Most people have heard of Second Life and other adult virtual world games, but what many of you might not be aware of is that there is at least one virtual world game that is designed for kids; this kid virtual world is called Club Penguin. Club Penguin was developed by New Horizon Interactive, but was later bought by Disney. The game was designed for children between the ages of six and fourteen but anybody can play it. This game was made available to the general public in October of 2005 and has continued to grow ever since.
Club Penguin is an online world that offers cartoon Penguins for your character rather than human forms. The Penguins then waddle around and talk to one another, play minigames and participate in a wide range of activities that are available in a wintery wonder land. Just like other virtual world games you have to sign up for an account in order to play. And like other virtual worlds when you create an account you actually have two options.
Your first option is to create a members account which will end up costing you $5.95 a month or you can choose to be billed every six months or once a year, of course if you choose to pay for the membership in bulk you are going to receive a small discount. If you choose to create a paid account then you are going to have certain advantages that non-paid members won’t have. Some of those advantages are you can own three or more puffles, enjoy early access to newly released games, buy furniture and many other things that non-members won’t have access too.
This leads us to the other option which is a free account. In Club Penguin a free account is considered a non-member account and you are extremely limited as to what you can do in the virtual world. You can still buy colors and player-card backgrounds, you can still play games and you can go anywhere, unless there is a member’s only party going on at the time. But something that you need to be aware of is that if you are a non-member you can only have two puffles, you can only buy the colors blue and red, you can not buy furniture or clothes for your Penguins and you can not access the new game area during its first release.
Like most virtual worlds chatting is a huge aspect of the game because you are going to need to communicate with other players. But unlike other virtual worlds the chat options in this game are different then regular virtual worlds because this game is designed for kids from six to fourteen. The two methods of chat are Ultimate-Safe Chat mode, which allows players to select what they want to say from a predefined list of phrases. The second method of chat is the Standard-Safe Chat mode which allows players to enter in custom messages, but these messages are always censored for any vulgar language.
Something else that you need to be aware of is that Club Penguin is completely moderated. What this means is that there are numerous people who watch what is going on at all times to ensure that no profanity is used nor any kind of harassment or abuse towards any player. And if you abuse the rules of the game then you are most likely going to end up with a ban. In fact most of the time if you use any type of profanity you are going to get automatically banned for at least 24 hours. And if the behavior continues you can end up with a longer ban. Keep in mind that if you get between 3 to 5 bans, depending on what the bans were for, you can get a permanent ban.