Everyone who has been to a Penn State football game has seen the banking version of street vendors.

Throughout State College at various times during the year, they lure students in with a simple promise: Sign up for a credit card, get a free T-shirt.

Or hat. Or phone card. Or frisbee. Or whatever.

But some of us are smart enough to just either ignore these overtures or make up a fake name and address.

Others aren't so clever. Worse yet, some students receive these cards and use them despite having little to no knowledge of how to properly use credit cards, which would explain why one survey found 14.2 percent of college students to be financially at risk.

A Penn State Erie professor has created an online game in an attempt to help curb this phenomenon. Mary Beth Pinto, director of the Center for Credit and Consumer Research, encourages students with questions about using credit to visit www.cccr.psu.edu. It would be fair to say the information on this site appears quite extensive.

And it would also be easy to poke fun at this effort by queuing the drums and saying "bad credit is no game."

But that would be a cheap shot, and furthermore, it wouldn't be the truth. In fact, this Web site is not a "game" at all. It's more like a research survey disguised as a multiple-choice test. Neither of which are fun.

Combine that with the site's irritating registration process -- all for the sake of gathering demographics, of course -- and we can safely assume few students will visit this site of their volition.

There's no doubt that students with credit problems must be proactive, but a game is not the answer. Personalized attention for students with financial problems sounds more realistic. They provide this kind of guidance at the MBNA Career Center.

MBNA, a credit card company that funded a large part of the center's construction, should be commended for this effort, however coincidental it might be. And, of course, this is the same company permitted to hock its product on university property before football games.

To be clear, if a student gets into credit card debt, it is probably his or her own fault. But it seems odd that company helping students manage their debt might also provide the product enabling them to get into debt. It is a mixed message, one that implies credit is a frivolous pursuit, driven by the desire to obtain cheap apparel. But it is the wrong message.

And that's something every John Doe oughta know.