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nutrinopets
Nutrinopets is a virtual pet site where players can feed, care for, and battle a virtual pet. Users can chat on the message boards, buy virtual goodies and train their pet and make it stronger.
Criticism of similar games
The idea of the game is similar to Neopets. Games like Neopets have received criticism for their targeting of children for advertizing. Critics have claimed that children may be more suceptible to advertizing than adults are and that the games may be designed to expose children to advertizing from sponsors. For example, in neopets, advertizers may pay to have the name of their brand on games or prizes, such as the hershey trophy, pressuring children to be exposed to the brand labelling if they want to progress in the game. Hand-in-hand with this strategy would be a deliberate design for the games to be "addictive", so that children continue to be exposed to advertizing and continue to play, bringing in revenue for the game company.
On a more general level, computer games have been criticized for contributing to the obesity epidemic by presenting children with a more attractive passtime than exercize. Other general criticism of online video games is that they may provide people with an artificial sense of community while actually preventing them from interacting with others by encouraging them to stay at home inside.
