• Skip to primary navigation
  • Skip to main content
  • Skip to primary sidebar
  • Skip to footer

NetFamilyNews.org

Kid tech intel for everybody

Show Search
Hide Search
  • Home
  • Youth
  • Parenting
  • Literacy
  • Safety
  • Policy
  • Research
  • About NetFamilyNews.org
    • Supporters
    • Anne Collier’s Bio
    • Copyright
    • Privacy

Top 8 workarounds of kid virtual-world users

July 18, 2008 By Anne 3 Comments

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
    Share Button
  • Filed Under: cyberbullying, kids, Risk & Safety, Social Media, social networking, virtual worlds, Youth

    Reader Interactions

    Trackbacks

    1. Smart safety: YouTube's 'neighborhood watch program' - NetFamilyNews.org | NetFamilyNews.org says:
      April 1, 2014 at 8:37 pm

      […] Because of sheer size and all the “false positives” (kind of like false alarms) any site’s customer service department gets from users reporting abuse, no global social media service could possibly detect all violations of its Terms of Use. [One site another moderator once told me that about 90% of abuse reports on her site were false positives, whether from people testing the system, acting out, making stuff up, making a mistake or abusing abuse reporting (see No. 5 in my 2008 post "Top 8 workarounds in kids virtual worlds").] […]

      Reply
    2. 2 new kids’ social spaces: ToonsTunes, Scuttlepad | NetFamilyNews.org says:
      August 12, 2010 at 11:34 pm

      […] know that they also tend to make a game of “gaming the system” in virtual worlds (see “Top 8 workarounds of kid virtual world users”). What I’ve learned from my friends who are virtual-world moderators and online-community […]

      Reply
    3. A teen on kid virtual worlds | NetFamilyNews.org says:
      July 2, 2010 at 12:30 am

      […] and only being able to use certain words, there was occasionally underground activity (see also “Top 8 workarounds of kid virtual world users”). “Some sites now have started to limit phrases, and only let kids use a set of pre-made […]

      Reply

    Leave a Reply Cancel reply

    Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

    This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.

    Primary Sidebar

    NFN in your in-box:

    Anne Collier


    Bio and my...
    2016 TEDx Talk on
    the heart of digital citizenship

    Connect with me on LinkedIn
    Follow me on MASTODON
    Friend me on Facebook
    See me on YouTube

    IMPORTANT RESOURCES

    Our (DIGITAL) PARENTING BASICS: Safety + Social
    NAMLE, the National Association for Media Literacy Education
    CASEL.org & the 5 core social-emotional competencies of SEL
    Center for Democracy & Technology
    Center for Innovative Public Health Research
    Childnet International
    Committee for Children
    Congressional Internet Caucus Academy
    ConnectSafely.org
    Control Shift: a pivotal book for Internet safety
    Crimes Against Children Research Center
    Crisis Textline
    Cyber Civil Rights Initiative's Revenge Porn Crisis Line
    Cyberwise.org
    danah boyd's blog and book about networked youth
    Disconnected, Carrie James's book on digital ethics
    FOSI.org's Good Digital Parenting
    The research of Global Kids Online
    The Good Project at Harvard's School of Education
    If you watch nothing else: "Parenting in a Digital Age" TED Talk by Prof. Sonia Livingstone
    The International Bullying Prevention Association
    Let Grow Foundation
    Making Caring Common
    Raising Digital Natives, author Devorah Heitner's site
    Renee Hobbs at the Media Education Lab
    MediaSmarts.ca
    The New Media Literacies
    Report of the Aspen Task Force on Learning & the Internet and our guide to Creating Trusted Learning Environments
    The Ruler Approach to social-emotional learning (Yale Center for Emotional Intelligence)
    Sources of Strength
    "Young & Online: Perspectives on life in a digital age" from young people in 26 countries (via UNICEF)
    "Youth Safety on a Living Internet": 2010 report of the Online Safety & Technology Working Group (and my post about it)

    Categories

    Recent Posts

    • Safety by co-design: How we can take youth online safety to the next level
    • Much-less-social media on Facebook’s 20th birthday
    • What child online safety really needs, senators
    • Welcome to 2024!
    • Supporting the youngest witnesses of this humanitarian crisis
    • Should our kids learn how to use generative AI? Well…
    • The missing piece in US child online safety law
    • Generative AI: July 2023 freeze frame

    Footer

    Welcome to NetFamilyNews!

    Founded as a nonprofit public service in 1999, NetFamilyNews quickly became the “community newspaper” of a vital interest community of subscribers in more than 50 countries. Site and newsletter became a blog in the early 2000s. Nowadays, you can subscribe in the box to the right to receive articles in your in-box as they're posted – or look for toots on Mastodon or posts on our Facebook page, LinkedIn and Medium.com. She welcomes your comments, follows and shares!

    Categories

    • Home
    • Youth
    • Parenting
    • Literacy
    • Safety
    • Policy
    • Research

    ABOUT

    • About NFN
    • Supporters
    • Anne Collier’s Bio
    • Copyright
    • Privacy

    Search

    Subscribe



    THANKS TO NETFAMILYNEWS.ORG's SUPPORTER HOMESCHOOL CURRICULUM.
    Copyright © 2025 ANNE COLLIER. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.