The competitor to Blockland, Roblox, is a licensee of theTRUSTe® Children's Privacy Program, and the company gets an A rating from the BBB as well. I didn't find anything equivalent for Blockland when I took a look around, but it does have an 18,000 user base so it's reasonably mature. If there were major issues with the safety of either, I would have expected to be reading about them easily enough, though you make a good point and while Roblox is up-front about safety, Blockland isn't.

The only issue I came across in a brief look around was some concern over whether the language used in the chat rooms on either site was filtered or not. In the end the topic was so confused I never did find out for sure. But that's certainly one area of concern if you have small children and it's probably worth asking.

I don't know if you've considered this, but most people don't consider emailing the sites or companies they're interested in directly. Yet that can be the quickest way to get the information you need. If it were me I'd probably shoot off an email to the customer service folks at both sites, asking them to address any specific concerns you might have, and see what they come back to you with.

Otherwise, the most likely places to read comments from the users of online games are at fan forums, either independents or on the official home sites, if they have them. Single-topic games forums are usually popular and busy, especially if the games allow user-created modifications, or "mods" as blockland apparently does. There will definitely be "modders" out there chatting on forums about what they've developed. Try using "blockland forum" as a search term in your search engine of choice and see what comes up. You probably won't get the answers you're looking for as such, but reading the conversations of users should give you at least some indication of the type of people who populate it.

There is also YouTube, always a good resource on childrens' and adolescent issues, but then you'll likely have to wade through yards of inane and occasionally profane comments and you'll probably be no wiser at the end of it all. There are several pro-blockland and pro-roblox videos there, anyway.

You might also be aware that Lego itself is shortly to weigh in with its own online game, and that's a company that's going to want to protect its reputation. In under a year that could make both of the other games obsolete, so you might not be looking at a long term commitment to any one of them. No doubt as soon as the official Lego Online advertising hits the TV, the kids are all going to want to go there instead.

asked by Chris O. on 1/18/10