preview new games and game enhancements, and provide you - the users - with an opportunity to discuss the changes and provide feedback.

Subscription Models

Digital Gamers will offer individual and family subscription models. The individual subscription is for a single user of the service. The family subscription is available to a husband and wife and their dependent children.

The basic subscription (whether for an individual or a family) allows access to role-playing products, educational software, and non-branded traditional games. Additional subscription features may be enabled for nominal charges, and include:

• access to branded games licensed from independent designers and studios;
• league and tournament play of traditional and branded games, including competitive play for various prizes;
• multi-user access, allowing multiple family members under a family subscription to access the service simultaneously.

Personalization Features

Digital Gamers provides a web-based interface through which an account's logins may be customized. This customization provides parents with a powerful tool to control how their children use the product. Available controls include:

Content Tools

Educational software should not be one size fits all. The content appropriate for an eight year old third grade girl is not the same as that for a twelve year old eighth grade boy. Each child starts at a different point, and learns at a different pace.

Our Content Tools allow you to adjust our educational games in three ways:

• You may change the subject taught by a particular game. Each game supports a certain range of instruction. For example, our World Traveller game supports geography, geology, and world history.
• You may adjust the difficulty level of the subject being taught. For example, in the World Traveller game a third grader might be expected to find Europe on a map, while a sixth grader might be expected to find Andorra in Europe.
• You may adjust the difficulty of play. For example, in the World Traveller game a third grader might be required to travel to two locations before completing a task, while a sixth grader might be required to travel to five locations before completing a task.

Scheduler

The Scheduler allows parents control over how they use the services. With the Scheduler, parents may control when their children use the service, for how long they use the service, and preconditions they must meet to use elements of the service:

• The Scheduler provides a daily scheduling tool allowing parents to indicate the time of day and duration for which a child is allowed to use the service.
• A single condition can be applied on the entire week, or separate conditions can be applied each day. The restrictions can be set on the entire service, on any of the four product suites of the service, or on a specific product within the service.
• The Scheduler provides a pre-condition tool allowing parents to control the way in which children use the service. For example, a pre-condition may be set requiring a child to spend a half hour using a geography game before gaining access to other portions of the service.

Product Regulator

The Product Regulator allows parents to restrict access to portions of the service. With the regulator, parents may bar a child entirely from any of the four product suites offered by Digital Gamers, or may use fine-grained access controls, restricting access to individual products within a suite.

Feature Regulator

The Feature Regulator allows parents to disable portions of a product. The capabilities of the regulator vary from product to product, and are most pronounced in the role-playing products. Some of the capabilites of the feature regulator include:

• The ability to turn off chat capabilities service-wide, within a product suite, or within a single product.
• The ability to restrict tournament game play to solo play, or to play against a parent-specified list of opponents.
• The ability to turn off anti-social behavior in role-playing games, preventing the player from playing anti-social activities.
• The ability to designate an account as non-PVP (player-versus-player) in role-playing games, protecting the player from aggression from other PVP players.
• The ability to restrict the player to certain regions within the role-playing games, including restriction to server-designated safe zones or to player-designated safe zones.

Minimum Requirements

You must have access to the internet in order to use the service. Digital Gamers does not supply such access. Broadband access is not required, although it is recommended for optimal performance.

Most educational, tournament, and branded products are browser-based, and will run in Navigator, Opera, or Internet Explorer. The browser release-level required may vary by product; if a specific browser version is required the requirement will be documented on the page for the game.

Some educational, tournament, and branded products, and all role-playing products, require the download of client software. All client software is developed using Sun's Java(tm) Technology, and will run on any Sun-certified compliant 1.4.0 virtual machine.

For the technically-inclined:

Note that some applications (especially the role-playing client) will perform poorly if the virtual machine does not implement hardware-accelerated graphics (in particular 1.4.0's VolatileImage).

Digital Gamers is committed to being "penguin-friendly". If you believe you have found an incompatibility in our software, please report it promptly. We will assess whether the problem appears to be in our software. Please be aware that the nature of Open Source is that developers will tweak systems to 'improve' them, and that one developer's idea of an improvement may break hundreds, or even thousands, of other developers' dependent products.