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Jesse Shannon is the president of the premiere interactive marketing agency, SAJE Media. As a corporate citizen, he busted his chops in the dynamic world of video game production gaining working experience in Activision's Los Angeles and Tokyo offices. His most recent work as an employee was contracting with Honda on their ASIMO humanoid robot project spreading the good word on the coming personal robotics industry to the world (and Disneyland).

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Online Community, Minus Smut: Whyville Aims to Make the Virtual Streets Safe for Kids

Written on
Jun 7, 2006 
Author
Jesse Shannon  |
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Online Community, Minus Smut: Whyville Aims to Make the Virtual Streets Safe for Kids

Whyville strives to not only meet but exceed COPPA (the Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act) standards. There’s a whole suite of tools to give kids a safe place to learn and socialize on the net. First off, children under 13 must get a permission slip signed by their parents before they can chat, sign in to bulletin boards or use the Y-mail service. Also, before anyone on the site can begin chatting, they must go through a 3 day trial period for learning the site and getting familiar with the rules.

During this time, they can take the Chat license test as many times as they need to get it 100% correct. The chat license test features a lot of questions that clarify safety issues that even I, internet veteran that I am, found difficult. What should a kid do when asked the A/S/L (age, sex, location) question? What should a kid do when asked an inappropriate question on the service? How does a kid know who the “city workers” (watchful Whyville employees) are? When should the powerful 911 service be used?

The 911 service is the catch-all tool that is available in all chat sessions giving kids a direct line to Whyville city workers if anyone is acting inappropriately. There are also many automatic safety tools as well. Profanity and inappropriate subjects are blocked from chat windows, and all bulletin board and Y-mail messages are scanned for content.

I happened to find out about the Y-Mail defense mechanisms the hard way. Since SAJE Media is working with Whyville to develop advertising opportunities, I signed up for the service to get a better idea of what goes on there. People of any age are welcome to join Whyville, as long as they do not misrepresent their age. So parents, teachers and other non-kids are welcome, but I have to warn you, this is a kid’s realm. In a social sense, Whyville functions on kids rules. For anyone over, say 21 years old, Whyville can be a pretty interminable, strange place. Though I digress, the generation gap is a subject for a whole other article.

To get started, I entered some of the vibrant, virtual chat rooms as a “bluebie”, which is what a newbie is called in Whyville because you start with a basic blue face as your avatar. The detailed, cartoony avatar truly acts as your face to the Whyville community, and the kids show incredible personality and creativity through their custom created avatars.

However, you cannot gain access to all the cool face parts and thus attractive avatars until you’ve been on Whyville long enough to earn some of the in-game currency, called “clams.” Without a cool avatar and with a limited knowledge of all the latest emoticons and chat speak the kids are typing these days, it can be tough figuring out how to have a meaningful conversation in, well, kidsville.

Eventually, a “Whyvillian” as the citizens of Whyville are called, took pity on me and offered to give my avatar a makeover. I was so touched! It was like being the new kid in a new school sitting by myself at the loser table, and some nice kid came up and asked me if I wanted to sit at the cool table. So it was with much eagerness that I opened my first “Ymail” from the Good Samaritan. That’s where the trouble began. In addition to the safety guidelines, one point that is made abundantly clear during the sign up process is the importance of not giving out your password.

Reading my very first Ymail, I was troubled to find that I would have to give up my Whyville password to the friendly Good Samaritan for her to pull off the makeover. I was incredulous. I responded that I may be a bluebie, but I’m not stupid, and she’s lucky I don’t 911 her for making such an illegal request.





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