Neopets is the Safety Blanket Millenials Reach for in These Trying Times
When Adam Powell and Donna Williams created Neopets as a way to provide a distraction for college students, and maybe make a little extra money while they were at it, there was no way they could have known what an influential site they were creating. Since then, the site has grown into a cultural touchstone that has informed how we look at other pet sites and cartoony MMOs for years, and it became a childhood staple of those coming of age in the 2000s.
For many, a childhood spent feeding and bathing digital creatures is as far as Neopets got in their lives. But for others, it didn’t end there. There’s a large portion of Millenials who are either returning to the game as adults, or who never left in the first place. With so many entertainment options available to us, my curiosity as to this site’s particular popularity with people my own age was peaked.
Much like in the real world, Neopia runs on money. Everything from food, to paintbrushes, to outfits, to toys all cost cold, hard cash, and players get it by partaking in the game’s expansive economy. There are multiple systems at play to provide players with efficient ways to make money. The site’s flash games are the most basic way to earn Neopoints, chasing high scores to earn bigger payouts. But that’s not the only method, nor even the best one.
Through the use of “dailies” (games of chance that players can access every set amount of hours), it’s fairly easy for anyone to make a quick buck. Combined with restocking, a practice where private shop owners buy out the inventory of site-run stores as soon as new items become available and then flip them in their own stores at inflated prices for profit, it’s easy for anyone to make more than a living efficiently, and the learning curve isn’t much of an obstacle. “It’s so easy to find a niche on that site, re: what you collect or what you sell,” said Marn, host of the ARGonauts podcast.
This is the complete opposite of most of our current situation, as millenials have less net worth than our Boomer and Gen X counterparts did at our age; 15% of us have to live with our parents to get by (compared to 8% of Boomers), and the median Millennial student debt percentage is almost 50% greater than Gen X when they were our age. We have to work even harder for less than what our parents and grandparents had. Through its economy, Neopets allows players to achieve their wildest financial dreams, ones they could never attain in their real lives. With so much money at easy disposal, it’s easy to feel safer and more comfortable than one would in the real world. As LGBTimeMachine host, Theo, put it: “there’s something satisfying about amassing wealth in a made up world, because I know I absolutely will never have any kind of wealth in the real world. Neopets is pain-free, risk-free capitalism where everything is cute and colorful and happy.”
Indeed, Neopets provides a vision of a utopia where people can be aggressive capitalists while still existing in a world with underlying socialistic systems. No player’s pets ever need to go hungry because of features like the Soup Kitchen, Money Tree, and Giant Omelette, which provide food, in the case of the Soup Kitchen and Omelette, and Neopoints (the game’s primary currency) in the case of the Money Tree. Even the economy itself has failsafes to level the playing field. Using the dailies, it’s fairly easy to earn free money. According to Marn “in the past few years they introduced Trudy’s Surprise, which is a free game that costs nothing and gives you more Neopoints for each consecutive day you play it, and in my opinion, it’s counterbalanced inflation pretty well.”
Having this kind of financial security, and access to socialized care is a real revelation for young adults from countries where such services are broken or don’t exist at all. Longtime user, Denzelle, who was born in the US but has since moved abroad said of the game: “I’m a poor student at the moment, and while I’m hopefully going to be comfortable in my line of work when I graduate, I also have a serious health condition that interferes with my ability to work, and while I’m lucky enough to have my care covered here, I’m also hyper aware it would not be in the USA where I was born.”
Meanwhile, in real life, more than a third of working millenials have a second job, or side hustle, to make ends meet in addition to having access to healthcare and other benefits. This kind of nonstop work is obviously exhausting and leaves little time for hobbies that may be more time consuming. Finding the energy for activities that require a lot of focus and attention can be difficult, so having a game with such low stakes that you can so easily pick up and put down is a godsend for many. Another user, Kat, is a prime example of this: “lately I’ve been finding it hard to sit down to play games with higher time requirements, but I can do everything for Neopets during work breaks.”
While many adults use high intensity, world absorbing games as a bit of escapism, Neopets is accessible and varied enough to provide a respite for a busy work day, lecture, or just something to zone out to for a bit while listening to podcasts due to its nature as a browser based game. There’s no need for an expensive console, or even internet that’s all that great.
In a world where many of us are struggling to get by, and are working soul-sucking day jobs to do so, it absolutely makes sense that the world of Neopia would be appealing. It’s bright, happy, provides a distraction that doesn’t require too much energy (a resource many find ourselves scraping the bottom of the barrel for), and gives a vision of the world we’ve been fed all our lives. In Neopets, if you work hard and are smart, you really can achieve anything, and you don’t have to worry about getting into an expensive university to do so. Anyone can be anything, and getting ahead doesn’t necessitate stepping on someone else’s dreams or humanity.
