Top 8 workarounds of kid virtual-world users

It stands to reason that bullying happens in kids' virtual worlds (e.g., Club Penguin, Webkinz, Neopets, Nicktropolis, etc.), because, well, it happens in school, instant messaging, and social-networking sites. But I hadn't learned how it happened until Sharon Duke Estroff called me about it. The Atlanta-based parenting columnist, former elementary school teacher, kids' pop culture expert, author, and mother of four spent a couple of weeks in Club Penguin to learn what her eight-year-old son might experience there. She didn't like everything she saw.

Having occasionally watched my own son waddle around and play games in Club Penguin and thought it was pretty cute, I asked her why. Sharon - who will tell you that she's definitely not an overreactor where parenting's concerned - proceeded to tell me what she learned about digital pre-adolescent behavior in CP (and I have no doubt similar experiences are to be had in every other virtual playground on the Web).

Not that her CP time was all bad, of course, but there were some "Lord of the Flies moments" just like in real-life elementary school, and I thought you'd like to know what the virtual versions look like - techniques kids have developed for beating the system so they can move all that social behavior at school, good and bad, online. Simply put, they're "workarounds"- some but not all about meanness or bullying. So I boiled the behavioral parts of what Sharon told me down to a list of eight (note how sophisticated these workarounds' young creators are):

1. Beating the language filter. Putting consecutive words in separate message "bubbles," spaces between letters, creative capitalization and punctuation, etc. - whatever it takes to say what they like, including mean stuff and invitations to "visit me alone in my igloo."

2. Code lingo. Not just POS ("parent over shoulder") or ROTFL ("rolling on the floor laughing"), but text-formatting tricks that get around safe-language rules: e.g., if language filters don't allow numbers, kids share their ages by expressing them in dots. For example, they ask, "How many dots are you?" and get back: "I'm ........."

3. ID theft, kid-style. One of the cardinal rules of online safety is never to share your password because best friends sometimes become non-friends and can impersonate and embarrass you. Password-sharing, however, is rampant in kid virtual worlds - a popular way of offering and accepting best-friend status. It becomes a problem when your "best friend" logs on as your avatar and makes it break the rules so you get kicked out.

4. Stealing virtual possessions. Kids also use peers' passwords to steal their virtual clothes, furniture, and other in-world possessions so the victims have to start over or walk around as naked avatars and so the thief, succumbing to some sort of pre-adolescent digital version of "keeping up with the Joneses," can add to his/her in-world prestige (as well as the real-world kind - because, Sharon said, a lot of penguins know each other as humans at school too).

5. Abusing abuse reporting. The digital version of tattling: being mean by reporting avatars just so they get privileges taken away. "Kids can report other kids for all kinds of vague reasons, but they don't have to give a reason - all they have to do is press a button on the player card and the complaint goes straight to the monitor," Sharon said.

6. Using safety features to bully. Using blocking, ghosting, ignoring, and other in-world user-security tools to ostracize a kid or make it clear he's not a member of "the club" - whatever the club-of-the-moment is.

7. Digital "Spin the Bottle." Those pre-teen games for exploring dating and sexuality have moved into cyberspace. Kids manipulate their avatars and a virtual world's systems to create opportunities to explore virtual sexuality too. An example in Club Penguin: "Spin the Fish," only the fish doesn't spin; "you have to pretend it does," according to young CP lifestyles blogger Imatweetybrd, whose blog Sharon found. "You either say 'I'll spin!' or someone will tell you to spin. Then, most likely, you are just going to say 'spin,' then 'it landed on [the penguin's name that you like most]. At that point, you go up the person and say 'mwah.' Then your turn's over. Your penguin might like you back and ask you out or maybe you want to ask him out, then you guys can leave the game or whatever."

8. Kid avatars have cheats too. Just because the person behind the avatar is only nine years old certainly does not mean s/he's any less savvy about how to find cheats to beat the game and make coins or points a lot faster in order to have a bigger place of residence and more clothes, puffles, and furniture. The kid just types the name of an in-world game into a Web search engine and turns up hundreds of tips, or "cheats," as they're called - situation normal in the world of videogames (clearly also for people of younger and younger age, we now see).

My takeaways

First it should be acknowledged that there are plenty of positive and just plain fun things about Club Penguin too (check out its kid philanthropy feature). It's possible the average child user (probably 7-10 - not teen hackers like Mike 92 in Related links below) could experience or use one or two of the above workarounds, but not likely all, unless he or she is looking for trouble, feeling mean, or really into power in a social sort of way. Putting all the workarounds together here is designed only to help parents ask intelligent questions.

My 11-year-old was an avid CP user for a few weeks last year, but he never noticed any of the above except a few cheats (penguins a little too good at some games) and occasional meanness - trigger-happy abuse reporters or safety-feature abusers - and none of it ruined his fun in CP, but CP also wasn't the all of his entertainment or social life (balanced lives do help us not take certain things too seriously). The workarounds only confirm for me that, wherever kids are online, alertness and critical thinking are needed on the part of children as well as parents. Club Penguin and other kid virtual worlds are not babysitters! But they are great social-networking training for both participants and parents. They offer many teachable moments for learning all kinds of things: e.g., how to treat others online as well as offline, how to be a good citizen and friend, how to detect social and commercial manipulation, how to deal with peer pressure and group think, and even how to be a leader.

Readers, we'd love to hear about your children's virtual-world experiences in the ConnectSafely.org forum. Email's ok too, via anne@netfamilynews.org.

Related links

Visual aids: "Club Penguin Robbery" video at YouTube in which director/producer/penguin Mike 92 robs Club Penguin's bank and gets his just desserts (here's his cheats site). I'm guessing Mike is a teenager who uses CP as a hacking and video-producing creative outlet (hacking isn't necessarily illegal or malicious). Another, more bird's-eye view of cheating the systems is "How to move peoples stuff on Club Penguin."

Numbers: "As of last month [4/08], more than 100 new virtual worlds had started up or were in development," the New York Times reports. "Many sites such as Empire of Sports, Planet Cazmo and Xivio are aimed at so-called tweens, ages 8 to 12.... This year, more than 12 million children nationwide under the age of 18 will visit at least one of these sites, and that number will grow to 20 million by 2011," the Times adds, citing eMarketer research.

For some nearly original digital kid anthropology research, surf around the Club Penguin Coolers blog.

Sharon Duke Estroff's bio Web site

Good for dinnertable discussion: "How social influencing works"

ConnectSafely.org's Safety Tips & Advice page

Two new WB sites for kids & youth

Warner Bros. has two new Web sites aimed at a generation increasingly more interested in the Web than in watching TV. KidsWB.com features timeless favorites like Bugs, Scooby Doo, and DC Comics heroes (e.g., Batman), the Associated Press reports, and "TheWB.com - with full episodes of shows such as 'Friends,' 'Smallville' and made-for-online shows" - is targeting 20-somethings. "It also will be possible to view TheWB.com inside Facebook users' home pages and vice versa," the AP adds.

Disney.ru & other Russian sites

Hannah Montana has arrived in Russia. Disney's getting very local around the world, as Disney.ru joins counterparts in the UK and Japan. The Russian-language site has similar features to other Disney Web properties, with sections featuring movies, TV, games, and marketing of Disney offline attractions, all of which can be navigated by individual Disney characters, the company's press release says. Gosh, maybe it's controlled by the FSB! Just kidding, but read in the International Herald Tribune about a parody site called FSBook.ru that makes a joke out of Russian "fears about how personal information that is freely shared on social networks may be used by government agencies" like the former KGB. It does give new meaning to concerns about posting personal info in a social site!

Online ed for little tykes

PBSKids.com has always meant ad-free entertainment for the littlest surfers. Now the US's Public Broadcasting Service has a new educational service for children 3-6: PBS Kids Play "is a subscription-based service that lets children play animated games with characters like Curious George and learn basic skills in reading, listening comprehension, and problem solving," CNET reports. CNET adds that parents have their own area of the service where they can see how their kids are progressing in terms of national educational standards. See also USATODAY's coverage.

More Web playgrounds coming

Stories about kids' virtual worlds are becoming perennial because children 6-10 appear to be a growth market. Twenty million children are expected to be virtual-world members by 2011, up from 8.2 million right now, according to eMarketer figures cited by the New York Times. This latest article paints a pretty good landscape. There's Disney's new “Pirates of the Caribbean” world for kids under 11, with "worlds on the way for Cars and Tinker Bell, among others. Nickelodeon, already home to Neopets, is spending $100 million to develop a string of worlds. Coming soon from Warner Brothers Entertainment, part of Time Warner: a cluster of worlds based on its Looney Tunes, Hanna-Barbera and D. C. comics properties." I was glad to get an update from this piece on Neopets' protections for kids under 13 (in compliance with the US's Children's Online Privacy Protection Act, or COPPA): "Neopets restricts children under 13 from certain areas unless their parents give permission in a fax. Several Neopets employees patrol the site around the clock, and messaging features are limited to approved words and phrases."

Disney's UK kids portal

Disney says it's about to launch a site for UK children and tweens. Disney.co.uk will be a portal pulling together the company's assets (including social networking) for kids, Reuters reports. "At its heart [is] a feature called Disney Xtreme Digital" in which users can "customize multimedia content simultaneously while watching and sharing videos, messages, music, and games." It'll be interesting to see what is meant by "social networking," but Reuters says "online parental-protection measures are wrapped into the site, along with functionality that prompts children to use Disney-proposed online-chat phrases that have an emphasis on being polite while also using language that can reflect whether the user is looking at content focused on pirates or princesses."

ClubPenguin members can give to charity

Parents of penguins probably already know that gold coins are earned by playing games in the site. With them, penguins can now not only feed and care for their puffles, and buy surfboards, etc. They can give to charity, the Associated Press and the in-site Penguin Times report (I like that my 10-year-old started reading that paper unbeknownst to me). "Starting Dec. 14 and running through Dec. 24, kids can choose to donate their virtual money to support the environment, children's health or children's education. The company will then split $1 million real dollars among three charities, including the World Wildlife Fund, the Elizabeth Glaser Pediatric AIDS Foundation and Free The Children." This started before ClubPenguin was acquired by Disney, according to the AP. "The Canadian website donated a little more than $30 million to charity after Disney agreed to pay $350 million for the company earlier this year."

What virtual worlds teach kids

Their effect is not entirely unlike hanging out at the shopping mall in the "real world," is my take-away from reading CNET on researchers' just-released study of kids' virtual worlds. Of course, my characterization is simplistic and on the negative side, but "the inherently commercial nature of virtual worlds like Club Penguin and Webkinz, which encourage kids to play games, dress up online characters, and buy virtual goods to decorate their in-world homes or avatars," seems to send kids the message, they said, that good residents, users, or "citizens" know how to make money (amass points by playing games) and buy the right things (e.g., furniture for your igloo, cute pets, and attractive clothes and accessories, I've found from watching my 10-year-old play in ClubPenguin).

But there were positives among the findings of researchers at the University of Southern California's Annenberg School of Communication, the recipients of major funding from the MacArthur Foundation for research on young people's use of digital media. "Kids who are active members of virtual worlds are learning how to socialize" and "how to be technologically savvy" - things they'll need when they enter the workplace - as well as "how to be good little consumers," writes CNET's Stefanie Olsen. Important to know, since "more than 50% of kids on the Internet will belong to such an environment by 2012," she reports. Another thing they're learning: the ability to adapt to and move in an environment of constant change. I was particularly interested in one thing Stefanie picked up on: that absorbing information is no longer the most important form of education - it's what to do with information and distinguishing between fact and fiction, i.e. media literacy. An educator said that to me recently: "Our kids know so much more than we did when we were their age. We don't need to fill their brains more. We need to help them manage all they're taking in."

Back to the consumerism part, The Telegraph tells of ClubPenguin's soon-to-launch, UK-based competitor, MoshiMonsters.com. Gizmodo calls it’s a mashup of Tamagotchi, Pokemon and NintenDogs, and my 10-year-old son calls it "a monster version of Neopets." And - because it plans to sell Moshi Monster charms, it looks like there'll be comparisons to Webkinz.com too. In any case, most appear to have aspects of this formula: games or puzzles to earn currency that buys things for an avatar that's sometimes real, sometimes virtual, sometimes both.

New virtual worlds for kids 6+

Close on the heels of her report that a "boomlet" of kids' virtual worlds was in the works, CNET's Stefanie Olsen blogs about toy company Playhut's two new online playgrounds, one for girls 6+, one for boys. Like ClubPenguin, it appears, "the free sites enable members to play games, dress up virtual characters and chat with friends - once parents send a permission slip via e-mail to the site." Well, ClubPenguin has very limited, scripted, chat, where kids are given phrases to choose from. VirtualWorldsNews reports that the free sites are Wowbotz for boys and Mystikats Kutties for girls.

Parental concerns key

eMarketer points out how important parents' views of social networking are to this social-Web business. It cites the research of Parks Associates as showing that "virtual world advertising in the United States will increase tenfold to $150 million by 2012 from the 2006 level. That spending could be cut, however, if parents deny permission for teens to visit virtual worlds. And parental approval is not a given, since some aspects of virtual worlds are still discomfiting for parents." What Mattel's BarbieGirls.com does is require girls to pick a username, password, and age range ("the choices are 5 or under, 6-7, 8-9, 10-12, 13-15 and 16+"). The also have to provide a parent's email address, "which is used to send an automated permission request. Once the parent approves, a child can access the site." Of course kids can find workarounds: It's impossible to verify that the email address really is the child's parent's, and the message "simply asks the recipient to affirm 'that you are the parent of the child')." And proof of the child's age can't be required because children don't have ID cards or personal information in any national database against which sites could check (a scary thought - see this on child age verification). [eMarketer this fall issued a very expensive lengthy report on kids' virtual worlds.]

Kids' virtual worlds hot

There's a mini boom of kids' virtual world afoot, CNET reports, probably fueled the success of Webkinz and Neopets and Disney's acquisition of ClubPenguin. One reason: "more kids are flocking to imaginative, character-driven environments. An expected 53% of children on the Web will belong to a virtual world within four years, more than doubling the current population of 8.2 million members," reports CNET citing eMarketer figures. Other worlds and services CNET mentions are WebbliWorld.com from the creators of Wallace & Gromit, GaiaOnline.com, Stardoll.com, and Nickelodeon's Nicktropolis. I would add Whyville.net as another prominent one, and possible Finland-based Habbo.com, though it probably skews slightly older. A related CNET article asks, "Are kids ready for ads in such spaces?". Since this interactive advertising goes well beyond cereal boxes and TV spots to immersive games and other forms of direct involvement for children, it's a good question to ask.

MP3 Barbie

Is it the Barbiepod? She has just as many outfits as the Barbie your mom knew and loved, but she's probably more appealing to the little female digital natives running around your house. Because she's a music player, and when her feet are plugged into the docking station, "she unlocks pages and pages of games, virtual shops and online chatting functions on the BarbieGirls.com Web site," the New York Times reports. This is kind of the tao of Webkinz, the new way to both market and sell "Web-enabled products" to Web-enabled kids. "Instead of asking young Web surfers to punch in their parents’ credit card numbers, BarbieGirls.com and other sites are sending customers to a real-world toy store first. Some of these sites (like the Barbie one) can be used in a limited way without purchasing merchandise — the better to whet young appetites - but others, like the popular Webkinz site, are of little or no use without a store-bought product or two (or three, or a dozen)." Then there's SpotzGirl.com, which allows users to design their own jewelry, picture frames, etc., with Spotz that are like charm-bracelet charms or buttons (the button maker can be purchased for $24.99 at a real-live store). Both sites are about personal expression - decorating oneself, site characters, and/or spaces.

Kids' ed sites back in vogue?

I feel like I’m back in Web 1.0, the downloadable, professionally-produced-content Web, when I read about educational sites for kids in the tech news media. They’ve been around for a long time, but they certainly haven’t been in the news. I guess what’s new is that the focus really is now shifting from textbooks and educational software to educational Web sites kids can interact with. For example, Starfall.com, which “opens access to learning exercises for free online,” CNET reports - kind of like the seasoned PBSKids.org. “Like a Sesame Street program, the free Web site teaches kids their ABCs and the basics of reading through the use of audio and visual phonetics, games and animations. Exercises on Starfall include sounding out vowels (‘ah’), reading books like The Little Hen and decorating a virtual character.” The other new-old genre is education-related sites for parents, such as the longstanding FamilyEducation.com and the startup Education.com, recently reviewed by SafeKids.com’s Larry Magid for CBSNEWS.com.

Outfitting their penguins

Some kids and tweens are obsessed with the virtual care, feeding, outfitting of their penguins, Webkinz, Neopets, etc. – not to mention furnishing their igloos and other spaces. In many cases, kids just have to amass points by playing lots of games in these sites, in which case the “cost” is screen time, a lack of healthy, active outdoor time, and something marketers aim for: serious brand loyalty (e.g. from playing games sponsored by cereal companies and driving virtual cars placed by automotive sponsors). Common Sense Media recently ran a commentary for parents with tips on how to turn these online activities into “value-able” discussions about how to be wise spenders (and savers).