Name: Club Penguin

Company: New Horizon Interactive, an entertainment software company based in Kelowna, British Columbia.

Established: October 2005

Overview: Designed for kids ages 8-14 but open to kids of all ages, Club Penguin lets users interact in a frosty playground using colorful cartoon penguins as avatars. Penguins can socialize, play minigames, furnish and decorate their igloos, explore different snowy areas, and accessorize.

How it Works: Club Penguin runs on Adobe Flash; there's no download. Users navigate interconnected map screens with a point-and-click interface; using a toolbar at the bottom of the screen, they can type messages or select emoticons (both appear in a speech bubble over the penguin's head) and perform various animations.

Payment Model: Club Penguin can be played for free, but paying members have access to a much wider range of features and exclusive content. For example, free-play users may only own two Puffles-- the fuzzy little pets of the Club Penguin world-- and may only choose red or blue. Membership is USD 5.95 per month, 29.95 for six months, or 57.95 per year. Coins, the in-world currency, are earned through minigames, and can be used to buy furniture and accessories. Those buying privileges, however, are available only to paying members-- although free members may use the coins to buy general customizables, like penguin colors. Club Penguin's revenue comes solely through membership sales, and the sale of merchandise like apparel and Puffle keychains through an online shop.

Key Features:
-Two chat modes: "Ultimate Safe" limits communication between users to pre-defined messages and responses, while "Standard Safe," allows users to type their own communication (subject to word filtering and censorship).
-Scored the Kids' Privacy Seal of Approval from the Better Business Bureau's BBB OnLine program in April 2006
-4 million active users as of June 2007 (via GigaOM)

Club Penguin: In-Depth Tour

In Club Penguin, even the servers are cute-- arctic themes abound with names like Snow Globe, Yeti, Flurry and Slushy. Little faces clue you in to how full the server is. Once you choose, the penguin world loads up right away-- the entire experience is admirably quick, and the interface is clean and user-friendly.

Hint-- best to pick a less-crowded server, because plenty of penguins means lots of overlap in crowded areas, and you might not be able to read conversations or penguin names. Once you're logged in, you're deposited in a random area of the Club Penguin map-- this is the Snow Forts area, where when I arrived penguins, some accompanied by pet Puffles, were already engaged in snowball fights.

The easy menu at the screen's bottom provides a space for typing text-- those using Ultimate Safe Chat mode, however, can choose some ready-made greetings and responses from a pull-up menu. There's also a wide variety of emotes-- happy faces, sad faces, hearts, flowers and a cup of coffee to hand a buddy when you're in the Town Square's coffee shop. Finally, you can pick some rather cute penguin animations-- wave a flipper, dance in place, or just have a seat.

From the looks of things, most of the other penguins are paying members-- their colorful avatars are decked out in all kinds of accouterments. A yellow penguin with a floral crown, a Hawaiian lei and a red Puffle asked me, "whant to be frieand?" And thus, a friendship was forged.

I followed my brightly-colored tour guide to all of Club Penguin's locations-- restaurants, shops and dance clubs, where penguins were mostly just milling about, occasionally chatting in broken grammar-- this is definitely a kids' scene, though to be fair, the text interface oddly doesn't recognize commas. At each location, there are minigames that can be played for coins. They're all fairly simple flash, using the mouse or arrow keys to a very basic extent. Some of the games are single-player-- like a point-and-click pizza maker-- while others require up to four penguins to join in, like with the downhill sled racer.

These kids are good at these games. During a sled race, they sped ahead of me-- while my little red penguin ended up face down over a log.

Minigames average a payout of anywhere from 4 to 100 coins per play-- gift shop items, like penguin clothes, range from fairly affordable (180 coins for a baywatch-esque lifeguard shirt) to pure status items, like 1000 coins for the inexplicable night-vision goggles. A few of these items, such as the inner tube, grant the user added functionality, like the ability to do a swimming animation while in water. Anyone can browse the item catalog, but only members can buy the items.

The coveted Puffle pets cost 800 coins to adopt, and their care is rather involved (think Tamagotchi toys)-- still, most users seem to have one following them around. If you don't care for your Puffle, it'll run away-- and then you've got to grind up to 800 coins all over again to get another one.

The games are simple and Club Penguin's not exactly the best conversation spot ("boy or gurl?"). But some of the most fun elements are in the periphery, such as the weekly newspaper full of tips, teasers about new games, a question-and-answer column, and user-submitted comics and jokes that are actually quite charming. Why do penguins only swim in salt water? Because pepper water makes them sneeze. The game tutorials are bright and cartoony, and the library full of click-through, penguin-themed storybooks is a nice touch, and for those for whom the novelty of navigating on foot has worn off, there's a map that lets you click quick to your desired destination, or back to your home base-- the personal igloo that every user gets, and members can furnish and decorate.

Entry, exit and re-entry is pleasantly easy. Club Penguin logs you out after ten minutes of idle time-- logout puts you (and your Puffle) in "pause mode," wherein your penguin and your pet will be exactly how you left it when you return for the next play.

Over the past couple of days, we spent plenty of time in the snowy playground of New Horizon Interactive's Club Penguin, playing minigames, saving up to buy Puffles, and being handily trounced at multiplayer sledding. So what's the big picture here?

Club Penguin is targeted at kids-- and that seems to be exactly who's playing, without surprisingly few noticeable exceptions. The only way to estimate, of course, is by evaluating the type of conversation that goes on-- and unsophisticated parlance could be just as likely due to poor computer literacy or poor command of the English language, not necessarily youth. Nonetheless, chatters seem to be pretty evenly distributed fifty-fifty between those restricted to "Ultimate Safe Chat" and those able to compose their own messages.

The surprising thing is that relatively little conversation is actually going on, and it can be rather difficult to find another penguin simply to talk with. Perhaps the very limited communication is due to strict moderation. I was slightly tempted to raise a rude little ruckus just to see how strict it really is-- despite Club Penguin's claim that moderators patrol the areas, I never saw one in several play sessions, though users can report violations any time by clicking a big "M" icon on their screen. The world of Club Penguin seems so wholesome and adorable I was loath to disrupt it, though-- and besides, who wants to offend children on purpose? Aside from a single snowball fight over a boy, with some mild sniping accompanying (think grade-school playground fight), penguins mostly ambled about aimlessly, with occasional directionless commentary (lol's the word). The major draw of Club Penguin seems to be the games-- and the coins.

The average penguin was sporting several thousand coins' worth of clothing and accessories, by my estimation, and based on the time I spent playing, that's anywhere from ten hours of mini-game time on up. Perhaps that's the reason for the limited conversation-- they're kids with a mission, there for the single-minded pursuit of wealth and status, going back and forth from the coffee bean counter game to the gift store next door. Which is a little unsettling, actually, but speaks volumes about the draw of Club Penguin and what it's got over simple single-player minigaming. Not only can the kids earn prizes, but they can show those prizes off in the form of fairy wings and fancy penguin hats-- and express their personalities to one another at the same time.

Highlight? A penguin decked out in full pirate regalia, on the Club Penguin pirate ship, repeatedly typing "YARR", and enjoying little else.

More Useful Links :
Club Penguin Q & A
Club Penguin Developer Blog
CNN Money: Time to play, money to spend