Developed by Club Penguin Entertainment which (formerly known as New Horizon Interactive) and published by Disney Online Studios, Club Penguin is an online MMORPG (Massively Multiplayer Online Game) with an ESRB rating of E for everyone. It uses Adobe Flash as its engine and thus its media is definitely a web interface. It was released on October 24th of 2005 and by the year 2007 it had grown tremendously and had had over twelve million accounts!
Taking a brief look at Club Penguin’s history, Lance Merrifield and Lane Merrifield are the ones who saw a need for having a social networking tool for kids. Since they were employees at New Horizon Productions, they decided to build Club Penguin. With the help of Lance Priebe, the first version of club penguin was released on 24th October 2005. It started off with 15000 users and by March the following year the number had risen to 1.4 million users. At just two years old, Club Penguin had almost 3.9 million users!
Club penguin was basically designed for children of ages 6 to 14. Being an online game, the issue of security had to be put into consideration and how the safety of the participants could be taken care of. Since Lane Merrifield stated that he and the other two founders would feel safe letting their own children visit the site, security has always remained a huge priority. Some of the approaches it took are to ensure that there is no use of inappropriate usernames thus this provided a safe chat mode for everyone.
It also limits users to only selecting phrases from a list and disallowing users from generating their own texts. One can still generate their own messages by using an automatic filter which blocks even the most creative users from inserting words or phrases which are not allowed. Players who manage to use profanity get punished by an automatic 24-hour ban though this doesn’t always happen immediately.
You too can become a member; this has been categorized into two. You can either be a subscribed member or a non member. Subscribed members had to pay initially so that they could join Club Penguin. These members get additional things which non members don’t have. These include buying clothes, wigs and you can even own up to eighteen “virtual pets” found in the game. This does not mean that non members get nothing at all; they can still purchase different colors that they find interesting for their penguins and can also buy flag pins. They too can play different levels in the game but their levels are limited.
It won’t be necessary to view the game as a loss of money if you decide to become a member since New Horizon is always donating large sums of money to charitable projects. So, if you are more of a giver than a taker, you can always enjoy what you do more by playing the online game and helping someone at the same time.
