If you are interested in kids and social software (or the future of persistent worlds, or the internal economics thereof) then Neopets is something you can't ignore. With, at the time of this posting, over 61 million registrations and almost 92 million pets created, it is by far the biggest web site that most non-parent adults haven't heard of. (According to their press kit they are the fourth most trafficked site among Americans, after only Yahoo, eBay and MSN, and have by far the longest time spent on the site per user.)
Each player gets up to four tamagotchi like pets (their mood tends down unless you play with them and feed them) and earns currency (NeoPoints) by playing games "located" around a thematically organized world. The currency can be used to buy food, toys and accessories for your pets, along with a bewildering variety of collectable objects.
The surreal-o-meter is high, with items like eyeball slurpy, strawberry artichoke and lightning fern and there is just so much of it. On the other hand, it is the simplest possible case of a persistent world: character data persists, but the world can't really be changed by the players. And the games suck. And it is not easy to communicate with other players. But 60+ million Neopians can't be wrong.
With pan-world auctions, trading, searchable player-run stores immediately available to all (since there is no real concept of location), gambling, banking and even an in-game stock market, it is an incredibly fluid market (and probably something like 100 times as many economic interactions per day as all other persistent worlds put together). Finding arbitrage opportunities or tracking prices for a while and determining when to buy gets downright fun.
And although the players can't have much of an effect on the world, they do get to design pages for their pets and their store, meaning that there is a generation of kids coming up whose first experience in personal publishing was through Neopets. (The store pages in particular are amazing examples of web creativity gone mad: since multiple store listings occur on a single page there can be wild cacophonies of competing midi files, gif animations, and inline java applets.)
Although Neopets as a popular phenomenon (and hugely popular marketing-based business) has been noted (NYT, CNET, BusinessWeek), it has received scant attention from academics and designers. And there is a lot to learn here.
1. Liz Lawley on October 1, 2003 5:08 PM writes...
Ah, yes, Neopets. My kids went through a phase of being quite fond of that site. But they got bored, in part because there was no real-time interaction with other pet owners. While they knew there were lots of other users, they didn't feel connected to them (or to each other).
Same thing, to a lesser extent, with Animal Crossing --a game that they (and I) played almost obsessively when we got it, but finally tired of. I suspect that the net-enabled version of AC, due out next year in the states, will be far more dangerous and seductive, since it promises to allow visiting of other peoples' towns over the 'net.
Permalink to Comment2. Greg Lastowka on October 2, 2003 12:37 PM writes...
Good call -- I was playing with this one day a couple of years ago and got the sinking feeling that the whole thing was *way* over my head. But you're right, in the words of Linda Loman "attention must be paid" to Neopets. I've got a cynical suspicion that they've been outside the academic radar because they're not just in the games ghetto, they're in the kiddie games sub-ghetto...
Permalink to Comment3. Richard Bennett,14 on May 2, 2004 10:36 AM writes...
i am an avid neopian player,and the game, while difficult to get into, soon becomes very immersive and addictive (round about the time you start getting decent amounts of intrest and stat dabbling in stocks & shares.the games are basicully remakes of old classics (meerca chase=snake,Korbats Lab=breakout etc) so easy to play
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