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Water Cooler Games

a forum for the uses of videogames in advertising, politics, education, and other everyday activities, outside the sphere of entertainment



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Ian Bogost (editor)
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ID the Creep
April 25, 2007 - by Ian Bogost

Liz Losh recently introduced me to ID The Creep, a game that purports to help young girls practice identifying pedophiles online. The game is sponsored by the National Center for Missing & Exploited Children and The Ad Council.

As Liz argues, the player really isn't forced to make any hard decisions in the game; for example, there's no actual socialization or learning or interaction that takes place in the simulated chat space, so there's little motivation to treat the simulated interlocutors as . Liz found that the best strategy was just to identify everyone as a pedophile. Perhaps this is the game's actual message: any online conversations might be risky, so it's probably best just to avoid them.



Comment from Phalligator on April 26, 2007

I tried playing ID the Creep and even if I identified some of the 'creeps' it wouldn't tell me which ones they were, or what the warning signs were that I identified. Pretty disappointing.


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