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Beware the bottom-feeders

Every successful business attracts bottom-feeding parasites, and Club Penguin is no exception. As many people know, there's a huge amount of web sites, mostly in the form of blogs, that contain various tips, tricks and "cheats" to help you get a slight edge. Now, the ethics of providing cheat codes and tricks for a children's web site is certainly debatable. However, that's not what concerns me.

What really gets me going are the sites that prey on kids looking for tips, tricks and cheats but providing completely deceptive marketing tricks. Case in point: penguincheaters.net. Here's a site that advertises using Google AdWords to show up whenever you search on "club penguin cheats" or similar keywords. If you click through to their website, you'll see a page full of marketing copy inducing kids to enter their cell phone number and then a code word sent to their phone to get the guide. There's no mention of a cost anywhere on the page.

What really happens is that the child is redirected to yet another web site, playphone.com, presumably through an affiliate relationship. There, the child enters his or her cell phone number to get 20 download credits. Buried underneath the bright pink and blue colors and pretty graphics is the fine print, which casually mentions that by entering your phone number and confirming a code sent to your phone will sign you up for a $9.99 monthly subscription service to download ringtones and wallpapers for your phone. All of this, of course, has absolutely nothing to do with Club Penguin or a cheat guide.

I've seen all kinds of Internet affiliate scams, and over the years have generally become numb to them. But this one in particular got me going because it preys on small children. Most adults, I hope, would see right through this. But you cannot realistically expect children in the Club Penguin age range to fully understand the nuances of fine print.

Here's more detail on who's involved, and numbers/addresses you can use to voice your concerns.

Penguincheaters.net
According to the WhoIs server, this domain name is registered to Gamer's Guides LLC. The administrative contact and address are as follows:

Gamers Guides L.L.C.
Joe Schmidli
P.O. Box 2714
Columbus, MS 39704
US
(662)889-0508
joe@gamers-guides.com

Playphone.com
Playphone.com's website lists Ron Czerny as the founder and CEO. The VP of Marketing, who likely has oversight of the affiliate operation, is Jay Moore. Playphone's address and phone number is:

PlayPhone, Inc.
224 Airport Parkway Suite 300
San Jose, Ca 95110 USA
Tel. (408) 261-6200

Google AdWords

You can tell Google what you think about penguincheaters.net here:
http://www.google.com/contact/rate_advertiser.html

In case you hadn't heard...

...virtual worlds are a big deal for kids and teens. :) According to a recent eMarketer report, over a third of all children aged 3-17 visit at least one virtual world site per month. They're projecting that 53% visit at least one virtual world site per month by 2011.

Breaking free of email

Sean's up in Redmond this week at a Microsoft Symposium on social networking. I was reading some of the blog coverage of the event, and among the mentions of Zoodaloo was a quote from Sean talking about how Zoodaloo doesn't use email. That's actually a bit of an overstatement--we do use email to correspond with the outside world, but internally, we rarely use it. At least not to the extent that most of us are used to with past companies.

This is intentional. Anyone who's visited our office knows that we rely on a highly collaborative office environment, borrowed from our early days in Sean's living room. Most of our daily interactions and decision-making processes are handled the old-fashioned way, in-person and face-to-face.

The speed with which we operate is stunning compared to what most of us have seen in a company that centers on email as an internal communication and decision-making tool. In those organizations, so much time is spent composing and distributing emails and keeping up with the often endless reply (and reply-all) chains that develop. Decisions that should take minutes often take hours or days (even weeks in some cases) because of the inherent lag in email communication and the often misguided need to gain consenus with all parties. Too often, it's not even completely clear when a decision has been made, or what the next actions are and who is accountable. It's ironic given that it's a written medium, and those things should be clear.

Of course, not everything can be done in real-time, and there are plenty of cases where you want to document quite a bit of what you're discussing, decinding, and doing. For that, we use Basecamp. Or more specifically, a combination of various tools from 37signals, such as Basecamp (for project managemet), Campfire (real-time chat) and Highrise (contact management). For group scheduling, which is quite rare since we all sit around two big tables, we use a shared Google Calendar.

Email certainly has its place, particularly in large organizations, or when communicating with the outside world, but we're doing just fine without it as an internal tool.

A different approach to mini-games

It should be no surprise to anyone who's taken even a brief look at entertainment sites for kids that games are the biggest draw. Usually, these manifest themselves as simple casual games that are easy to learn and deliver a quick diversion.

The problem is that on most of the sites--particularly in the current crop of virtual worlds--the games feel a bit like an afterthought. They're often used solely as a mechanism for point accumulation, and often don't even tie directly into the theme of the web site, giving them a "bolted on" feel. The other problem with most of the games is that they don't become more challenging as the player gets better. That leads to boredom. Even the venerable Club Penguin suffers from this. How many times can you conquer Pizza-Tron 3000 before it loses its appeal?

One of the concepts we're most excited about in Zoodaloo is our strategy for games and activities. We can't give too much away prior to launch, but it should suffice to say that we're taking a completely different approach. For starters, we're designing the games and activities to be highly adaptable and to have them vary in difficulty based on the individual player's experience and skill. Also, our games will be much shorter--no more starting over at the first level every time. Finally, we're putting in lots of spontaneous multi-player games and activities right into the world, instead of as separate solo mini-games that launch in a different interface. The result will hopefully lead to more excitement, interaction, and fun.

LOL I'm JUOC

David Pogue, with a little help from his summer interns, has compiled a list of current acronyms in use online. It's definitely a good resource for parents, or anyone else who's wondering exactly what their kids are typing online.

If you scroll to the bottom, you'll find some clever ones that Mr. Pogue has suggested for adults to use at work.

All in the Family

PopCap games announced the results from a survey they recently conducted on casual game play online between family members. According to their projections, there are nearly 50 million “family gamers” -- parents and grandparents who actively play casual games online along with their children and grandchildren. You can read the full release here.

I’m always a little cautious when I read research or a study that tells me what I want to hear, especially when that research is commissioned by a biased for-profit entity. But these findings definitely back up quite a bit of anecdotal evidence that we’ve been hearing during our focus group and user testing, as well as in our early talks with parents of kids in this age range. A lot of parents like to play casual games or interact in casual virtual worlds with their kids.

We’ve heard anecdotally that this fairly common on Webkinz, where grandparents often buy two Webkinz dolls--one for the child, and one for themselves. They’re then able to log in together and maintain conversations and play games, spending quite a bit of time together. For a family member who lives far away, this seems like a great way to spend some quality time with a child--doing something that they love to do. It sure beats those awkward phone conversations: “I’m fine. I’m good. Bye, grandma.”

The New Digs

For the past few months, we've been operating out of Sean's house (Zoodaloo South) with a few days up at my place outside of the city (Zoodaloo North). It's a great place, but we definitely outgrew it quickly.

This week, we're finally moving into our "real" digs: an office in downtown San Francsico (Zoodaloo Central). So far, everything is going smoothly. Our work tables are in and we made a late-night run to IKEA (my first trip ever) to pick up some chairs and storage cabinets. Over the next few weeks, we'll be decorating the space and making it more homey.

More Concept Art

Here are a few more concept sketches from Jake Parker--the man, the myth, the legend. As a reminder, these are concept sketches--not actual screenshots or artwork for the web site. But they give an awfully good idea of what we're aiming for.

Octopus Den

Octopus Den, originally uploaded by scotta.

One of the best moves we made early on was to bring Jake Parker on board to help us put together some conceptual design work. These are not screenshots (we wish!), but rather sketches that our helping us work with the engineers and product design team to build out the world of Zoodaloo. Over the next few weeks, I'll post a few more sketches. We want to give everyone a taste of what Zoodaloo will be like...but not too much!

A Penguin with Mouse Ears

This bit of news definitely has our industry buzzing, and my mobile phone ringing. An acquisition of Club Penguin has been rumored for a while, although most people seemed to think it would be Sony doing the buying. Simply put, Club Penguin has executed exceptionally well in a short amount of time--although not as short as the mainstream press would have you believe.

Hats off to our friends up North!