Habbo clients around the world

I must live under a rock. So many scandals and incidents of elemental weirdness manage to just pass me by. Yet, now and then I get a chance to play catch-up. Last night it was in an underground dive bar known as the 8-Ball, and a kindly grad student told me about the “furni whores” of Habbo Hotel. It seems that on Habbo the only thing you actually have to pay for is furniture, and there is a TSO-quality culture that has arisen where kids will scam people for furniture and yes, cyber for furniture. Since Habbo has a draconian chat filter, the preferred invitation is something like this: “I will babbo for furniture.” There is a nice discussion of the phenomenon in this post on the BBC web site.

And I quote: When you hear a female habbo(habbohotel coins) say, “I WILL BOBBA FOR FURNI,” then you’ve met your first virtual furniture whore. This behavio(u)r is quite against the rules of Habbo, but it would not take much to find a quiet room somewhere, or create your own room, then get your groove on with the furni whore. It’s not like the little cartoons are programmed to fornicate, or even touch each other, but she’ll offer to reply in character to your one-handed typing of what you want to do to her. She may not be acting out the words, but it’s enough for some people to imagine that this female knows what you’re doing with one hand under your keyboard. It must be a very compelling situation for a lonely person, if you can ignore the possibility that the female avatar named “Cumilla” may be operated by a 67 year old man(habbo credits).