9/22/2023 0 Comments What happened to playon scriptsNeopets, she said, “gave them a safe space to voice who they really are for the first time.” topics on the site last year (which were blocked by “child-friendly” keyword filters), people started coming out on the site when they hadn’t yet anywhere else in their lives. Morris said that after players successfully pushed to allow discussions of L.G.B.T.Q. “Recently, the site feels like the one place on the internet that can be an escape,” said Liz Morris, 30, who lives in Texas with her wife and dog. The anonymity of the site has also made it a haven for its queer usership. “My pets are expressions of myself,” she said.īecause the platform was originally intended for children, its current user base - made up mostly of 20- to 40-year-olds - is not allowed to share identifiable information, like real names or external social media handles, and certain topics are banned in its chat rooms, including politics and Covid-19. Allwood herself has tattooed arms and wears dark clothes. She’s especially proud of having won a quest that let her give her catlike Aisha, named i_Ophelia_i, snot-colored skin. Allwood has spent countless hours accumulating imaginary wealth and achieving missions that allow her to dress her pets in gothic accessories and paint them magical colors. Together, they inhabit a vast digital world known as Neopia: It includes games and guilds, elaborate quests and a battle dome, hotels and a hospital, a hidden island and a fully functioning stock market.įor Hannah Allwood, 23, who works the night shift at a veterinary hospital’s emergency room in Seattle, it’s the feeling of “nurturing rather than just self-achievement” that keeps her returning. Represented by a cute and customizable illustration, each Neopet belongs to one of many imaginary species and possesses its own unique name and character traits by collecting Neopoints (the site’s virtual currency), users can buy clothing, food, toys and other items for their cyber companions. “My pets, oh dear, my pets, I really love them even if they’re just little drawings on a screen,” said Adriana Freitez, a player in her 20s who has had her tiger-like pet Kougra for nearly 14 years now. And as much of the website is breaking down after the recent discontinuation of Adobe Flash - critical software for the platform - these longstanding users are now taking its future into their own hands. These players, the majority of whom are women, according to Neopets, got their first tastes of coding, web design and animation on the site. While pandemic returnees discovered this digital world is like a living time capsule, a steady corps of committed users have been dutifully caring for this cyber village. Neopets rivaled other digital pet fads like Tamagotchi and was cross-promoted with small pet-like toys in McDonald’s Happy Meals, but over the years, it struggled to adapt to new technologies and attract younger generations of players, and, as a result, the website slowly stagnated. When Neopets was first introduced in 1999, it was an instant success among children browsing the internet for the first time, boasting 25 million users by its peak in the mid-2000s. For the uninitiated, Neopets is like Animal Crossing meets Pokémon meets early Myspace: The platform allows users to explore a charming, click-based universe and rear magical pets while building their own webpages and socializing on glittery chat boards. Many former users returned to their dormant accounts in the last year or so, driven by boredom, nostalgia or a desire for escape - the site’s team reports a 30 to 40 percent spike in usership in the months following March 2020. Kennedy isn’t the only millennial who logged back into Neopets during the pandemic. “It felt like coming home,” Kennedy, a 29-year-old web developer from Arizona, wrote over Neomail, the website’s internal email system. She selected a piece of “Thornberry Jelly” from her inventory, chose the “feed” option from a drop-down menu and clicked the giant yellow “submit” button, repeating this process several times until a dialogue box on confirmed that her virtual pets were “satiated.” With her pets happy again, Kennedy, who goes by the username “iplatypus,” realized just how comforting it was to see their smiling cartoon faces on the browser-based game she’d been visiting since 2003. Feeling terrible that she had neglected them, Kennedy sprung into action. Big blue tears of hunger and sadness ran down their cheeks. When Allison Kennedy visited her Neopets in May after a four-year hiatus, they were crying.
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