Undercover Mom in Poptropica, Part 2: The Apple Jacks of kids' virtual worlds
By Sharon Duke Estroff
Last week I detailed the good things I discovered in this popular kids' virtual world for 5-to-10-year-olds. This week...
What I wasn't crazy about
Video Game Overtones. Gallant educational effort aside, my suspicions were correct. Kids aren’t flocking to Poptropica.com
by the tens of millions out of a quest for learning, they’re flocking
there for the highly addictive video games. No sooner had I entered an
Aztec ruin on Shark Island than I found myself hopping, flipping, and
climbing Nintendo-style to a secret passage (a task that took me a good
30 minutes to nail down as I kept missing my landing targets and being
tossed back to Go). Indeed, everywhere I turned on Poptropica held
similar gaming challenges. It’s safe to say that for every second a kid
spends reading educational tidbits on Poptropica, he spends hundreds
more in videogame la-la land.
To Cheat or Not to Cheat.
Let there be no mistake about it. Poptropica games are HARD. For a
prehistoric parent like me, they border on downright impossible. At a
loss for how I’d ever manage to sedate that Great White and save Shark
Island, I turned to two of my joystick-savvy sons (ages 9 and 14) for
assistance. But alas, they too failed miserably. That’s when I began
combing the kiddie masses (at school, birthday parties, Chuck E. Cheese
and the like) for advice on how to succeed in Poptropica. The consensus
was clear and simple: I needed to Google "Poptropica Cheats." My search
yielded no less than 36,000 results including this unsettling video
on YouTube of two children explaining how to cheat on the site - a
great opportunity, I'd say, for family discussion about "cheating" in
game and virtual worlds vs. in the real world: Ask your kids the
similarities and differences are.
Advertising All Around.
I’m not naïve. I understand that for a free virtual world like
Poptropica to be profitable it needs to feature paid advertisements.
The Apple Jacks banners flanking the site didn’t bother me a bit. Nor
did the Cinnamon Toast Crunch game that has kids collecting pieces of
cereal. But is it really necessary to launch a full-screen pop-up ad
every time a kid (or a mom) moves the mouse a millimeter too far to the
right or left? Worse yet, the pop-up ads prevented me from returning to
the Poptropica page where I’d been previously playing, forcing me to
start the game all over again with a brand new avatar – five times.
(Hmm, might such repeat registration have something to do with those
reported 20 million Poptropica accounts? Hey, I’m just saying.)
The Bottom Line
Ultimately,
I found Poptropica to be a lot like the Apple Jacks cereal it plugs so
aggressively - loops of empty calories dusted with vitamins and
minerals. Nevertheless, in a virtual-world cafeteria line full of
straight-out junk food, it makes for a pretty good choice.
Sharon
Duke Estroff is an award-winning educator and author of "Can I Have a Cell Phone for Hanukkah? (Random House,
2007). Her parenting articles appear in over 100 publications including
Parents, Good Housekeeping, Woman's Day and the Jerusalem Post. Her popular Undercover Mom Blog on Net Family News
gives digital immigrant parents timely, straightforward advice on raising digital native kids.
