Emily has found a new pastime in the past few weeks—The World’s Most Massive Virtual World for Kids—otherwise known as the Travels of Wiglington and Wenks. Emily has had great fun making new friends and traveling around this virtual world, playing games and searching for hidden objects. I like that Emily’s playing time is actually learning time. As children travel around the “world,” they learn about geography, famous landmarks, famous people, inventions, and more. As a parent, I appreciate the safety features built into this online community. According to the site, the following features are available:
-filters that disallow URL links, telephone numbers, or addresses
-chat logs that can be monitored by parents
-vulgarities are censored and offenders are banned from the community
-the ability to report inappropriate behavior
My Thoughts:
As with any online activity, parents should exercise caution and supervision. Despite the built in safety standards, I witnessed bad language with ** (and others threatening to report the offender) and someone spamming another website. I was unable to locate the feature for parents to monitor chat logs. I think the safety standards should be tougher for a child's game.
Much of the game is “fluff”—searching for hidden objects, balloon wars, and shooting galleries. I certainly wouldn’t count this as school time, but it is a fun, recreational activity with some educational components. I think Emily’s favorite aspect of the online world was actually just meeting and chatting with the other players.
The Travels of Wiglington and Wenks is free to play for anyone. However, a membership option is available that offers enhanced game play, including additional costumes, pets, houses, and islands as well as additional quests and game play privileges.
Membership costs range from $5.99 a month to $59.99 a year.
As a member of the TOS Crew, I was given a free one-month membership to Travels of Wiglington and Wenks in order to write this review.
Hello Debbie,
ReplyDeleteMany thanks for taking the time to do this review. My name is Aldric - the Deputy CEO and Chief Executive Producer of the Travels of Wiglington and Wenks Virtual World.
I am thrilled to hear that Emily had a great time learning and making friends on Wiglington and Wenks.
Regarding the chat aspect, you would be pleased to hear that we will soon release 3 levels of chat that can be selected during registration -
No Chat - The No Chat option is for parents who want their children to focus solely on the virtual world quests and not interact with other players. Using this option, your child will not be allowed to engage in any form of chat, nor see any chat. You can toggle this feature off later in the Parents Control Panel and switch this to Safe Chat mode.
Safe Chat - The Safe Chat mode is for parents who want to limit their children's interaction on the virtual world. Using this option, players will only be able to chat and view chat using chatlines from a safe pre-constructed list.
Moderated Free Chat -
The Moderated Free Chat mode is for parents who want their children to learn about different cultures and gain social skills through interacting with children from other countries and through engaging in team activities. Using this option, players are able to chat freely using a chat system which is moderated for abusive language. However, no chat moderation system is 100% foolproof and occasionally abusive language presented in different forms may still surface. It is up to parents to guide and educate their children on reacting appropriately to such unwanted chat.
In fact, we have already developed the safe chat system and it is currently in Beta testing phase - http://blog.wiglingtonandwenks.com/ww-news/wiglington-and-wenks-launches-beta-testing-of-safe-chat
You have our assurance that child safety is of utmost importance to us and we will keep working hard to make it as close to perfection as possible.
Once again, thank you so much for taking the time to write this review.
I look forward to seeing Emily make more friends from other countries on WW.
Kind regards,
Aldric