Name: Whyville

Company: Numedeon

Established: March 1999

Overview: Kids in Whyville get the opportunity to connect as real productive citizens within a virtual world, with education on social and world issues at the forefront as they chat, work, contribute to the Whyville newspaper, earn clams and learn about financing purchases, and investigate science, mathematics and art. It encourages self-expression and makes a clear effort to distinguish between strong, child-safe moderation and censorship; for example, it points out that users are free to complain about in-world features they dislike, and while offensive content is a reportable offense, insulting another user isn't.

How it Works: Whyville runs in a browser using Java, with a pull-down menu to the left of the play window that allows users to select their location. Each location is themed around a specific type of activity, and users can move around in the play window or enter buildings by point-and-click.

Payment Method: Whyville is free to play, supported entirely by ads and sponsorship from organizations or university centers that have exhibits in Whyville.

Key Features:
-Users must pass a quiz on chat behavior before being afforded privileges
-Scholastic Publishing, US Center for Disease Control and Prevention, Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution all sponsor programs
-Users can create and sell their own Whyville faces for "clams" (in-world currency)

Whyville: In-Depth Tour

You can check out Whyville freely using a guest account without even signing up, a good tack for the curious, but creating your own user ID allows you to keep persistent content, like avatar customization and your accumulated "clams," the in-world currency.

The avatar design process that kicks off the experience is limited and straightforward -- one of Whyville's hallmarks, though, is the ability to design and even sell your own faces for clams, once you've found or traded for a permit that lets you access the face factory. Whyville avatars don't even have legs; the state of being a disembodied head and torso is a little disorienting, but the weirdness can be quickly overcome once you see the diversity and creativity of each individual user-generated design.

Whyville requires you to take and ace a comprehensive quiz on chat behavior and moderation policy before you're allowed to use the speech bubble-based chat feature; minors (register your birthdate on signup) require a "permission slip" from parents. I confess I flunked the quiz several times.

Whyville draws a clear distinction between rude behavior and impermissible behavior. For example, it encourages you to report users who try to con you into divulging your personal contact info, but scamming other users in trades or calling them "ugly and stupid" are not report-able offenses.

The blocking features let you "vaporize" users who hurt your feelings so that it's not possible for them to have further contact with you, and Whyville encourages use of trading posts to swap goods and clams rather than to do so privately, but largely the Whyville world makes an obvious effort to enact safe moderation without censoring kids. Still, users who violate policy will find their avatar will have to wear duct tape over their mouths for a while.

Even after you've received your chat permit, newbies need to wait three days before they can talk. And that's not just three days in passed time -- you actually have to visit Whyville for three days before your privileges will be unlocked, to prevent griefers from signing up just to raise a ruckus, and to encourage thoughtful and sincere investment in the Whyville world.

The environment uses a combo of web pages and pull-down menus surrounding the actual world window itself in order to navigate and educate. This compartmentalization is a little disorienting for those used to a more seamless virtual experience; there's very little sense of connectedness from one area to another. Since the meat of Whyville is in the educational minigames in each area, the virtual world interface almost feels superfluous.

Almost -- if it weren't for so many users so obviously enjoying it. Though each Whyville area contains buildings that house the educational exhibits, many of them are largely social areas, and these are all enormously populous, with an unusually active amount of chat. It's squarely a kids-and-'tween scene ("I want sum oreos," was the last comment I observed), and many kids chat privately using the whisper feature. You're clued in to who's whispering to whom via thought bubbles over the avatar's heads, but you're not privy to the discussions.

Once you're a Whyville citizen, the idea is that you earn clams that will buy you new facial features. You do this by establishing a salary, a daily payment amount that will be credited to your character on login. So, when I was new to Whyville, I set out looking for a job to do.

I checked out the areas on the pull-down menu and decided to go to one of the beach areas, where lots of kids were hanging out. Once there, some links at the bottom of the screen told me where I could go from there -- oddly, clicking "Taxi" brought up a cab driver who wanted to charge me five clams to drive me to a location I could have easily accessed from the pulldown menu. I decided to try getting some work operating a hot air balloon.

All of the "jobs" are really educational minigames. From what I gathered via the display, I was to learn, through experimentation, the right combination of thermal power, weight and wind vectors required to get a balloon from one end of the room to a landing target a short distance away. At least, I assumed I had to experiment, since there were no instructions given.

My first attempt, I over-shot the target by several feet. The second time, I was more gentle, employing the flame burner and the bean bag in what I thought had to be the proper way. Much to my surprise, when I settled my balloon squarely over the target and descended, I was told that my balloon crashed because my speed was too high. Try as I might, I could not successfully complete a game designed for middle-schoolers.

Humiliated, I decided to try for Chinese Checkers -- that, at least, I know how to play. But it requires multiple players, and despite the crowds in The Grotto and other social areas, there was nobody available to play Checkers with me, and since I was a newbie, I couldn't speak to anybody and ask them to join.

Still clam-less, I made a third attempt by visiting the Bio Plex, a biology-themed area that has a "Virus Lab" and a "Climate Center." I entered the virus lab, where a scientist standing over bubbling test tubes invited me to click him to hear more about the lab. I clicked; "Welcome to my virus lab!" He effused, and further clicking elucidated no other details. I decided to try the game for myself.

Like the balloon game, my fledgling science career was given little explanation or direction. I was asked to create a virus by coloring squares in a 3 x 3 grid; the colors I chose, apparently, would determine how many of the character faces in the left-hand panel of the game I "infected" and how virulent my virus was (interestingly, the word "virulence" was misspelled).

It took some experimentation before I realized my 3 x 3 grid would be matched against the pixels in a small section from each face in my potential pool of victims; therefore, my goal was to find a common area of similar colors that matched as many faces as possible. I was told that the combination of colors I used would determine what symptoms I produced, but there was no information as to what, exactly, the correlation was. Still, by trial and error, I completed the top level of the game. Finally, I'd earned 25 clams and had a daily salary of ten per day -- but I can't say I learned anything about how diseases spread.

I wanted to start my own business making pixel faces to sell, so that I could perhaps lease one of the Toyota Scions that are sold in Whyville and demand real-world timely payments just like actual cars, but I lacked a permit to create a store, and without the ability to chat I couldn't figure out where to find one.

Each of the areas I explored were full of educational literature -- at the virtual Getty Museum center, for example, a Whyville Times newsletter explained all about different art and science mediums. But it's difficult to translate all of this into the actual game experience. At the beach I was encouraged to say "sample" in order to obtain a water sample to study at the Plankton Lab, but as a new member, I couldn't say anything. At the Virus Lab, there was a link to a "tutorial" -- which was only a single video of a polygonal virus image with a brief explanation of what viruses are.

Literature on the Whyville site urged me to be patient and assured me that my gradual immersion into the world and my active participation would eventually relieve me of the loneliness of newbie status, but confronted with games that weren't exactly intuitive and conversations in which I couldn't partake, I was a stranger in a strange land.

Whyville: Conclusion

Overall, Whyville's unwieldy navigation is somewhat of a problem for it. The virtual world component features strongly -- most areas consist of interactive environments around which you can navigate your legless avatar -- but some of the content is in web page form, some areas are accessed by clicking icons, and others require links or menus. There seems to be no consistent system for locating content, and a lot of paths lead to a text page with no clear links to the next area. It makes the virtual world interface feel a little redundant, as if Whyville could be more effective -- and less confusing -- if it was simply a browse-able portal with links to the learning games.

However, setting it up this way would remove an element that seems to be a major draw for the loquacious Whyville users -- the social factor. Lots of the Whyville users seem heavily involved in the facial customization, personalizing their crude pixel selves with impressively elaborate and creative looks, each an expression of personal style and interests. In addition, chat's prolific, especially the one-on-one "whisper" chat, and the users seem to make extensive use of the ability to congregate and talk in a kid-friendly and parentally-sanctioned educational environment. Though they, as kids do, are more interested in talking about relationships, snacks and music than the pH of the ocean or the vectors of wind.

This makes the three-day suspension of chat privileges for new users a little bit of an odd move. It's understandable the moderation would seek to prevent wham-bam griefers who sign up for a little hassling and then bail, but the complicated, not-necessarily-intuitive chat quiz (which took me at least fifteen minutes to sort out and get right) seems a good barrier in itself, and the reporting system is easily accessible. In addition to reporting offenders, users have the ability to completely block bad apples from interacting with them altogether -- they don't even have to see them. At the very least, three days is a long time; asking familiar users for help or directions is one of the most naturalistic ways to get acclimated in a virtual world, and being isolated in the most vulnerable phase seems like a counter-intuitive measure in terms of user involvement.

Most of the educational information is not in the virtual world itself. It's not evident how many of the exercises translate to actual scientific facts or learning-by-doing -- the pixel-based virus game, for example, is clever and fun, but its objective or method isn't stated outright, leaving users to fumble around simply to figure out the game mechanics and how success is achieved, let alone how picking and matching colors correlates to the spread of illness in a population. The avatar who volunteers to explain about the lab has nothing to say besides "welcome," and the "tutorial" for the game is simply an animated slide that gives precious little explanation of either the game or the mechanics of disease biology.

It was the same for the balloon game I tried -- trial and error, for example, showed me that heat makes the balloon rise, the wind determines its direction and weight causes it to descend -- but for an elementary or middle school audience, this might not be eminently clear. To be fair, these sorts of exercises might be intended to be explored within the context of a classroom curriculum or with the guidance of a teacher who explains the physics involved -- but even I couldn't figure out how to make the balloon descend at an acceptable speed or what the factors within my control had to do with it -- and moreover, didn't understand why I should.

The pastiched interface and obtuse game objectives definitely hurt the educational objective. One of the sponsors was a musical artist called the Jonas Brothers Band -- for example, kids are rewarded by jukebox tokens if they visit the band's website, and in kind, 'tween rock tunes often blared loudly over my scholarly pursuits, sometimes unpredictably. I was impressed, though, at the complexity of the subject matter -- Whyville clearly puts world social issues and science on the radar of kids who might have showed up hoping for some hip social hangouts, and that can only be a good thing. Some of the web pages have copious student essays that are demonstrative of the sort of awareness and education they've received as part of Whyville's community on topics like environmentalism and art, and it's heartening to see.

Useful Links:
Whyville's 'Cool' Factor Helps Industry, Learning
CEO Dr. Jim Bower on Advertising in Virtual Communities
Whyville: The Place Girls Love to Go For Science