Jen Sun, president of Numedeon Inc., the Pasadena company that created and runs Whyville, said there is an upside when kids get scammed this way -- they learn a lesson about being careful on the Web in a safe environment.
"It's a learning experience for the victim not to be so gullible, not to be motivated by greed, because the scammers use greed against you," she said.
Two UCLA researchers who study virtual worlds were startled by the "seemingly innumerable" ways that kids cheat each other. They detailed several in a 2007 paper published in the proceedings of the third international conference of the Digital Games Research Assn.
According to the paper and Whyville staff, Whyville veterans often haze newcomers by demanding rent, even though apartments there are free. Other players have figured out a combination of keyboard commands that allows them to jump into the virtual cars of strangers, which is normally allowed only through invitation. Users have claimed that elections for the Whyville Senate were rigged through stuffing of virtual ballot boxes.
Some players took advantage of an outbreak of Whypox -- a virtual plague that causes avatars to sneeze and break out in boils -- by selling cures that turned out to be fake.
UCLA doctoral student Deborah Fields, who wrote the paper with professor Yasmin Kafai, said players were much more willing to engage in behavior that they wouldn't in the real world.
"I don't think they feel monitored," she said. "It's way less monitoring than they probably have in school from just the presence of a teacher."
Like adults, many kids feel that behaving badly online has fewer repercussions than behaving badly in real life, where face-to-face interaction drives home the consequences. Just as they can jump off a virtual building and not feel a thing, they can steal from each other with no consequences.
Virtual worlds are trying to change that. Webkinz and Club Penguin allow users to type only lines that are selected by the site's monitors.
Others, such as Whyville, screen chats through a filter that flags when kids swear, type their real names or exchange e-mail addresses, phone numbers or other personal information. Kids who violate the rules lose their privileges on the site or even are banned, and Whyville keeps a "rap sheet" on users to see who has had previous offenses.
