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

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.

Gambling Banned in SL

I’ve long been interested in Second Life as an educational or serious games venue, and my discussion with Karl Kapp about the merits of SL versus World of Warcraft as appropriate venues for educational contexts still gets hits. But, there is a type of gaming in SL that, regardless of popularity, is now banned by corporate parent Linden Lab: gambling. Apparently folks could gamble using the in-game currency, which could then be converted to real dough. Or, probably more likely, folks could convert real money to Linden bucks then lose it all in virtual casinos.

Linden Lab is bringing SL into compliance with new US federal law that prohibits online gambling. Andrew, over at Gaming Today, suggests that SL folks will likely find loopholes such as virtual sports betting and office pools.

On the one hand, it’s a shame since SL gambling could have been used as a Petri dish for interested researchers. On the other hand, similar gaming (perhaps using fake virtual money) could probably be replicated without too much additional effort. Time will tell.