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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
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.
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.
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.
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.
"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!