Students Blog

As I have a friend who works for Neopets, I chose that gaming community to examine for this week's assignment. Neopets is, as the name suggests, a game wherein the player creates a virtual pet (or several) to take care of. The player can travel throughout the world of Neopia, exploring various areas and playing dozens of mini-games. These mini-games are typically clones of other games (most card games, old arcade games, more recent popular internet games, etc.), with the dramatic elements changed to match the new world. Upon playing these games, players are rewarded with Neopoints, which can be used to purchase items, strengthen a Neopet, or play other gambling-style games.

Though ostensibly the social metaphor for this game would be caretaking, there really isn't enough of a caretaking game mechanic to be compelling in and of itself. The Neopets are cute, but very difficult to customize beyond the initial choice of race and a few basic colors. To transform a Neopet into a pirate, fairy, merfolk, etc. or - even just to change color - requires very expensive and very rare items. As far as the literal caretaking options, beyond feeding the Neopets and playing with them (mind you, 'play' consists of clicking the "play" command on a toy and merits only a one-line response), there is little ability to interact with the Neopets and even less satifaction to be gained from doing so. Although I do like my pirate Kougra -- and the art is good -- the caretaking aspect would be insufficient to fully hold my attention.

Exploring might be another possible social metaphor. Rather than just provide the ability to create a virtual pet, Neopets allows for player and pet to explore the world of Neopia. The world is divided into various regions -- a desert land reminiscent of ancient Egypt, the stone ages, a space station, a medieval realm, an underwater city, a floating faerie castle in the clouds, etc. With each area, NPCs live and fight, creating plotlines and histories for each area. For the most part, however, players cannot influence or interact with these stories, thus limiting the sense of player agency.

The true social metaphor seems to be collecting. Whether the players chooses to collect rare (limited edition) Neopets, items to showcase, items that increase a Neopets various statistics, game high scores, number of different games played, money, awards, or anything else of similar nature, the intent in clear -- to have the most, the highest, the best. Or, at the very least, to get more out of playing the games than the satifaction of having done so. When players explore the right areas or complete games, they earn points, items and rewards. Though these rewards have little real value outside of the Neopets site, it still documents achievements in a way that other casual game sites (Yahoo! Games and the like) cannot match. Add to that good art and the dramatic elements of a cohesive world along with social opportunities for comparing collections and a trading structure... the site's success is not inexplicable. Neopets is what you make of it, and you may fully eschew most aspects of the game with no real loss. It all depends on which game you want to play.