Steel Yourself for Toy Pets With Internet Strings

Kids like to collect things. Of that I'm sure. Some collections, like shells and bottle caps, are free. Others, like Hot Wheels and Barbies, cost money. Accessorizing these collections costs even more. But none of these are quite like the "buy-a-toy-access-a-web-site" phenomena that we're about to see this holiday season.

It started with Webkinz and its brilliant idea to link a furry store-bought pet to a unique ID on the Internet. You enter the unique ID at the Webkinz web site and your pet comes alive and becomes part of a larger Webkinz community.

Webkinz has spawned a number of variations on the theme. Today Hasbro announced My Littlest Pet Shop VIP (that's Virtual Interactive Pets), a special version of their Little Pet Shop line. Five new big-eyed cloth pet animals with secret decoders on them let you gain access into the Little Pet Shop world on the web. Pets earn Kibble points by playing games. The accumulated Kibble can be used to decorate and accessorize their rooms and themselves. Littlest Pet Shop VIP costs about $14.99 each and includes a plush pet and exclusive access to the VIP online world.

It's very sweet and harmless enough, but why should innovation stop there? Never mind that there's no Pet Shop in the Pet Shop world (a cognitive disconnect), but imagine if Hasbro had built a world where you learned about animals and how to take care of them?

The Pet Shop experience is not alone in missed opportunities. Pleo, a $350 robotic dinosaur, is going to join a PleoWorld community in cyberspace with other Pleos.  Barbiegirls.com invites girls and their Barbies to decorate, shop, and share too. Imagine if they had Barbie role-playing her future careers instead of trying on her future outfits.

Linking real-world toys to the web has tremendous potential to enhance play. Kids find it a natural experience. Plus, there's an undeniable additional layer of safety when one ID is tied to one person using the real world play toys. It's also fun to shop and decorate every now and then, but does consumerism need to be the rasion d'etre of the virtual world?

As long as there are kids there will be collections. But for now, parents should think about limiting the number of toys in any collection as well as the number of hours spent playing with them. Now that these communities are becoming safer and better understood it's time to beef up the content.