Hot Penguin on Penguin Action!

Just trying to get your attention here with that provocative headline. Anne Collier, in her fabulous Safe Kids newsletter, alerted me to the Club Penguin game "Spin the Fish." You can probably guess what it's modeled after -- the good old fashioned "Spin the Bottle" game in which IRL a group of young persons sit in a circle, a bottle is spinned, and the spinner has to kiss the person the bottle is pointing at (or be put into a closet with them for five minutes while everyone else stands outside with their ears pressed to the door). I remember in grade school longing for that bottle to point to Scott Cassidy or David Bowerbank. But I digress...

Not to be thwarted by the lack of real smooching, kids at Club Penguin (around ages 9 and up, from what I gather) are playing this game virtually. See it in "action" here:



Note how the fish doesn't really spin. Note how you can react using emoticons about how you feel about being kissed by someone (too bad we don't know whether these penguins actually know each other offline or not). Note how this is yet another example of how kids will do ANYTHING to express their crushes on someone -- and can also snub certain peers just as easily. For more rules on how to play it "cool" (the unwritten rules of this unofficial game) during Spin the Fish, look here. The point in this blog I found most poignant is that the author commented that "No one asked me because I didn't have my latest style on yet." Apparently it's just as important for a penguin to look hot as it is for a pre-teen...