Webkinz Exploiting Children
(1 votes, average: 4 out of 5)
Loading ...So this past week I made it into the Webkinz world for at least 20-30minutes a night, and sometimes longer. I’ve come to the conclusion that while there are some positive aspects of playing in this virtual world, there are many more negative components. In my opinion, It’s undeniable that the learning forums built into this site are beneficial for the children that typically engage in the Webkinz world. I found myself spending a fair amount of time in:
. I chose the 
option, which determines the level of difficulty in questions, and then I had the choice between the following subjects: The Arts, Social Studies, Health, Math, Language and Science. I dabbled in all of the offered subjects, and I have to admit I did get the occasional question wrong. I knew the vast majority of answers, but there were a couple of instances in which I hesitated between two answers (the questions come in form of multiple choice). And while I am no genius, I’m assuming that if I was able to learn some things by participating in Quizzy’s Question Corner, children half my age and younger would also certainly be able to pick up valuable information.
But on the negative side of Webkinz, I found the majority of the rest of the site to be rather exploitive of children. Specifically, this quality became increasingly evident throughout the portion of the site where you decorate your pet’s room and buy clothing etc. for it.
First of all, many of the item descriptions did not sit well with me. For example, when I went to buy clothing for My Little Pony (as my pet is named), I ended up purchasing this shirt: 
. I don’t like the idea of planting the idea in a child’s head that any item, whether it’s clothing, furniture or a toy, is “a must have.” It implies that you are less worthy if you don’t have a particular shirt, and I think this reinforces the notion that material goods can be used to measure how good or bad someone should feel about him/herself.
Secondly, the Webkinz site has a feature that allows your pet’s friends to come and see your room (and you can go visit their’s). In my opinion, this is a great way to create a sense of competition, where visiting a friend’s room with more decoration and more toys than your own can cause that child to feel inadequate and push him/her to purchase more with their Kinzcash. And I have to admit that this assessment is, to at least some degree, coming from my experience with the site. As you can see here: 
my room is very sparsely decorated, and after visiting two other of My Little Pony’s friend’s rooms, I wanted to buy more in the WShop…but I had very little Kinzcash left. And while I could try to earn more money by playing some of the games, (such as Mini Golf, Ant Mania and Cash Cow) the amount of Kinzcash I would likely earn in a reasonable amount of time would be nothing in comparison to me purchasing another pet altogether (which automatically gives you 2000 in Kinzcash). Therefore, if I were, say, an 8 yr. old girl, GANZ, (the company behind Webkinz), would have been successful in getting me to beg my parents to pay REAL money for another Webkinz pet, just so I could derive a sense of self-worth by adding to a FAKE room by spending FAKE money.
Lastly, I found some of the options that were available for me to buy for My Little Pony to be strange. A prime example of this would be a treadmill, which I purchased. At first I didn’t think the site would allow her to actually run on it, because there are things like basketballs and other sporting goods that you can purchase for your pet, but are just for show (My Little Pony couldn’t bounce the basketball or shoot it or anything). However, to my surprise, the Webkinz site had a feature that would allow My Little Pony to actually get on the treadmill and run.
Out of curiosity, I let My Little Pony run on the treadmill for 12 minutes straight, and I was never prompted to stop, and she never told me she was tired. I took her off the treadmill after almost 15 minutes had elapsed because I was bored of watching the tiny pony run on the tiny pink treadmill, but I found the whole thing altogether odd..but funny. It was weird that this was a feature of the site (why the ability to run on a treadmill instead of bounce a basketball, which is a game?), and that it existed with seemingly little attention paid to my clear mistreatment of my pet.
Also, on a quick side note, I was constantly getting logged off of the Webkinz site. I thought at first that it may be my internet connection, but after doing some quick research, I learned that it is in fact a very common problem experienced but virtually all Webkinz users. This issue was particularly annoying when I was trying to emerge myself in Kinzchat. After finally finding a friend that would add me to their buddy list, I would get signed off and it would take me at least 5-10 minutes before I was able to sign back on - making it very difficult to try and carry on a conversation - (although, when I did manage to stay logged in for a decent amount of time, I found it virtually impossible to have an actual interaction with other Webkinz users due to the formatting restrictions of the Kinzchat feature).
Comments
This site is a marketer’s dream. Imagine being able to influence consumer’s at such an early age. Look at children’s commercials at Xmas. Although, it seems harmless enough superficially, you can see how sites like these start embedding codes into our collective psyche at earlier stages of development.
-egor
Some of these points are really interesting. It’s like these companies make games to teach kids certain lessons but completely neglect other things that the child might learn from it. Clearly, consumerism is something that’s not only taught but completely reinforced. Kids these days already have to many commercials directed towards them, do we really need to show them what else they MUST HAVE? I think also that kids can pick up on some of these oddities as well, not just you because you’re older.
I wonder what kinds of kids go on this site. Where are their parents? You might not be able to answer these questions exactly, but what do you think about the way gender, race, sexuality, age, etc is portrayed or taught or regulated on this site. What ideologies are taught? Who are the creators?