This is part of a series of posts looking at virtual worlds targeted toward kids.

If your kids watch the same TV channels mine does, then you’ve probably seen the commercials for a new virtual world called Free Realms. My girl certainly saw them and wanted to go check it out, so our series of kid-focused virtual world reviews continues.

Free Realms
Free Realms bills itself as “a fun, whimsical virtual world filled with dynamic gameplay and compelling content for everyone, especially families.” It’s really more of a pure MMOG than any of the other worlds we’ve toured as part of this series. As soon as my girl set up her account (all by herself, except for my need to give her an e-mail to attach to the account) and entered the world, she was met by a character asking her to embark on her first quest. This prevents the “what do I do now” issue that plagues some virtual worlds, but also aligns more firmly with games such as the non-kid-focused World of Warcraft (WoW).

With more than a million people signing up for it in the first week and that number doubled already, it’s on target to be just as popular as WoW, too. In addition to quests, kids can work at a variety of jobs from pet trainer to ninja to miner and others mentioned below. Like most other kid virtual worlds, you can enter and play for free; but, for $4.99/month you can upgrade to get more things like additional job options, and you’ll also pay to purchase items.

The Good
Free Realms automatically limits kids under 13 to “quick chat” - my preferred choice for my youngster because it restricts them to a preprogramed set of words and phrases to communicate. That way you don’t have to worry about them giving out any personal information (but, don’t let that get you off the hook for still having that discussion about what you don’t share online).
Free Realms’ parent controls area also mentions that they intend to implement a feature which will permit you to customize a calendar to set times of day and/or days of the week that your kid will have access to the account online, as well as days and times during which they may play.

The Bad
I’m willing to bet that most of us teach our kids that fighting is wrong, so it’s a little unsettling to see that quests in Free Realms can involve combat and one of the jobs kids can get is called a Brawler. Brawlers are described as being “up for fight anytime with anyone” and they “use hammers, clubs, and powerful kicks to defeat enemies.”
We didn’t run into any Brawlers in our first few visits to Free Realms, but then again, we didn’t run into anyone other than the in-world characters who play parts in the quests. This may or may not be a bad thing, but struck me as odd considering there are supposed to be more than 2 million people in-world now.

The Lessons Learned
I only heard the “rated E for everyone” part of the commercials, but when you really look, you’ll see it is “everyone 10+” and I would reccomend following that age recommendation from the Entertainment Software Rating Board. Even more specifically the rating warns of “crude humor” and “fantasy violence.” We haven’t encountered the humor yet, but as noted above, the violence is definitely there.

Related articles by Zemanta

• Free Realms Still Growing Insanely Quickly [E3 2009] (kotaku.com)
• Sony’s Free Realms game signs up a million users in 17 days (venturebeat.com)
• The free price is working out nice for Sony’s Free Realms as registrants top 2 million (venturebeat.com)
• Video Game Review | Free Realms: Pick a Role, Any Role, Then Live Nine Lives (nytimes.com)

This is part of a series of posts looking at virtual worlds targeted toward kids.

The latest stop on our kid-focused virtual worlds safari took us to a world of cute dinosaurs. Dinokids was a major sponsor of the recent Virtual Worlds Conference & Expo, so I not only got their promotional cards in my conference bag, but also got to watch commercials for them prior to every panel and keynote. Not sure if my little review will give them enough return on the money spent for that placement, but here goes. <wink>

Dinokids

One of the first things that struck me about Dinokids is how game-like it seemed. Not that it’s any different in regards to the games it offers in-world – it’s very similar to most of the other kid worlds we’ve visited in regards to the activities offered. No, when I say game-like, I’m talking about the way your dinosaur actually moves around inside the environment. Not having played many video games in quite some time, I still immediately thought of Mario Brothers when I saw ladders and ropes to climb to different levels. This video illustrates it better than I can explain:

In fact, one of the times my girl seemed to be having the most fun in Dinokids was during a game of chase with one of the few other dinos she met in-world, much like what you see in the video.

Speaking of videos, my girl discovered a movie theatre in-world while I had stepped away. She mentioned finding it, but said it just had some “teenager videos” in it – which I immediately made her go back and show me. Turns out they’re running YouTube videos inside Dinokids that appear to be primarily G-rated movie trailers for kid/tween-targeted moves. Whew!

The Good

Dinokids has a definite focus on parental involvement. When we first explored the world, I noticed two types of accounts – authorized and unauthorized. Having seen the subscription model as the main method other kid-focused worlds use to create cash-flow, I just assumed that unauthorized accounts were free and authorized ones cost. Turns out that both are free, but authorized means that a parental account has been created and associated with the child’s account.

This allows the parent to set several parameters for how your child will interact in Dinokids, including not only the choice between pre-programmed responses or free chat, but also setting time limits for how long your child can be logged in during a day. I really like that one as I’ve often thought about setting a timer when my girl gets on the computer to keep myself from losing track of just how long she’s been sitting there.

Also good is the educational element in some of the games such as the math one in the school building. And, dinos can learn about good citizenship and environmental stewardship by picking up trash around their world and placing it into a trash bin to earn eggs (the Dinokids currency).

One other thing I think I would rate “good” that I think is a unique feature in Dinokids is the camera for snapping pics of you and your friends in-world. I can see this as a nice bonus feature. It’s something you have to pay extra for, but gives your little dino a nice scrapbook of snapshots that they wouldn’t be able to grab via your basic screen capture.

The Bad

I’ve had to rewrite much of this section of my post after making the discovery that authorized accounts didn’t cost. Many features that I thought should have been at least partially available to free accounts are available, they just require that you as a parent authorize the account. So, “the bad” section of the post got a lot shorter.

Free or not, one thing I still didn’t really like was the controls for the athletic games such as track. Making your dino run requires hitting the space bar on your keyboard – over-and-over, faster-and-faster. In older users hands like mine, that can be done pretty easily, but in a six-year-old’s hands that repetitive fast motion turns into parent-cringing pounding on the keyboard. And don’t even ask them to try to do that and hit a letter key at the same time to jump over hurdles.

The Lessons Learned

Dinokids just launched as a public beta in September, so you won’t find the traffic numbers of a Club Penguin or Webkinz when your kid is looking for someone to talk to or play with in-world. And, many areas of the world are still under construction. Also, you may encounter bugs with such a new application. My first attempts to authorize my girl’s account didn’t work, and after a nice e-mail exchange with the team in Korea who is building Dinokids, it was determined that a bug in the system didn’t like the underscore character in my e-mail address. They quickly fixed it, and I can feel good about the fact that I’ve helped make it a better process for those who come after me. But, not everyone wants to be an early adopter and deal with the issues that can sometimes bring. Overall, we both liked what we were able to see and my girl has returned several times on her own, so if you’ve got a kiddo who’s crazy about dinosaurs this world is probably a good one for them.

Laura P. Thomas is the wife of a former rocker and mother of one 6-year-old girl that’s already waaay too interested in The Jonas Brothers (the apple didn’t fall far). She works in the Global Online team at Dell, evangelizes virtual worlds, and twitters too much as LPT.

This is part of a series of posts looking at virtual worlds targeted toward kids.

As with nearly all things Disney, when they embraced the technology of virtual worlds, they did it in a big way. Not that it was without a bumpy start, mind you. Their earliest venture into the space called ToonTown launched way back in 2003 and has been panned pretty hard - or worse, simply ignored. But, as I heard from Steve Parkis, SVP of Disney Online Studios, when he spoke at the Virtual Worlds Conference and Expo, Disney is not only improving the worlds they already have, but also taking the technology for creating them and adding a bit of the “Disney Difference” to it.

Club Penguin
Not everyone was sure it was a good thing when Disney bought the popular world of Club Penguin last August. Many took a wait-and-see approach to the news; and one year later, some users still don’t like it, while others have embraced it as a good thing. Founded in November of 2005 in Kelowna, Canada, Club Penguin is the flagship of Disney’s virtual world arsenal. It has more than two million accounts and its online newspaper, The Club Penguin Times, is apparently more widely read than New York’s Daily News, the Chicago Tribune or the Dallas Morning News. So, we decided penguins would be next on our safari of kid-focused virtual worlds.

When first going to the site it seemed that we would have to purchase a monthly subscription to enter, but a little more poking around and we found where we could create an account to get in-world for free. The sign-up process requires e-mail verification, supposedly by a parent. This was the first sign that parental involvement is definitely encouraged in Club Penguin. During sign-up, you’re given a choice of open (but human-moderated) chat or restricted chat. I thought about going with the open chat to allow more interaction, since I had heard from Parkis about the millions of lines of chat their moderators have reviewed; but, in the end, I opted for the pre-set conversation options.  Might as well take the super-safe side while she’s unaware of any other way to do it.

Once in, we picked a penguin color and name then headed off to see the sights. My girl picked the “nightclub” first, which turned out to be pretty tame - a dance floor downstairs and a couple of video games upstairs. The games we found as we explored beyond that starting point to the beach, the mines, the soccer field and more ranged from easy to challenging - a good thing for the wide range of ages they want to attract.

The Good
One of the best things about Club Penguin is their definite focus on kid safety and parental involvement. Related to that is the moderation and interaction the company has with their users. Here in Austin last week, one of the Club Penguin founders, Lane Merrifield, spoke about that moderation and interaction during a keynote of the Austin Game Developers Conference: “‘We rarely hire techies to take care of the kids… we hire people who care about the kids,’ with backgrounds as teachers and other professionals.” More than 150 of them respond to e-mails, have direction interaction with the Club Penguin members and, with the help of game veterans, enforce a constantly evolving censorship list.

The Bad
You really need to pay a monthly subscription fee to get everything out of it. Some things like the ability to buy merchandise for your “room” are limited. The options for non-subscribers to customize are there, but they’re fewer in number and your child will beg for the subscription so they can get the things they see, but are unable to purchase.

The Lessons Learned
There are plenty of fun games for your little penguin to play; but, if you want the full experience, be prepared to pay for it. A one-time purchase of a stuffed animal will not get it for you. Also, there is way more to learn than can fit in one post. The world has entire blogs focused on it, wikis, lots of game cheat sites, and apparently, in-world armies that have epic snowball fights. And that doesn’t even include the active Disney-run community blog that keeps penguins up-to-date and in-touch even when not in-world.

Laura P. Thomas is the wife of a former rocker and mother of one 6-year-old girl that’s already waaay too interested in The Jonas Brothers (the apple didn’t fall far). She works in the Global Online team at Dell, evangelizes virtual worlds, and twitters too much as LPT.