Back in July, I blogged about Animations from the Old Testament, By Kids for Kids.
Today, I learned about BoMToons (pronounced “boom-toons”), a site created by some BYU students with cartoons and games about the Book of Mormon.
Some of the games involve battling Mormon characters and others are word games. You can even race your missionary companion on a bike. The site gets about 900 visitors a day and includes some interesting guest features submitted by users. The cartoons remind me of the HomestarRunner cartoons that are so popular among teenagers nowadays.
How helpful do you think sites like this are to parents? Are these good, Sunday activities for kids or do they encourage more mindless time on the Internet? What suggestions do you have for creators of this type of content?
What do you think is the role of the Church in creating games and activities like this? The online Friend magazine has begun to provide coloring pages, videos, and activities. Would you like to see more of this? What suggestions do you have to make it more effective?
The online friend video idea is interesting. I’d like to check it out, but the windows media format it uses doesn’t seem to be working on my machine. It seemed like the church sites were moving more to flash video or the move networks plugin. I like those formats better.
I find it mindless. I don’t like most of the games. I have a problem with a nephite war being likened to Warcraft. That doesn’t seem right. The site doesn’t seem like Sabbath day material to me. Fine for any other day of the week.
The videos make the Book of Mormon seem stupid.
The missionary games seem harmless.
I certainly wouldn’t send my kids hear to strengthen their gospel knowledge or to learn correct principle. Playing some of the games would be silly fun. I laughed while I played the virgin lips game. Just my opinion.
I have a real problem with cartoon depictions of scripture stories in general. I want my children to understand from a very early age the very clear distinction between the reality of the revealed gospel of Jesus Christ and Sponge Bob or Batman. In my opinion, cartoon-izing the gospel is an open invitation for children to relegate the gospel message to a Saturday morning footing, rather than revering it as a special thing that is ultimately *true* and essential to their salvation. I really wish the church would not get involved in propagating this kind of confusion of my children.
I love this website it teaches the gospel while childre can have fun. It might not be the best but at least to the kids it’s better that sitting in sacrement for an hour and half
Games can be am amazing way of gaining the interest of children and youth. It’s not the end goal of course, but can be a useful stepping stone to greater things.
I do find that currently they are aimed at the very young and tend to be very simplistic. Generally video games are simplistic and many of the commerical non-LDS ones tend to fit into the category of “mind numbing” or “shoot everybody” (and often both!)
I admire those games that teach history and other stuff of value. It was in part why I designed a game (modification) of my own aimed at LDS youth. You can find out more about that (and games by an associate, artist and games designer James Fullmer) here:
http://bookofmormonbattles.com
My game, “Title of Liberty” is found under the Games section. It’s much more advanced than the games you have seen in the LDS market before. And, as it uses a commercial engine, it is free (though you need the engine – though that’s about $10-12 on Amazon I believe).
James has kindly put a video up so you can get a taster of it. Click my name above to go directly to the video.