Go Smurf Yourself

A long time ago, a major concern that parents had to worry about was having children who were too young to know any better calling those “976” pay-per-minute telephone services and running up huge telephone bills. Some of it was that these services had “adult” material, but mostly it was just that a three-year-old could call the recorded “Message from Santa” number six hundred times in a day (kids that age do not get bored as easily as you might think), and a few weeks later the parents might be faced with a thousand dollars in phone charges. Even otherwise intelligent people who were old enough to know better would occasionally make this mistake; using a phone service to get updates about their soap operas every weekday for a month until their parents started yelling at them about a $700 phone charge (at $4.95 per minute, it adds up quickly). Of course, that all seems so quaint now…

The phone-service menace had faded, if not quite vanished, when websites that charge for content became the new electronic threat. Most of these required a credit card in order to use, but those aren’t that hard for an enterprising young tyke to get hold of, especially when their parents use the same credit card number on the same computer to buy their own online content; in some cases the computer’s own auto-complete software will fill in those fields for them. For at least ten years now, we’ve been bombarded with stories of children as young as 2 years old placing orders for everything from pornographic movies to large construction equipment using their parents’ computers, and this along with the threat of online predators has convinced most reasonably sane people that you’d have to be an idiot to let small children surf the ‘Net unsupervised…

Now it would appear that Apple has pushed back this frontier, as they have so many others, with iPhone and iPad technology. A story from the Associated Press by way of the Yahoo News tech page presents the curious case of the “Smurf’s Village” video game, which is available for Apple gadgets as part of the run-up marketing for the upcoming Smurfs movie. Like a lot of the current generation of online games, the Smurf’s Village gives the user the option of simply buying resources (using real money) instead of working for them through game play. What’s special about this case is that the game is intended primarily for small children – and the usual failsafe of requiring the user’s iTunes password in order to purchase things within the application apparently doesn’t always work…

Now, the Apple leadership and the game publishers have correctly pointed out that parents can restrict all in-application purchases with a simple settings adjustment; it also seems reasonable to ask about kids and unsupervised online gaming in the first place. Any child who is too young to understand about money (and credit cards) is probably too young to be using web-enabled electronic devices without supervision, and letting your child do so isn’t functionally any different from letting them have access to X-rated cable channels, adult websites, or chat services, all of which are already on the list of socially unacceptable parent behaviors (and will probably end up in the legal definition of child endangerment soon if they aren’t already). A much more troubling point is how easy these applications are to abuse – and how blatantly the programmers are trying to get the user to do so…

Consider the case of the Smurf’s Village game, for example. Like most such applications, it has a wealth of challenges that can take days or weeks of constant play to overcome – or you can complete them instantly with the application of a few real-world dollars. Even adults who should know better can fall prey to this type of programming; expecting small children not to is unrealistic. And while children might consider the idea that purchasing a sword or a biological-warfare grenade launcher in order to slaughter other players might be bad, it’s hard to picture them applying the same logic to purchasing “Smurfberries” in order to build their village faster…

Even worse, in my opinion, is the attitude that some of the parents quoted in this article seem to be taking; that none of this is their fault and everything should go back to the way it was when they were children. Like it or not, in-app purchases are here to stay, just the way online communities and cyber-stalkers are. Letting your children play with a web-enabled computer/communications device that is connected to your credit cards is every bit as stupid as letting them play in traffic would be – and these electronic hazards are no more likely to go away than automobile traffic is…