The big news at the end of the week was of course the sale of Club Penguin to Disney for a nice sum of $350 million; and an additional $350 million if everyone plays nice and successfully sucks more kids into the penguin web.

I don’t have anything per se against virtual reality worlds like Second Life, Red Light Center (for the real adults) or even to an extent the kid versions like Club Penguin or Barbie Girls. After all this world sucks enough as it is so shuffling your kids off to virtual worlds; where everything is politically correct and they can live a distorted view of worlds approved by boards of psychotherapists, is better than having to learn how to deal with the real world - right?

While Mark Hendrickson from TechCrunch provided the typical TechCrunch reporting of the sale a more interesting post came from Carleen Hawn doing a guest column on GigaOM about the sale. In her post she outlined two things that worried her about this partnership between Disney and Club Penguin but it was a line in her first point that I think speak volumes about this current drive to make virtual reality; especially for kids, the cyber quicksand that sucks us all into safe created worlds.

As she quotes Steven Wadsworth; president of the Disney Internet Group, saying in a conference call announcing the partnership:

….. But in virtual world environments — having watched Club Penguin carefully and learning from them — in those immersive environments that are clearly targeted at a younger kids, like Club Penguin, Disney Fairies or Toontown, those will be ad-free … so once kids get immersed, they’re pretty clean.

Immersed ….

Clean ….

Do we really live in a world where we will so willingly offer up our kids to be playthings in a sterile world of make believe. Is it so much easier to cough up a credit card and let some corporation spoon feed our children their perceptions of what is right and wrong.

What ever happened to our responsibility as parents to teach our children or has that to been handed over lock stock and barrel to bland corporate entities with their own agendas; and if you don’t think they have such agendas then you’ve been spending to much time in your own virtual reality.

Conversation Tags: virtual reality, Club Penguin, Disney