Critical Play: Social SandBoxes
What makes Club Penguin fun?
Gone are the days of getting back from school and spending hours navigating the fantastic world of penguins while hearing my mother complain about how slow the internet was because of my play. Of visiting virtual friends in their igloos and dreaming about adopting the colors of Puffles restricted to paying players. My dear purple penguin, Olguete, is now a cherished memory of my childhood, brought back in this essay as we explore different kinds of fun and game mechanics.
In a nutshell,
Club Penguin was a massively multiplayer online game (MMO), involving a virtual world that contained a range of online games and activities. It was created by New Horizon Interactive (now known as Disney Canada Inc.). Players used cartoon penguin-avatars and played in a winter-set virtual world.
It was an immensely successful game with over 200 million registered users in 2013 waddling around this frozen land, solving different puzzles, discovering new pathways and sub-games, and being social with your fellow penguins. From this (bizarrely long) sentence we can already observe some of the main types of fun present in the game. Now, let's go a little bit deeper:
Fantasy: Who would not love to be a penguin? Especially colorful ones that can speak and spend their days playing in the snow. Fantasy is a strong component of fun here as it allows players to design a completely new personality for themselves in the shape of a penguin.
Fellowship: you could spend a lot of time in this frozen imaginary land playing solo puzzles, yes, but you could also join friends in multiplayer games and engage with other penguins from a series of pre-defined (unless you were a paying player) sentences.
Discovery: Part of what made Club Penguin magical was the ever-growing world and how each corner of it had new puzzles. From classics to holiday-themed adventures, there was always something new to explore — especially if you were a paying player; which brings us to the second part of this essay: how did in-app purchases affect the fun.
Life as a Paying Penguin
Despite my frequent pleas, my parents never let me pay for internet games. Even if I explained to them that I already had all the colors of Puffles, that I wanted to type out sentences and decorate my igloo with disco balls. I did, however, have a friend on the other side of the spectrum with a credit card saved to her account and a luxurious penguin life. As a child, being able to pay meant keeping up with the massive igloos my friends have, being able to access different parts of that make-believe land, and unlock new territories and puzzles. Club penguin was still fun in its free version but was finite.
