Avakin Life

I like to see myself as a vigorous tester of video games and their communities. I like to see what goes on in the confines of enclosed indie gaming communities of niche, small studio made games. I found out about this game after I decided to peek into the IMVU community. Across 4 different accounts with 4 different personas and styles, I think I’ve discovered Literally everything wrong with this game: 1: Sexualisation. This game is built for cyber dating and promiscuity: It’s full of child predators and children putting themselves in vulnerable positions. An alarming portion of the player base is under 15s and predators masquerading as such. The game allows the player (including your child) to strip down to their underwear. Women get a free underwear choice that is simply coloured tape blocking their intimacies. Due to what I hope to assume is a modelling oversight, Girls wearing no leg clothing except certain tights removes their underwear’s visibility completely, exposing a bare arse and pubic area (displaying no genitals thankfully but still it’s heavily implied). You can purchase and use very erotic dances, even being able to narrow down which ones by using the “search” function on the shop to find “twerk” dances, “butt” dances, and “sexy” dances. It didn’t matter what my character looked like or did, I found myself simply swamped with requests for sexual acts as well as to date them. Male, female, gruff character, ugly character, joke character, nothing stopped this pure filth coming my way. I couldn’t tell if it was actual children or adults masquerading as such but either way your child won’t be able to tell the difference either if they play here. During one incident, I was in another users house, in which I was told to interact with an item of furniture, in this case, being a pillory. The other user then interacted with a cage which makes your avatar shake the bars. This looked like I was partaking in BDSM sex. Immediately upon doing so, the user started saying how my “young ass felt so good on his meat”amongst other ultra-sexual, rape like messages. I did not consent to partake in this act and was tricked into it. Upon removing myself from the pillory he went back upstairs and convinced someone who seemingly was a literal child to go and do the same thing I did. Now would you want your child going through any of this? Now bear in mind this user was reported by myself, however, he was on a 1 day old account. You don’t need to link an account to an email or anything to play, you can simply go around with throwaway accounts to remake when you get banned. This user probably makes a pass time out of e-raping YOUR children! Half the girls clothes feature skin tight outfits, skimpy outfits, and even outfits with cutaways revealing breasts and pubic areas. There is a shirt for girls that is literally just a pair of sleeves and shoulders where the rest of the shirt is cut off, revealing breasts. 2: Encouraged real-funds purchasing, gambling. There’s literal gambling in the game. The players can buy “mystery boxes” which either give you “good” or “rare” items or items you will never use. If you run “low” on funds, you’ll get frequent pop ups pressuring and goading you to buy more money. 2 clicks and your child has paid for money. Unfortunately alongside the game goading you to buy their in game money for real money, the community is also very peer pressury, where anyone with cheap / default clothing is spoken down upon by rich players in 10k suits with $50k LGBT rainbow angel wings. Personally I don’t see too much of a fuss for this because this is a sad reality of our current generation, children love mystery boxes, despite them being gambling, and the thrill of opening one is more than enough for these rascals to get their gambling kick at an early age. Avakin life didn’t start this trend nor did they execute it in any way that makes it any more deplorable than other companies. If a child puts on an outfit item to try on, then attempts to leave the menu, rather than just defaulting back to your clothing you wore prior, the game will prompt you saying “you are about to leave with something you do not own” and prompt you to purchase the item without any confirmation message before hand. If your child wants to spend £10 of their pocket money on this game, and they accidentally buy an item they did not want or mean to buy, tough luck, because you won’t get a refund! There’s also occasional “bugs” on menus that make you buy things you didn’t buy. 3: There is no real objective to this game beyond dressing to impress and starting online relationships: There is no gameplay objective. There is no skill. There is no competitive element beyond fashion shows which are mundane and you don’t even need to do literally anything besides select a few clothes for.the WHOLE game is just talking to strangers, dancing, getting to know them, and “roleplaying”. The game gives you costumes and items (including weapons) to roleplay with, however there’s no actual way to defeat or harm another avatar physically with these weapons. 4: racism and discrimination is ripe: For some reason this game seems to be a far right safe haven or at least an edge lord safe haven. I joined a lobby a few times to hear people spam how much they “hate n****rs, f****ts, Jews, and t***nies” Upon putting a trans badge on my character and entering another lobby, I was messaged saying how I will never be a real man, and that I should be stoned alive for being trans and that allah hates me. This had no effect on me as I am not trans. However if your child is undergoing some sort of disphoric state and is told stuff like this then it could be devastating to their mental health. 5: religious reasons If you are part of a faith that forbids the following then avoid: - Satanism - Promiscuity - Homosexuality - Black magic, devil worship, death worship - Horror entities (vampires, werewolves, demons) - Polygamy - Cross dressing - Other acts the bible is not too keen on This game is ripe with all these subjects. I do not think any of this necessarily is a bad thing but parents do apparently so I felt like mentioning it. 6: political extremism: A few occasions I’ve been asked questions or had someone attempt to persuade me to the following political causes, organisations, etc: - IRA - Islamic State - The Proud Boys - Palestinian Liberation Front - Arab Socialist Ba’ath company (Assad’s government) - National Front - KKK - Bloods and cripz gangs - Individuals such as Brenton Tarrant (Christchurch shooter), Paul Miller (far right racist who made videos of himself making threats to kill people for their race ), and other alt / far right individuals. 7: hackers. The game can be hacked as easily as it can be installed onto a computer. On IOS devices this is not possible without modifying the devices OS. On android it’s possible and on Computer, well, since this is intended as a mobile only game, getting it installed and running on your computer is harder than hacking the game on a computer. I can’t confirm the authenticity of these complaints however I’ve heard that people “lost accounts” to “hackers” on multiple occasions but I just don’t see that being the case. 8: safety features are redundant: Safety features, such as age verification, hardly at all do anything. A few times I’ve been asked to reverify my age upon logging in however after deciding to experiment, adding different ages every time, including some outlandishly impossible ones such as me selecting 18 on one occasion and then the next day selecting 76. It just does absolutely nothing. 9: DEPENDENCY AND ENCOURAGEMENT OF USE OF DANGEROUS, UNAFFILIATED SOCIAL MEDIA PLATFORMS: The second biggest issue with this game in my opinion is this. The game encourages users to “blog” their gameplay on apps such as Tik tok and Instagram. These platforms are adults only. Tik tok and Instagram collect information on your child and allows them to make posts geolocating themselves on a map, which LITERALLY shows people the EXACT google maps coordinates to the location the message was sent from with the ability to have this way pointed like a sat nav in order to find that person. These platforms also do not make it impossible or all that difficult to accidentally leak your exact location through these means and countless children have in the part leaked their locations in this manner unknowingly. Furthermore they are widely unmoderated and dangerous platforms for children to be on. On top of this, the avakin life related hash tags only make my first point about the community even more concerning by allowing Avakin life’s predators to skip the part where they have to meet through the game and can just get the personal information of whatever child they want, all because they made a public post on their personal social media profiles linking them to this game. Honestly, I’d rather let my child play an ultra violent video game, such as Hatred, Postal, or GTA 5 than let them even acknowledge the existence of this game.

My daughter has been on this app around three months. She is 15. The app alleges safe to play for over 13s. She has met children younger than that, parading their avakin dolls in skimpy underwear, looking for relationships, mentioning sex. What is unclear, is how many of these kids are actually kids and not adults looking for kids. There are players threatening others with violence, death wishing, name calling. In addition, there is no direct messaging control, meaning, anyone can get unsavoury messages from any of the players. There is zero monitoring and zero safety. Please approach with extra caution, this app is not suitable for children.