In one of the largest deals of the web 2.0 era, the Walt Disney Company recently agreed to pay as much as $700-million to buy Club Penguin, a ”virtual world” for children between the ages of six and 14. When kids join Club Penguin, they adopt an animated penguin as their online alter ego, or avatar. The penguins can chat or play games with one another or collect coins to buy trinkets at in-world shops.
Although it’s been around for less than two years, Club Penguin has become enormously popular. The site attracts nearly five million visitors a month and 700 000 kids have become paying members.
In fact, all of the most popular virtual worlds are geared to kids and teenagers. The venerable Habbo Hotel attracts seven million visitors a month, Sweden’s Stardoll attracts five million, Webkinz and Neopets attract about four million each, and Gaia Online reports nearly three million monthly visitors.
Clearly, there are big commercial rewards to be had by enticing children to spend a lot of time exploring virtual worlds. What’s less clear, though, is the long-term effect on the kids themselves. In one sense, the virtual worlds are simply the latest versions of the make-believe games that children have always played, with online avatars taking the place of dolls and action figures.
Some experts argue that hanging out online is just another benign form of play, and a few suggest that it may actually help speed the socialisation process through which children learn to interact with others.
They point out that virtual play helps youngsters become skilled users of computers and the internet.
But there are reasons for concern. The hours that kids spend in front of computer screens are hours they don’t spend engaged with the physical world, talking and playing with real people and real things.
Some authorities in child development wonder how effectively socialisation can occur when a child is sitting alone in front of a monitor.
”If kids are involved with things that keep them from playing with other kids, or keep them from being involved with physical activity, then it’s too much,” Richard Gallagher, a child psychologist at New York University, told a reporter from Newsday.
He worries, in particular, that the meticulously designed and programmed virtual worlds will rob children of the imagination required to engage in unstructured, open-ended play with their friends. He also warns that the intent of the commercial sites is less about socialisation and more about turning ”younger and younger kids [into] consumers and the targets of advertising”.
The fact is that even as it’s becoming routine for children to spend hours in virtual worlds every day, we don’t yet know whether it will help or hinder them in becoming happy, productive adults.
With Club Penguin and its like, we’re undertaking a massive experiment in child development, and it will be a long time before we learn the results. — Â