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.