Club Penguin - Child Safety

Child Safety

Club Penguin was designed for the ages of 6–14. Thus, one of the major concerns when designing Club Penguin was how to improve both the safety of participants and the suitability of the game to children. As Lane Merrifield stated, "the decision to build Club Penguin grew out of a desire to create a fun, virtual world that I and the site's other two founders would feel safe letting our own children visit." As a result, Club Penguin has maintained a strong focus on child safety, to the point whereby the security features have been described as almost "fastidious" and "reminiscent of an Orwellian dystopia", although it has also been argued that this focus may "reassure more parents than it alienates."

The system employs a number of different approaches in an attempt to improve child safety. The key approaches include preventing the use of inappropriate usernames, providing an "Ultimate Safe Chat" mode, which limits players to selecting phrases from a list, using an automatic filter during "Standard Safe Chat" (which allows users to generate their own messages) and blocks profanity even when users employ "creative" methods to insert it into sentences, filtering seemingly innocuous terms, such as "mom", and blocking both telephone numbers and email addresses. It also includes employing paid moderators; out of 100 staff employed in the company in May 2007, Merrifield estimated that approximately 70 staff were dedicated to policing the game. It also includes promoting users to "EPF (Elite Penguin Force) Agent" status, and encouraging them to report inappropriate behavior.

Each game server offers a particular type of chat—the majority allowing either chat mode, but some servers allow only the "Ultimate Safe Chat" mode. When using "Standard Safe Chat", all comments made by users are filtered. When a comment is blocked, the user who made the comment sees it, but other users are unaware that it was made—suggesting to the "speaker" that they are being ignored, rather than encouraging them to try and find a way around the restriction.

Beyond these primary measures, systems are in place to limit the amount of time spent online, and the site does not feature any advertisements, for, as described by Merrifield, "within two or three clicks, a kid could be on a gambling site or an adult dating site". Nevertheless, after Club Penguin was purchased by Disney, concerns were raised that this state of affairs may change, especially in regard to potential spin-off products — although Disney has continued to insist that it believes advertising to be "inappropriate" for a young audience.

Players who use profanity are often punished by an automatic 24-hour ban, although not all vulgar language results in an immediate ban. Players found by moderators to have broken Club Penguin rules are punished by a ban lasting "from 24 hours to forever depending on the offence."