The other day my 10-year-old popped in at the igloo home of a friend and discovered that her friend’s Puffle had vanished. She had to call her right away to let her know.

My daughter and her friend inhabit the forms of animated penguins in an interactive online game called Club Penguin. Puffles – shaggy, big-eyed blobs – are the animated penguins’ animated pets. Players can adopt one and care for it by allocating points – which they win by playing fun little games within the game – to food and care. The little creatures visibly brighten when cared for. Neglected, they can run away.

Players can also waddle up to other players and address them (that is, their penguins) in print, choosing from pull-down menus of pre-typed phrases – “hi,” “let’s play,” “go away” – or by typing their own words, which appear in real time. That makes Club Penguin, which launched this past summer, a social-networking site for the 8-to-14 set (and training wheels, in effect, for the byzantine worlds of MySpace and Facebook.

I know this particular friend of my daughter’s. She lives right down the street, and visits often (in person, not as a penguin avatar) to join my daughter in noncomputer games. I don’t know the other penguins, and neither does my daughter, even though she might occasionally engage one or more in an online slide down a mountainside, or exchange innocuous greetings.

She also knows that she doesn’t know them – no matter how much they divulge, unsolicited, and as cute as they are in pastels. We’ve had the Internet talk about how anonymity clouds discernment, and she doesn’t even log on if neither my wife nor I can be in the actual (not virtual) room. There’s also a two-level “safe chat” function. One level disallows messaging. The other screens messages for suspect language (a tall task, and the site’s operators concede it’s not a failproof filter).

Parents need to know enough to select safe-chat areas of the Club. That should be an obvious part of knowing what tweens are doing online. The more stringent safe-chat areas, I’ve noticed, are never the ones marked “full.”

Oh, and there’s retail going on inside Club Penguin  too, even if it's facsimile spending. Besides “buying” Puffle chow and little beds and scratching posts, a player can accessorize his or her little penguin with clothes and sporting goods. It can be an incentive to play a lot of games and compile a lot of points, which serve as currency. But a player can only spend them if he or she joins: $15 a month (in legal tender) for the full Club experience.

My daughter and her friend have settled for the freebie version – for basic, unadorned penguins and basic blue Puffles. But message boards buzz with player chatter about whose parents went in for the membership and whose have declared it a waste of money. There are also boards online at which players trade “cheats” that can enhance point-gathering.

The real questions for parents: Do you want to set up your preteens with yet another training ground for the lesson that spending yields status, and can justify corner-cutting? And do you want them chatting with cute little penguins who might not be who they say they are?

Let us know where you stand on online gaming for tweens.

by Clayton Collins