Community: Habbo Hotel

Habbo Hotel

Habbo Hotel is an online community designed for kids. People can build an avatar which they can then use to 'walk' around a hotel. You can interact with other players (there were between 1000-5000 people on today) and build your own guest rooms to invite players. The animations look like Commander Keen and other ancient dos games.

It uses a combination of shockwave animation and messengers to create an interactive environment. You can start playing for free but to interact in certain ways (adding furniture to your guest room, playing certain games) you buy Habbo coins (current exchange is 5 coins to 1US$). It's pretty easy to purchase and you can definitely do a lot for US$40 but it looks like an environment where you do want to pay at least a little to play. And it looks addictive.

The site is highly personalisable and users build an avatar and their own rooms developing an identity in the community. Habbo Hotel also use events, as Amy Jo Kim suggests, to keep participation. There's a weekly newsletter and competitions. Users can write articles for the newsletter and win design competitions.

It's got a TOS/EULA as we discussed in our lecture this week. They own anything that you submit to your site and you can get kicked off if you don't play to the community codes of behaviour which they call The Habbo Way. On the other hand it's trying to promote a space that's safe for children. From the very first page they promote safe internet behaviour (not giving out real details (name/address/passwords) and they have a guide for parents.

It's kind of different from Neopets (also aimed at kids - though most of my friends will admit to having been suckered in) in that it's much more subscription based where Neopets is advertising/promotion/product based. Different ways to get money to pay for it all.

Habbo Hotel is an interesting example of a propriety community designed to make profit without being too invasive. I do think it has a shelf-life, at least for me (who hasn't played my neopets in three years despite a daily addiction at one stage) but you can lurk and interact as much as you want in a mostly easy to use environment.