Nickelodeon Launches Nicktropolis Web Playground

Nickelodeon has taken a bold step into the burgeoning virtual-worlds arena with the launch of Nicktropolis, a personalizable, avatar-dwelling playground for kids on the Web.

Nicktropolis, which goes live on Nick.com and Nicktropolis.com on Jan. 30, is sort of a Second Life for tweens: Kids can create a virtual identity for themselves – a 3D video game-like character which they create, picking out what color hair it has and what kind of clothes it wears, for example. Then kids can take that avatar to visit various virtual locales within Nicktropolis, such as stores, friends' rooms, amusement parks and even virtual versions of top Nickelodeon shows, like SpongeBob's Bikini Bottom.