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Neopets Gambling Controversy
To "feed" their pets, Neopets players have to win points in a variety of mini-games, including versions of poker and blackjack. Australia has a high rate of gambling problems with poker machines ("pokies"), so when a mother discovered her nine-year-old playing online poker to feed his virtual pet, she approached Today Tonight claiming McDonalds was setting her son up for a life of gambling addiction.
TT aired the story Parents not McHappy over pokie toy and the Neopets message boards went nuts. Meanwhile McDonalds heavied Neopets into banning Australians from the gambling games. Today Tonight must have received a lot of hate mail because the next night came Neopet players fight McDonalds ban, featuring interviews with adult Neopets addicts. But this only increased the outrage on the Neopets boards - they're now trying to squash rumors of McDonalds withdrawing sponsorship altogether, and Neopets shutting down."
Neopets is insidious because it provides "challenges" that appear to require students' problem-solving abilities. Its more like video-game crack since it combines elements that fascinate both girls and boys, youngters and adults: community-building chats, personal vendettas (you can slam an opponent by name) as well as the usual eye-candy. My students (grades 4/5, "inner-city" youth) will go to neopets given the smallest opportunity. Fortunately I've just gotten our squid-server going ... say "bye-bye! Neopets!"
I've heard about this site before (I work in PR), but in the context of how advertisers are trying to hook kids on their brands at a very young age. The logic goes that kids develop life-long brand associations, so the advertisers exploit that with these "free" games. Of course, you have to register, and the advertisers get a chance to get their hooks in you. I don't really consider online registration ever to be "free." It costs you something in terms of time, effort and privacy. That's fine for me - and most of us here - we know this stuff. But what about the kids who think they're getting something for nothing?
Electric Monkey Pants
Great, another parent who can't take responsibility to raise their own kid. How about you don't let the kid play the neopet? How about you watch the kid for signs of gambling addiction? How about you take responsibiliy for raising your own kid instead of blaming someone else
I figure it is the best way for them to learn the dangers of gambling. When you lose your allowance, well it hurts, but not as bad (I'm guessing here...) as when you lose your rent money.
We play Texas Hold 'Em, 2 cent / 4 cent, 3 limit raise per betting round.
You can easily loose a $0.50 or a $1 at the table, which is a good chuck of their allowance.
I figure it teaches them responsibility.
Sorry, but having an addictive game for kids to play poker and blackjack for more chips doesn't seem very educational to me. It's not like the 1970s where things were less stimulating but you actually learned stuff. Everything today especially dealing is so heavily stimulating and exploitive, it will just lead to problems in the future.
For example, when I learned math, I had exercises that I had to do with a textbook, pencil and pad of paper. It was boring, but I learned, and eventually learned how to study on my own. Nowadays, you need to have an educational game to make kids "learn". Tell me how this doesn't lead to kids getting bored from learning from an instruction book or during class? How will they possibly be able to learn to sit through a lecture without getting bored and not being constantly stimulated?
I'm now back in grad school after being out of school for 15 years, and I was astonished to see a 20-something kid playing his pocket Nintendo in the middle of a lecture. He's paying $2500 for this course, and he's so bored that he has to play a video game in the middle of a lecture? Incredible.
Kids need to learn without having all those flashing lights, adrenaline rush, etc, otherwise they'll grow up to be true ADD adults.
Actually we should point them to first person shooter games.
My two kids and my wife play NeoPets, although my wife and son play it more than my daughter. My son has actually become pretty good at buying/finding items and selling them for profit. He's figured out the economics of the game. They all enjoy the game challenges, but if gambling is really that much of a concern, we'd have to ban quite a few sites that offer gambling style games. Guess the kid orientation of the site is causing the problem, but in my opinion, responsible parents should be checking what their kids are doing online. Parents should make the decision on their own to allow/disallow access rather than trying to take the site down. Parents should allow/disallow their children from accessing certain sites based on their own values and the maturity of their kids.
is there some kind of super insane overly conservative group of people breeding rapidly? It seems everwhere I look there is someone or some group complaining about things that are so trivial in comparison to things like guns and drugs in schools...
It's like "they" want to find evil in everything.
Ave Molech Setting
Sadly, too many parents are too busy with their own lives to spend the appropriate amount of time necessary to teach their children. They expect the schools to do it all for them.
Sadly, because things have come to parents using TV, video games or the internet to babysit their children, this is going to come up more and more.
Your children are very lucky. Most will never receive the kind of parenting you purport to provide.
But that's not why. Their stated mission isn't to provide a fun game for kids to play, it's to maximize advertising revenue. They have marketing studies talking about children as though they're consumers waiting to be advertised to and nothing else. Their "immersive advertising" technique is horrible; most children can't even tell the difference between the ads and the game. In a nutshell, they're a marketing company with a game attached.
Some alcohol is good, but alcohol is bad if you drink too much of it.
Some gambling is good (I fondly remember many nights of penny ante poker with college friends), but gambling is bad if you do too much of it (e.g., interfering with studies or making you poor).
Drugs are good, but drugs are bad if you do too much of them.
Pretty much any behavior (excluding criminal acts, libel, etc.) is good or ok in moderation, but bad if you do too much of it. If you simply prohibit potentially bad behaviors, then how do you learn to act with moderation? Too many people have a "don't do it" attitude to most everything, which I think in the end is counterproductive.
So my girlfriend is addicted to neopets and over the last 3 years I've had a pretty good view of the site. This story is pretty much uninformed. The gambling games make up about 4% of the total games on the site. Your pet only goes to the adoption agency if you do not play with it and it gets unhappy with you, actually sitting there ignoring your pet playing gambling games will hasten this, but not cause it. NeoPoints (the in-game currency) are very easy to come by, and 15-20 minutes of playing any of the other 96% of the games the player has between 5-10k worth, which is enough to pretty do whatever you want for over a month or two.
So whats to stop the kid from going to yahoo games and playing blackjack there?
That's not so bad really.
After they are feeling the joy of being broke, a little extra work just might reinforce the responsibility issues while giving them some hope of that next trip to the movies with their friends...
Blogging because I can...
No surprise there. Neopets is a member of WISE, the World Institute of Scientology Enterprises. Naturally they're going to follow L. Ron Hubbard's game plan which is to be obnoxious fsckheads making baseless threats using lawyers. (They're also marketing survey spammers as the Dohring group.)
One line blog. I hear that they're called Twitters now.
...Then the 1up machine in Super Mario Bros 2 was too, and a blatent one at that. I played that game constantly in the day and I dont have any urge whatsover to play a slot machine.
In Soviet Russia, Trojan exploits YOU!
One line blog. I hear that they're called Twitters now.
My gmail account is very generic, and is already attracting lots of attention, but the biggest shock to date has been emails from the neopets lawyer bloke mixing me up with some hacker.
Nothing really odd about that you might say, apart from the fact, the lawyer in question happens to be one of the biggest Internet law specialists.
Was strange to see him make the same mistake not just once, but twice (both times I mailed back informing him of his error).
You would think that somebody who handles such matters would be a little more careful about their email practices, and not send confidential material to free unencrypted accounts.
liqbase
First, it was the Pokemon trading card game.
This game supposedly damaged our children in the following ways.
1. It taught them gambling.
2. It taught the theory of evolution.
3. It introduced kids to evil occultism and Eastern Religions.
4. It was a gateway game used by WOTC to lure kids into playing MTG and D&D.
5. It opened our kids up to be mind controlled by the Japanese, who would use our kids as drones to bomb Pearl Harbor again.
"You spoony bard!" -Tellah
I've been reading Paul Graham's book, "Hackers and Painters", so let's take a different take on this. Here's an unthinkable thought, if indeed Neopets is introducing kids to gambling at an early age, then maybe they'll be better gamblers when they grow up! Afterall, the practical problem with gambling is being bad at it! My daughter loves Neopets, but since her computer is in my office, it's pretty easy to keep things under control. That's what parents are supposed to do, right? Still, if Neopets is making her a gambling genius, that could be pretty useful... ;-)
Of more concern for our Aussie friends are the extremely paternalistic proposals and legislation coming from down under lately. It seems that every other story here on /. lately is about something being banned in Australia. What's going on down there?
To the making of books there is no end, so let's get started
Do a Google search on "neopets scientology". Read some of the search results and decide for yourself.
Way back when they tried to sue Neomail for the rights to the name Neomail, which they were using to brand their webmail service. The basis of their claim was that since they had 'thousands and thousands' of users, they had rights to the name.
My life is dedicated hosting
"To "feed" their pets, Neopets players have to win points in a variety of mini-games, including versions of poker and blackjack."
My 7 year old introduced me to neopets, and I quickly learned two things:
1) Food that you have to pay for is really scarce, no matter how much money you have, and
2) You don't need to BUY food.
There's a section of the site where you can find "donations", and maybe someone dropped some food there. There's also a spot where you can get a free omelette once a day. After I discovered that, I don't have to spend an hour a day just trying to find food. I play a few games (btw, they have some really entertaining and addictive games there), make sure my critter's not dying of starvation, and I'm done.
Come to the University of Mars! Classes starting soon!
Parents fail to see that this gambling on Neopets might actually be beneficial to children. By exposing them to a tiny bit of gambling, they'll see there's nothing special to it, and won't become addicted to it later in life.
Besides, if churches can hold "bingo" games (and other gambling games approved by God), why shouldn't Neopets?