TODAY'S REVIEW:



Whuddleworld starts out with promise. Your basic kid-friendly site; a bit like Neopets, only yet to go down the Neopets' "Let's advertise the fuck out of our target audience" route. Which I'm thankful for, don't get me wrong-- as much as I love using choice words, there's something to be said about G-rated material. It's a throwback to simpler times.

... At least, it should be.

Upon joining, you're confronted with an avatar-based system, anthro-style pixel art. Cute enough, right? The selection is limited, but as is with any virtual pet site, you have to work to really get anything. I guess that's teaching our kids the right values! Work hard and people will respect you, work hard and you can dress up properly... Again, simple stuff.

I think I wouldn't have even bothered attempting to review it were it not for a glaringly huge mistake in the site's composition: Mainly, the Orientation Quiz.

Ohhh, the orientation quiz. Depending on your age selection (12 and under to 13 and above), you're required to take a bit of a test to rank your 'citizenship' level, which in turn determines what you can and cannot access on the site. This should be fairly general stuff, but it's only when you click to take it that it's actually composed of about 12 small quizzes acting as a tutorial for the site's features and terms of service. This would not be a problem, honestly, if I hadn't been given a goddamn tutorial at the beginning in slideshow form. You would think one could grasp the basics well enough with that, which was, believe me, longer than necessary, but no.

And it's not like these quizzes are all based on simple, 'Food Handler's Permit' levels of thinking. When they call it a quiz they are not fucking with you-- this is a test. A comprehensive one at that. And if you screw up on a single question, you have to take the whole portion over again. No clues as to what you said wrong, and some of these things are so vague or minor that you have to wonder if it's even worth the trouble. Hell, at one point I was asked where a goddamn pixel grill was located in town and by then it was obvious they were just trying to fuck with me.

Isn't this supposed to be a kid's game? I mean, sure, I picked the '13 and over' section, but I'm not sure I can give a lot of teenagers enough credit as to being able to answer all these on the first try. And according to yahoo answers, I'm not the only one who had to struggle through this section! I joined this site to dress up cute little lion people, nothing more. I'm pretty sure this is one of those sites your typical teenager would want to use as a distraction from their education, as well, not an extension of it.

I get wanting to weed through any possible morons out there-- I would want an application process for that kind of thing too. I'm just saying, it's a bit much and could possibly turn a lot of kids (and their parents) off. I suppose it's not a huge loss, though; you could get all the fun of dressing up cute things on eLouai for free and with not even half the effort required.


TL;DR: If you want to draw kids in, keep the tutorials out. Or at least make them less wordy. (And when this is coming from me, of all people, you know you've got problems.)