MMO Weekly 20/05

20 May 2009 at 12:07:58 by Jeff Hollis

Hello fellow online gaming addicts, and welcome to the latest edition of MMO Weekly.  In this week's edition we'll be exploring the virtual elephant in the room.  I'm referring to a large – no, strike that, a huge - subset of MMO games.  This subset is definitely something of an underground phenomenon, and it's flying below the average gamers’ radar.  Despite this, these MMOs are both incredibly popular and hugely profitable.  If you're an adult, it's most likely you've never set one digital foot in any of these virtual worlds.

However, your nieces, nephews, younger cousins, and your little brothers and sisters are probably playing these MMOs right now.  And if you have kids of your own, you know they're not only playing these online games, they've probably spent a nice chunk of your hard-earned cash in-game, too.

Of course, I'm referring to MMOs that are oriented towards kids. As a gaming journalist with a penchant for MMOs, I've covered nearly every virtual world in existence.  I've interviewed the developers, gone to the conventions, perused the press kits, played the demos, and basically run the gamut of MMO games.  Despite this inundation with all things online and virtual, a lot of these games have even flown below my radar. 

How can this be?  Why are we, the MMO hobbyists, the hardcore gamers, and the MMO journos, so oblivious to this huge segment of MMO space?  Well, it's pretty simple.  The companies that make MMOs for kids aren't ones that you're familiar with, and they aren't interested in marketing their product to you.  In other words, the developers of kid-based MMOs are ignoring you.

But they're not ignoring teens and preteens.  This past Saturday, I sat and watched a bit of Dinosaur King on TV with my young son (basically, it's a Pokemon style show, in which kids call forth dinosaur companions to fight for them).  As the show went to commercial, a familiar tune caught my attention.  It was a commercial for Free Realms, the kids based MMO that just went live this past month.  Since I don't see MMO advertised on TV all that often, this caught me off guard.  I suppose it shouldn't have.  Within 15 minutes, another kids MMO had a 30-second advert on the same show, and the pattern continued for as long as my boy and I continued to watch.  Mixed in among the commercials for Lego sets, sugary snacks, noise-making swords, Nerf guns, and remote controlled racecars, there were commercials for kids-based MMOs. 

I did a bit of checking around with my buddies (all adults), and virtually none of them had even heard of these games.  Kids know them quite well, and we adults are clueless.  Hmmmmm.

This inspired me to do a bit of digging, and I found that there are a surprising number of these games.  Despite the sheer numbers, I found that most of these games are very similar to one another, and I thought I'd scratch out a primer for all the adults out there.  You know, a little something for all the oldsters, so they know what the heck is going on in Electro-Penguin Fantasy World Hotel MapleScape Live.  I've done this in a list format because...well, there really wasn't a good reason.  I just felt like doing it in list form, ok? 

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