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)

Well, the PR people have found This Mommy Gig - that was fast! As a group, the moms here have given this a lot of thought and have decided on this as our policy for doing reviews and product contests when approached by companies and their PR firms (and we’re sharing with you in the name of full disclosure):

1. We will always fully disclose if we have been approached to write a review and what products we received to doing so
2. We will only do a maximum of 1 review or contest/product giveaway per week for products that we are “compensated” for - as in being given a product to review or being given product to give away to readers. (We decided on a max of 1 per week so it doesn’t in any way interfere with our main content about moms and juggling our crazy lives, but will still allow us to offer you great free stuff because honestly, we ALL love free stuff!).
3. We will be 100% honest in our reviews and will not review products that we would not recommend to our closest friends or family.

Tons of thanks goes out to Megan Jordan at The Velveteen Mind for creating Mommy Bloggers - The Resource, which gave me a lot of things to think about when creating this policy with the moms here. We’re here to write about our adventures in motherhood and connect with other working parents, that’s why I created the site. Now companies want to give us free stuff and then give YOU free stuff…….does this muddy the waters? Well, in my mind, no. A maximum of 1 post/week in which you get the chance to learn about products that we like and might make your life easier/more wonderful - and even better yet, FREE STUFF! If you love the rest of what we write and hate the entire IDEA of this, you only have to ignore at the very most 1 post a week - no big deal, right? We’d love to get your input on this - readers DO come first………….

With that being said, here’s the first item (a contest where the prize is free house cleaning service every other week for a year) that we were approached about, and it’s really just letting you know about something that I as a mother of 2 and a hater of cleaning would LOVE to win! I’m really just being nice posting it - I’m not getting ANYTHING out of this (nothing, nada, zip, zilch) and would love to hear about it if you win………..because then you’ll have time to come clean MY house!