Name: Habbo

Company: Sulake Corp., a Finland-based entertainment and media company.

Established: August 2000

Overview: Part virtual world, part social networking site, Habbo is aimed primarily at the teen and "tween" audiences. The virtual world itself is called Habbo Hotel, and it consists of lobbies, lounges and party rooms where users can socialize.

How it Works: Habbo runs in the browser on Shockwave, with nothing to download. A point-and-click interface allows users to move about the chat rooms, while a text field in the screen's menu bar lets them compose messages. By clicking items on the bar, users can navigate among rooms, view their friends, send private messages and manage their inventory in pop-up menus.

Payment Model: Habbo is free to access, but the whole works runs on the economy of Habbo Credits. There is some limited free content-- free chat rooms, four free games and basic customization and animation for avatars-- but most of the content, like furniture (furni to denizens) accessories and popular games, requires Credits, which can be purchased at twenty cents a piece. Players can also trade credits and furni among themselves. Credits also can be used to pay the monthly cost of optional membership (30 a month) to the Habbo Club, which allows access to even more exclusive items and VIP chat rooms. Members earn badges of honor for subscribing to the club for various lengths of time. Habbo also earns revenue through sponsors, like Sunkist Orange, who advertise in-world.

Key Features:
-Language filters replace all offensive words with "bobba"
-"Habbo Trax" lets users buy virtual CDs to play in the chat rooms
-Moderators are full-time, police-vetted Habbo employees who work from home

Adventures in Habbo Hotel begin in the usual way-- by signing up via email and choosing an avatar. The Habbo population resembles little Lego folk, and you can customize yours by choosing different hair, faces, torsos, legs and feet, and by picking different colors for each. There's no verification by email required to get started-- Habbo does send an email to make sure you're signing up to its newsletter, though.

Play always begins in the "Hotel View" screen, and travel to anywhere is done with the "Navigator" pop-up menu, which allows you to choose from a broad list of rooms. Be prepared to wait a bit, though-- loading screens between rooms in Habbo are rather excruciating, with waits of anywhere from 30 seconds to a full minute any time you want to make a transition. Many of the rooms are for members only, and the top tier, the VIP rooms, are only for those paying the 30 credits monthly to be part of the Habbo Club.

Your avatar can hang out in clubs, lounges, lobbies and even tea gardens, most of which are usually fairly well-populated. As a portion of Habbo's revenue comes from advertising, many of the rooms are furnished with some kind of corporate branding; there's the Alloy Lounge, the Sunkist Soda VIP Lounge, and the Target Red Sky Lounge-- the latter featured a promo for the Transformers film on its wall. Ads are shown during the protracted loading screens about half the time.

While there are often so many conversations going on in a room it's hard to follow who's speaking, it's not the friendliest crowd-- while I received a few friend invites immediately, groups in most rooms wasted no time in mocking the bunny hat I'd chosen for my avatar. The social scene consists mostly of text message-style shorthand and fairly typical teen antics-- they've developed well-crafted mudslinging tactics to insult one another around the word filters. Plenty don't mind the filters at all; "Bobba you," is a common exchange.

One kinda neat factor is that many of the lounges and restaurant areas are staffed by a kind of auto-bot manning the counter, who seems to recognize certain key words and can make basic conversation, and even hand your avatar a cola, which you'll hold and sip from for a few minutes.

There are four free games available in the "Cunning Fox Gamehall", but the popular games, where users can earn rankings and win prizes, are members-only. Free users can play against others in Poker, Battleship, Chess and Tic Tac Toe-- and they're clearly lower-tier leavings. The clumsy interface tends to freeze during games, and you're never sure whether it's frozen or your opponent is simply taking his time to make a move-- that is, until they begin to complain. Seated at a game station across from another avatar, the game is played in a pop-up window-- and in a few instances, the game's title bar and peripherals were still in what I assume must be Finnish.

There's more to do-- decorate your home page (which is what users will see when they click your avatar), buy furni to decorate your room, and read some of the journal-style Habbo stories in the newsletter-- but the hotel runs primarily on chat energy. You can leave Habbo simply by closing the pop-up window in which it operates; you'll have to log back in when you want to return.

The many rooms, plazas and restaurants of Habbo Hotel are easy enough to navigate, and the variety's fantastic-- there's pretty much every sort of atmosphere available that a teen imagination could conceive of enjoying. Keeping that in mind, the conversation is exactly what's you'd expect-- this is quite squarely a teen scene, and the conversation is generally either unintelligible or obscene. Despite claims of vigilant word filtering and moderation, the clever kids always find creative ways to spell certain words to avoid them being replaced with the ubiquitous "bobba." Most rooms feature either a word-salad brawl or some crude romancing-- that is, if you can follow the conversations. It's not always clear whose speech balloon belongs to whom, especially in crowded rooms where text and avatars overlap in Habbo's comparatively unsophisticated graphics scheme. The net effect of a barrage can be confounding, and an actual adult fumbling through Habbo Hotel would probably need a strong stomach.

To be fair, Habbo's hangups are owed more likely to its population and not to its environment, which is fairly user-friendly (save for the occasional Shockwave glitch) and rather impressively detailed, with plenty of features to delight the imagination. There's a fun degree of automatic interactivity with the environment-- approaching chairs and banquettes makes your avatar sit, for example, and the fun bots that staff the restaurants can make small talk and serve drinks. When entering a dance club, then, you can have your avatar do whatever it is you'd normally do in the scenario-- whether that's hit up the bar, sit at a booth, or dance on the floor.

Perhaps it's the juxtaposition on the rather aggressive crowd that makes the pervasive advertising just slightly eyebrow-raising, though. Most rooms feature an advertisement for a movie, product, or sponsor site, and several featured rooms are themed around an existing ad campaign already. Superimposed against cute sprites and kid-friendly literature, the campaigning (BUY EXCLUSIVE FURNI!) is a bit jarring. Nothing pops the balloon of faith in the next generation like watching a cursing match going down in the "Hogwart's [sic] Library" against the backdrop of film advertising. The Habbo homepage advertises the "Info Bus," where Habbos can learn about online safety and community rules-- the Info Bus Station was, however the site of yet another crudely-worded exchange.

It's difficult to tell which Habbos are paying for credits or joining the VIP club-- the only giveaway in the public rooms would be a strikingly unique avatar set, but since there are so many choices, even that's not a definite. Perhaps, however, the subscribing members are in the exclusive games rooms, or entertaining sophisticated friends in their well-furnished chambers, and the population that can be sampled via casual use are exactly that-- the other casual users.

A lot of effort seems to be put into making the Habbo world positive, variegated and entertaining-- games, planned events, and plenty of info. But the free games rooms were virtually deserted, and users seem primarily interested in socializing, not collecting furni and joining clever storytelling competitions. If this is your scene, you can most certainly enjoy Habbo for free-- but be prepared to dodge frequent, friendly suggestions to buy credits. Or Sunkist Soda.

Useful Links:
Habbo FAQ
The Habbo Way
Habbo Teams Up with Earth Day Network