9 Year-Old Raising Money to Attend RPG Camp

Looks like a free advertising stunt for RPG Maker. I'm very weary of this.<p>This paragraph:<p><i>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'll learn to program more as I get older, but right now, RPG Maker's drag &#38; drop functionality makes it pretty easy for me to create working RPG games quickly.</i><p>Kids don't talk like that. They don't announce their limitations and justify them with their age (since I'm 9...). The rest of the paragraph is almost insulting and straight out of a lame commercial. And there is a big RPG Maker screenshot just below this.<p>Millions of middle-class suburban kids go to summer camps that cost $1,000+ every year and their parents don't petition the internet for the tuition. This family doesn't seem poor. I think they could come up with it without posting an ad on Kickstarter for RPG Maker.

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.

While this project technically adheres to this policy:<p>&#62; Everything on Kickstarter must be a project. A project has a clear goal, like making an album, a book, or a work of art. A project will eventually be completed, and something will be produced by it.<p>IMO, it veers far too close to this policy:<p>&#62; Kickstarter does not allow charity, cause, or "fund my life" projects.<p>Of course, there is plenty of good to be found in causes like this, but in this case I fear that Mackenzie (and kids like her) will learn the wrong lesson.<p>I mean, she is essentially asking for a hand-out to pay for summer camp. And probably a new laptop (based on the "where's the money going?" section). I don't exactly see that as "proving her brothers wrong," and it kind of leaves a bad taste in my mouth.

How is this a Kickstarter project? Not only is this not the writing of the 9 year old daughter as echoed by the comments here, but if your kid wants to go do something like this then it's up to the parents to make it happen. And not through handouts.<p>And if it comes down to affordability - there's plenty of resources on the internet that will teach you this stuff anyway for free that someone who's actually motivated would indulge in. You can build an RPG without the holiday, which would ultimately be better anyway as self-guided learning is an important skill for any developer.<p>So please don't abuse kickstarter. Do go out and make full use of Google and the developer community who'll be more than happy to offer guidance for your daughter.

I don't buy it at all.<p>The text was clearly written by the mother, a self described entrepreneur.<p>I find it very hard to believe that this woman:<p><a href="http://www.linkedin.com/in/susanawilson" rel="nofollow">http://www.linkedin.com/in/susanawilson</a><p>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.<p>It smacks of a stunt to grab money. Anyone with any familiarity with kickstarter knows damn well that it's a lottery where some projects get vastly overfunded. What better way to make that happen than to make an emotional appeal to get people to give their money away. This is begging plain and simple.

How come her rogue has 16 int and a +5 modifier? This smells fishy. She also added her whole ability score instead of her ability modifier to her saves. I don't know if I can't trust her with my money if she can't fill a character sheet properly.<p>(Mackenzie , if you read this, I'm just joking. But as your kickstarter shows, you know exactly the best way to take a joke)

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?<p>There are quite a few projects by people who do actually need the money to have a chance for their dreams to come true.

<i>Don't sell them a product; sell them a story.</i>

Mother doesn't need the money, kid doesn't need it either, text written by her mother pretending to be her... This is a downright scam.

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.<p>I looked at the website and the about page has the following, "Pioneering entrepreneur scholarships, FundHer is raising $1 million via crowdfunding."<p>&#62; <a href="http://www.fundher.com/#!about/aboutPage" rel="nofollow">http://www.fundher.com/#!about/aboutPage</a>

THE GAME (that's what she is calling it) already has a release date of July 2013 despite there being no evidence of her having written a game before...<p>Without appearing cynical, can I ask why there is a $10000 pledge band?

Oh, thank the gods. I clicked to comment, thinking I was about to be a right cynical git, and well, turns out, I'm not alone!!!!<p>Nice scam though. $7k already. I have to respect that, grudgingly.

I would love it if this were real but I have this nagging feeling in me that tells me that this is just an attempt to exploit the romantics in us... I do hope it really is a kid trying to raise money to create a game.

There's something very awkward about all this. People criticizing this here, people who will criticize the game (expectations). The huge amount of money raised for her age (she really shouldn't have got that much money). The text written by her mother...

This is absolutely <i>fantastic</i>. I don't know if she'll succeed in building the game or not but just having the motivation at such an early age is awesome.<p>A question: "In case it's not already clear, I'm not a girlie girl." Assuming mom did not put this in, it's sad, but of course very common, to see the dichotomy "girlie girl"/"techie girl". And this has little to do with gender either, we also have "nerd"/"jock". Why do people like Elle Woods exist only in fiction?

I'm all for girls learning how to program, but the negativity in this campaign is rubbing me the wrong way. There's male-bashing - her brothers are "mean" and "brats", and woman-shaming (the photos of the "gold diggers" - perhaps not a life choice I would make, but if both parties are happy, who am I to judge?) - if the point of this kickstarter is really to empower women (well, one woman), do we really need to point judgy fingers at other women and bring them down? There's a million amazing reasons for girls today to learn to code besides "if you don't, you'll have to marry some old fart for his money." Why couldn't they have highlighted some of those? ugh

This was perhaps one of the most adorable and inspiring thing I've read. I'm really happy it succeeded.

So I'm guessing she's getting camp all summer and a new Retina Macbook Pro to code on :-)

Dungeon's and Dragons. Who wants that for their child?<p>Plus this has all the gloss of pushy pushy parents.

I woke up this morning and it looks like Kensie's got summer camp, a laptop and a reasonably nice used car.

No pressure. No pressure at all. There is now just the whole Internet watching this little girl and layering creative interpretations.<p>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.<p>@jgerman said &#62; This project has a nominal [...] I'll be surprised if Kickstarter doesn't pull it.<p>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.<p>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?

Interesting that its over $20K today (Mar 23) which was the target of the original Kickstarter the Mom did. That provides an interesting insight into the motivations behind backers.

This is really cute and awesome and why does anybody care how a 9 year old's mom wrote ad copy for her? It's still a 9 year old going to nerd camp which is great.

In the light of the ugliness of the last 24 hours, this couldn't have come at a better time.

F all the skepticisms, I'd rather take the chance. A 9 year old girl wants to learn to code… you definitely have my support! Way to go!

awesome.

Now this is how you get girls interested in technology and programming. Not posting pics on twitter.

wait...wat?