Study: Whyville Has Cheat Sites! Cyberbullying & Cheating in Online Worlds a Surprising Problem

Alana Semuels has an article this week in the Los Angeles Times detailing the surprising level of cyberbullying and cheating kids engage in while online. Despite chat safeguards in place in such kid-friendly worlds like Club Penguin (owned by Disney), Neopets (owned by Viacom), and Whyville (owned by Numedeon), kids often engage in cheating activities and bullying behavior. One example: account passwords are pilfered, often given by the victims in promised exchange for more virtual money or accouterments.

Even heavily restricted chat functions present levels of monitoring difficulties, as youngsters find creative ways to bypass profanity filters. Whyville flags children exchanging personal information such as their real names or phone numbers. The company blocks about 10 accounts a day due to violations.

Semuels notes UCLA doctoral student Deborah Fields and Dr. Yasmin Kafai wrote a paper on the topic for the Digital Games Research Association (DiGRA 2007). The paper is an analysis of cheat sites designed for Whyville, examining 257 sites and following one in particular over the course of eight months.

According to the paper and Whyville staff, Whyville veterans often haze newcomers by demanding rent, even though apartments there are free. Other players have figured out a combination of keyboard commands that allows them to jump into the virtual cars of strangers, which is normally allowed only through invitation. Users have claimed that elections for the Whyville Senate were rigged through stuffing of virtual ballot boxes.

Some players took advantage of an outbreak of Whypox – a virtual plague that causes avatars to sneeze and break out in boils – by selling cures that turned out to be fake.

Cheating and online thievery can go to extremes at times, such as the recent case of a teen in Habbo stealing €4000 worth of virtual furniture.

So the question arises: Are kids who figure out ways to part others of their virtual cash displaying tendencies toward larceny, or are they simply more intelligent than those who part with their cash? Certainly deception is not good, but convincing others to invest in a for-profit scheme seems a reasonable exercise. This makes for a very interesting field of study.

References:
Fields, D. A., & Kafai, Y. B. (under review). Stealing from grandma or generating cultural knowledge? Contestations and effects of cheats in a teen virtual world. Paper submitted to DiGRA07. [Online]. Available: http://www.gseis.ucla.edu/faculty/kafai/paper/
whyville_pdfs/DIGRA07_cheat.pdf

Semuels, A. (2008, July 2). In virtual worlds, child avatars need protecting – from each other. Los Angeles Times. [Online]. Retrieved July 4, 2008 from http://articles.latimes.com/2008/jul/02/business/fi-kidssafe2

Virtual Worlds for Children Survive and Thrive

Research is percolating around virtual worlds designed specifically with children in mind. While Club Penguin and Webkinz grab the lion’s share of press, this article notes a total of 158 virtual worlds or online playgrounds for kids worldwide.

The subscription volume is amazing. Habbo: 90 million subscribers. Neopets: 45 million. Club Penguin and Star Doll: 15 million each.

Some interesting quotes from industry officials are also included in the article.

For Mr Seiler [editor of Virtual World News] this popularity is based on three factors: friends, freedom and fun.

“One reason virtual worlds are extremely compelling is that they offer a way to get out of the house and reconnect with friends after their curfew hours,” said Mr Seiler.

The virtual worlds also give kids great freedom to express themselves.

“For kids, though, when they don’t have as many options in real life to decide what their house looks like, what type of clothes to wear, or where they go, virtual worlds must seem like a whole new land of opportunity,” he said.

Finally, he said, these virtual worlds are enjoyable places to be.

“Successful virtual worlds encourage creativity, imagination, and fun,” he said. “That’s pretty appealing to any kid.”

References:

BBC News (2008, May 9). Boom times for virtual playgrounds. [Online.] Retrieved May 20, 2008 from http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/technology/7390218.stm

Webkinz & Club Penguin: Evil? Or Good Financial Teachers?

Recently the debate over the benefit or detriment of MMOGs aimed specifically at children has heated up again. Specifically, these debates center around Club Penguin and Webkinz. The current debate was kickstarted in a New York Times article last week entitled, “Pay Up, Kid, or Your Igloo Melts,” by Mireya Navarro.

Navarro notes that several opportunities in the games require additional purchases, much to many parents’ chagrin. One thing that has alarmists concerned is the fantastic growth the two largest sites, CP and Webkinz, have seen recently. CP has almost 5 million unique monthly visitors, while Webkinz has around 6 million.

While there is some free content, attractive add-ons require additional payments. Anyone can register in CP for free, but to keep virtual items in the game, a monthly pay account is needed. People purchasing plush toy Webkinz in the real world get free access to the virtual Webkinz world for a year. Buying more plush toys leads to more benefits online.

Navarro notes that the idea of selling to tots in the digital realm is raising concerns:

Consumer Reports WebWatch started a study this summer to evaluate the commercial content of online games for 3- to 7-year-olds.

“Every interface is becoming an opportunity to sell children something, either brand awareness or real things,” said Liz Perle, the editor in chief of Common Sense Media. “That’s the end game.”

Other profit concerns exist, Navarro says, including the fact Disney bought out CP for $350 million, with an option to double that amount if growth targets are met. We’re used to hearing folks fuss about profits generated by “Big Oil” and “Big Pharma.” Now, perhaps we’ll hear talk about “Big Gaming.”

On the other end of the spectrum, some parents actually like these virtual worlds for tweens and kiddos. Brian B., a fellow technology director from Texas, and blogger, notes that his daughters have been captivated by Webkinz. After some scaffolding, his 4 year old twins took to the game like the proverbial duck to water:

At first, they were satisfied with watching mommy and daddy play the games, buy things, and arrange furniture, etc., but eventually they wanted to take control of their own private virtual living space themselves. My wife came up with the idea of putting a heart sticker on the left button of a little USB travel mouse I carry in my bag so they could remember which button to push (laptop tracks pads are difficult for 4-year-old fingers apparently), then a little instruction on drag-and-drop and they were off. They only thing that my wife or I do now is to log them in (while they can type their own names, the extra long/unique user names for the site give them a little trouble).

Brian is a little worried about the financial aspect, namely that it may use up a lot of his money like so many other things for your children have a tendency to do. But, he also likes what he sees in Webkinz:

Many of the games are educational – one of my personal favorites is one where you take random letters and try to put them together to spell words. Depending on how you put them together you get more points – don’t get enough points and you don’t advance another level. Another game teaches spatial placement by setting up pathways to get the “pets” on one side of the screen to their “homes” on the other. You have to click on each piece of the pathway to make them flip until the pathway is complete – and the possibilities are endless (no two game boards are the same) … BTW – My wife and I find several of the games as good methods of winding down at the end of the day…now who’s WebKinz are they again?

So, the jury is out as to whether these for-profit virtual worlds aimed at kids are evil capitalist “first hits” to the addictive world of Internet playgrounds … or fun sites where kids can learn a thing or two about money management and home décor. It will be interesting to see what Consumer Reports’ WebWatch report says, and hopefully we’ll see some academic research as well.

References:
Navarro, M. (2007, October 28). Pay up, kid, or your igloo melts. Newyorktimes.com. [Online]. Available: http://www.nytimes.com/2007/10/28/fashion/28virtual.html

A Billion Bucks on Virtual Worlds

Here’s a nice factoid for those interested in videogame statistics: in the last year, corporations invested over $1 billion on virtual worlds. VWs, as they’re sometimes called, are three dimensional environments shared by multiple people online. Lifelike avatars traverse the virtual realms, interacting, talking, texting, and exploring together.

Second Life is the most famous of all VWs, and garners the lion’s share of the press. However, there are many more. I’ve covered the rise of tween worlds, and therein lies one of the clues as to the high dollar amounts spent on VWs of late. Most of that billion bucks came from Disney’s $700 million purchase of Club Penguin (although half of that total is a commitment by Disney to CP’s founders if they meet certain sales goals … so the billion dollar figure really depends on how you are counting). Intel purchased Havok for $110 million. A total of 33 other companies have invested another $200 million in a variety of other ventures. VirtualWorldsManagement.com (“the leading provider of trade events and media for the emerging virtual worlds industry”) publicized the stats in a recent report.

References
Hefflinger, M. (2007, October 3). Report: $1 billion invested in virtual worlds over past year. DigitalMediaWire.com. [Online]. Available: http://www.dmwmedia.com/news/2007/10/03/
report-1-billion-invested-in-virtual-worlds-over-past-year

VirtualWorldsManagement.com. (2007). $1 billion invested in 35 virtual worlds companies from October 2006 to October 2007. [Online]. Available: http://www.virtualworldsmanagement.com/2007/index.html

Researching the Webkinz Phenomenon

As far as peer-reviewed academic research on the Webkinz phenomenon, I haven’t seen anything yet. However, several parents, magazine authors, and concerned bloggers have done personal research on this issue and have reported about it online.

The way Webkinz works is, youngsters buy a plush animal toy that has a code. Going online to the Webkinz site, youngsters enter the code and a virtual version of the toy comes to “life” on the site. Cleverdude relays the following factoids:

* When you activate the pet online, you get $2000 virtual dollars (KinzCash) to buy your pet food, toys, and other items. These items can be rather pricey. A fancy bed can run you about $1750 in KinzCash! Also, you can’t buy KinzCash with real cash (or it conveniently leaves that out of the FAQs if you can).

* You can earn more cash by playing games online, getting a job, or taking surveys. However, per Webkinz FAQ, these games are not gambling because “Webkinz members can not lose KinzCash playing any of our games. There are no wagers involved at all.”

* The pets need food or go hungry, and if they go hungry for too long, they get sick and need medicine, which all costs KinzCash. However, the pets never die, they just stay sick.

So, are the toys, and especially the site, good for educating your children? Cleverdude says yes, provided parents stay involved in the online process with their children. Many financial lessons, and teachable moments with time management and appropriate netiquette become feasible on the site.

Luigi Lugmayr over at I4UNews notes that Amazon carries Webkinz, and it can be a place to get the fast selling items when they sell out at the brick and mortars near you. The second and third top selling toy rankings at Amazon were taken by Webkinz when Luigi looked into the matter back in April.

Carleen Hawn, a freelancer writing over at Business 2.0, wondered what makes Webkinz and Club Penguin so popular with kids? Both Canadian startups have been enormously successful in North America, and CP was bought out by Disney this week. Some of Carleen’s key findings:

Bennett Morris, 7, and his brother Lawson, 5, used to live for Club Penguin but are now enthusiastic Webkinz players. The boys, who live outside Boston, like the variety of the Webkinz animals and the “houses” they live in. “I like the private rooms. I like to get furniture and decorate King Kong’s house,” Bennett says. King Kong is his Webkinz gorilla. He also has Coco (a monkey) and Gumdrop (a chihuahua). “I like Webkinz better because there are more games,” Lawson pipes in. “My favorite is Wheel of Wow, but you can only play it one time a day.”

This is an important feature: Webkinz puts strict limits on how much time kids can spend on any activity–a “leave ‘em wanting more” strategy that is one of the secrets of the site’s success. Webkinz’s traffic ballooned from 1.1 million unique visitors in November to 1.9 million in December. Moreover, kids spent an average of two hours and eight minutes per visit on Webkinz between April 2006 and January 2007. (YouTube, by contrast, averaged 32 minutes per visit during the same period, while Club Penguin averaged 54.)

Finally, Denise Pappalardo over at Network World wrote an article entitled, Fuzzy logic: How Webkinz is getting young kids hooked on the Web. Overuse is rampant, Pappalardo reports, amongst both youngsters and parents:

One grandmother says when she and her grandson stumbled on Webkinz last summer “it changed her life.”

Now she’s totally addicted. “I have 10 Webkinz and five different accounts,” says Sharyn Morin, a vet technician. She says she visits all five of her accounts daily and her grandson’s three after he goes to bed to be sure he “did his daily activities,” with all of his Webkinz.

Daily activities include exercising their animals, feeding them and keeping them happy by spending time with them. Kids see happy, health and hunger meters for their plush that lets them know if they’re taking good care of their pals.

All told, the research has so far been experiential and non-scientific. Perhaps something more experimental will come down the pike, maybe after a professor’s child somewhere gets the Webkinz bug, and the scholar/parent decides to research the issue.

Disney Buys Club Penguin

The Wall Street Journal reports today that the Walt Disney Co. is buying Club Penguin for $350 million. If the site meets Disney’s growth targets, the founders stand to earn an additional $350 million in bonuses.

Following the “if ain’t broke, don’t fix it” line of reasoning, Disney promises to pretty much let things be; however, the company did state the name would be changing to Disney Club Penguin.

Key quote from the article by reporters Merissa Marr and Peter Sanders:

Founded by three Canadian fathers in late 2005, Club Penguin has quickly rocketed to prominence by offering children the ability to customize their own virtual penguins in an online community. Armed with their penguin avatars, children can chat with friends, play games and earn coins to buy items such as furnishings for their igloo homes.

Buying a kid-friendly MMO marks something of a turn-around for Disney, as it has primarily focused inwardly on its own Internet strategy for luring young viewers:

Disney, preferring to take an in-house approach to building its Internet presence, has sat by in the past couple of years as rival media companies snapped up online social networks and virtual worlds. In a key move earlier this year, the Burbank, Calif., company relaunched Disney.com with its own social network, featuring chat rooms, games and personalized pages. But new virtual worlds such as Club Penguin have surfaced to pose serious competition in the target market of 6- to 14-year-olds.

Club Penguin is profitable without advertising (advertising aimed at teens and youngsters is generally frowned upon by some people), raising revenue through subscriptions instead. The number of subscribers to Club Penguin has almost doubled in the last year, to 700,000. That means the site grosses around $4.2 million per month at current subscriber levels, assuming a $6/month subscription fee.

Lane Merrifeld, CEO of Club Penguin, indicated the founders decided to sell because they needed a larger partner in order to grow more. Disney CEO Bob Iger and the Disney Corporation as a whole share many of the same values as the Club Penguin folks, so Disney seemed a natural choice.

Staci Kramer over at PaidContent.org has some additional commentary on the buyout that’s well worth reading, focusing on the Disney earnings call in which the announcement was made.

I’m still waiting for the educational MMO aimed at kids, perhaps headed by one of the major publishers. Scholastic seems a natural choice, but other candidates might be Prentice Hall or McGraw-Hill.

References
Marr M., & Sanders, P. (2007, August 2). Disney Buys kids’ social-network site. The Wall Street Journal, p. B4.

Update:
I noted previously that Sony was interested in buying CP for around half a billion. Obviously, that plan fell through. Nonetheless, the observation that big corporate guns are taking a hard look at child-friendly blogs was spot on.

On another note, before she went on vacation Snow949 copied the letter from CP’s founders explaining the corporate move on her blog. You can read it here.

Big Corporations Aim at Kid-Friendly MMOs

Forget MySpace. That is like, so 2006. Today’s tweens want to socialize in virtual worlds that are specially tailored for them. Such is the appeal of sites like Club Penguin and Webkinz.

Now comes word from Graham Charlton at e-Consultancy.com over in Britain that Nickelodeon is looking to tap into the trend with a $100 million investment in virtual worlds and multiplayer games.

New offerings will include myNoggin, a subscription educational service for pre-school kids; Nick Gaming Club, a multiplayer subscription service; while the existing Neopets site will be relaunched as Neostudios, with the focus on online virtual worlds.

Charlton states that Webkinz has grown by 13 times its size from a year ago while Club Penguin has tripled in the same period. In the UK, Club Penguin is the third most popular children’s site, and the third most popular gaming site behind RuneScape and Miniclip.

The idea behind Club Penguin is very clever – it provides a safe way for children to get into social networking, as messages between users are carefully monitored by the site.

Finally, Charlton notes that Sony has been talking with Club Penguin about buying it out, for around half a billion dollars.

So, now that Nick and Sony are looking to jump into the kid MMO fray with multi-million dollar efforts, will there be additional educational efforts any time soon? The myNoggin effort sounds very interesting, and I’ll be looking forward to checking it out. I hope that additional educational efforts expand beyond preschool. Surely Scholastic or one of the other major publishers would like to get in on this.

Funding Models and Educational Uses of Virtual Worlds

First came the monthly subscription fee. The most successful MMORPG to date, World of Warcraft, follows this model. Subscribers pay around $15/month for the right to use their characters within the world. This was followed by the free to try, pay for advanced features model. This is the tack taken by Club Penguin, and seemed to work well for younger audiences. Anybody can enter the world and play, but to keep property and accumulate virtual stuff, they have to pay a modest amount, say $5/month.

Second Life took the tack of offering free access, but sells virtual real estate in their world (I know, “virtual” real estate seems like an oxymoron). Companies like IBM have bought private “islands” for online meetings and sales, and pay rent for the privilege.

Webkinz, as I’ve mentioned here, gives buyers of its toy plush animals in RL a code which unlocks free access in their virtual world. This has been an extraordinarily successful sales technique for the company.

Now, Wagner James Au over at GigaOm brings news that Mattel’s Barbie Girls virtual online world has signed up 3 million members in its first two months, a rate eclipsing that of WoW when it started out. This, despite the fact Barbie Girls World remains in beta for the moment. Au mentions several “child-centric” MMOs and points out none of them are primarily subscription-based, but rather subsist mostly on selling virtual items or advertising streams.

I indicated previously there are several differences between WoW and SL, and that Second Life is much more conducive to educational appropriation than WoW. Karl Kapp commented on that blog entry, and said expecting students to pay an additional $15/month in order to participate was probably too much to ask. Certainly, the new approaches of these highly successful virtual worlds that don’t rely as heavily on subscription revenue seems to back up his assertion.

Club Penguin and Webkinz Receive Coverage

Two AP stories over the weekend gave several inches of news type to Club Penguin and Webkinz, two online 3-D virtual worlds aimed at kids. The first was written by Anick Jesdanun, and focused more on Club Penguin. The site offers free access, with $5/month premium features. Children use penguin avatars to navigate and play games. Both Club Penguin and Webkinz restrict the chat features of avatars to prevent poor behavior and ease parental concerns.

Two researchers were brought up in the first article. Peggy Meszaros, a professor of human development at Virginia Tech, and Peter Grunwald, no affiliation given. Both suggested parental supervision, especially at younger ages, is important to maintain healthy balance and responsibility on the sites.

Jane Healy, author of Failure to Connect: How Computers Affect Our Children’s Minds – for Better and Worse, was much more critical of the sites. She claimed the sites are steering children toward consumer lifestyles.

The second story was by Matthew Barakat, and focused exclusively on Webkinz, mostly through the eyes of Barakat’s six year old son. Webkinz is a twist on the old cheap plush toy sales technique. Previous generations familiar with Cabbage Patch dolls and Beanie Babies will recognize Webkinz plush toys as a 21st Century twist on previous collectible trends. Each Webkinz product has a code allowing a year’s play on the Webkinz site. Barakat says that additional credits can be earned by playing games on the site, but it is easier to just buy another doll for $15. This has led to sell-outs of the dolls in many places.

Barakat doesn’t interview any researchers, but he says he thinks his son is learning some important lessons on the site, including money management and other responsibilities.

References

Barakat, M. (2007, July 12). Review: Webkinz site not just for kids. [Online]. Available: http://fe15.news.sp1.yahoo.com/s/ap/20070712/
ap_on_hi_te/tech_test_webkinz;_ylt=Aqqvj0kFaOh2ZdDNOmFTLw9j24cA

Jesdanun, A. (2007, July 13). Sites introduce preteens to networking. [Online]. Available: http://fe15.news.sp1.yahoo.com/s/ap/20070713/
ap_on_hi_te/social_networking_tweens;_ylt=AlcBUnLIP_3kfNb5.Ne26XFj24cA