FTC Report to Congress on Kids in Virtual Worlds

This morning the Federal Trade Commission released its long-awaited report on kids and virtual worlds.  You can read the report, entitled Virtual Worlds and Kids: Mapping the Risks here.  There are several things that strike me about the report, below the fold.

So the first thing, and this falls into the shameless self-promotion department, is that they clearly did listen to a range of views.  No fewer than three of the articles from the Protecting Virtual Playgrounds symposium (now published in the Washington & Lee Law Review) were cited, including my Virtual Parentalism, my colleague Robin Wilson's Sex Play in Virtual Worlds, and our Rob Bloomfield & Ben Duranske's Protecting Children in Virtual Worlds.  The TNingo count is also pretty good -- they cite posts from TN itself, Ted Castronova's Synthetic Worlds, and Nic Ducheneaut's Body and Mind. They also cited my Anti-Social Contracts piece at length regarding the impact that virtual world actions can have on the real world. 

Ok, enough of that!  The thing that catches my attention about the report is what it doesn't cover.  The report restricts itself, at least on my first read, to non-game MMOs.  They say that this is because game MMOs don't permit enough control to their users to permit the kind of sexual or violent content they're looking for.  First, Conan, if that's what they were looking for.   But second, I wonder if the selection of which virtual worlds they looked at might affect their results.  Certainly excluding WoW, Lineage, etc., will make Second Life and There.com look like bigger players.  And I think that MMORPGs WILL get tarred with this brush, despite the fact that they were not considered as part of the report.

Secondly, I think the report is very interesting in that it finds rough chat or sexual content in a majority of worlds it looked at, but in general it didn't find many such instances per world.  I think this is important, because the billing of the report--and thus the likely media tagline--is that the "FTC Report Finds Sexually and Violently Explicit Content in Online Virtual Worlds Accessed by Minors."  But a more accurate statement would be "FTC Report Finds Surprisingly Little Sexually and Violently Explicit Content in Online Virtual Worlds Accessed by Minors, Especially Compared to What Minors Can Find on the Internet."  I'm relying on the following language:

"Despite this seemingly high statistic [the Commission found at least one instance of sexually or violently explicit content in 19 out of 27 worlds], the Commission found very little explicit content in most of the virtual worlds surveyed, when viewed by the actual incidence of such content."

And: "Of [the 14 virtual worlds open to children under 13], the Commission found at least one instance of explicit content on seven of them.  Significantly, however, with the exception of one world, Bots, all of the explicit content observed in the child-oriented worlds occurred when the Commission's researchers visited those worlds as teen or adult registrants, not when visiting the worlds as children under age 13."  

So the actual incidence of events was quite low, and further tended not to happen when the researchers identified themselves as kids.  Isn't that the real story here?

Update: Here's the reception this is getting in the media -- http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/34366992

Comments

[Doug]

1.

Its sad how MSNBC decided to display the report, and further still, I have to wonder how sites like Red Light Center are meant to block kids without blocking customers/players.

[Laura]

2.

Considering what's on regular old tv these days, I think a few rough chat comments are pretty tame (see http://www.apt11d.com/2009/12/not-ready-for-prime-time-tv.html). Right now it looks like virtual worlds might be safer than the real one.

[Stabs]

3.

Is it not easier to just use Google to find explicit content?

[ren reynolds]

4.

I know it's only me that will spot this and only me that will care. But why is the file name OECD-VWRPT. I find this highly perplexing as, so far as I can see, the report has nothing to do with the OECD, and ironic as I'm actually going to the OECD next week to agree the terms of reference of a Virtual Worlds report.

I know, just me.

Oh - wot Josh said.

[Isaac Knowles]

5.

The decision to avoid games was actually a decision to avoid virtual worlds in which ESRB-rated games were set. This decision, whether or not you agree with it, focused content-analysis on worlds that had not subjected their content to some sort of credible third-party watch dog. Had ESRB-rated games been analyzed, M-rated and above (a la Conan) would probably still not have been looked at. The decision also implicitly ensured that most of the the focus was placed on the the aspect of virtual worlds that have the greatest potential to shock and appall parents: avatar-to-avatar interaction. Games with an ESRB rating below M generally disallow any real interaction between avatars, besides fighting.

[Amarilla]

6.

It'a a conspiracy wether you like it or not ;)