
'Neopets': Inside Look at Early 2000s Internet Girl Culture - rbanffy
http://www.rollingstone.com/glixel/features/neopets-a-look-into-early-2000s-girl-culture-w509885
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thisisfineagain
Yeh I'm a girl I was into Neopets. But I never considered it a girl thing.
What interested me about Neopets was that I flew to California when I was 13
(now 27) to visit my cousin (same age as me) and I followed her along to one
of her routine babysitting jobs, two young Asian girls 8,10. I don't know if
their parents were software developers, but they were extremely well off with
a beautiful mansion in the hills of San Juan Capistrano.

Their girls were a fraction of my age but we're on Neopets opening up wen
frameworks and coding and doing stuff I didn't understand at the time. I was
amazed at what they could do.

I think the coolest thing about Neopets was it provided a real time economic
system and allowed people to actually experiment with businesses and profit.
Furthermore, it was not easy to be rich, and I traveled far and wide for rare
items to resell. I would love to see a new game like Neopets come back again
in a more mature fashion adults could get into, merely for an to engage in
economic experimentation. I learned more about the hustle in Neopets than I
did anywhere in school until I hit the real world after college.

About every three of four years I remember Neopets and check on Lara, she's on
the brink of starvation but not quite dead yet, a small snack keeps her going
for another few years. Really low maintenance pets on the whole.

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dragontamer
I never considered "Neopets" to be "girl culture".

Probably because I played it and I am a dude.

> nearly 60 percent of Neopets' visitors were girls

Eehhhhh, that's a really tough sell for "Neopets" to be "Girl Culture". It was
an internet game and internet community.

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This concept of "Closed Girl Space" is kind of intriguing, but seems to assign
gender to a concept that I've never considered "Gender" to be an important
distinguisher. Geocities, Homestead, and plenty of early internet "club
websites" have similar "Closed Space" concepts (including "Webrings" to join
the club). Its just how communities around the internet were built back then,
before "Search Engines" were very popular and when websites were spread by
word of mouth.

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There are some gems in this article. This is a good paragraph that greatly
describes the "feel" of the game:

> Neopets was the wireframe for a community of girls that continuously
> expanded its expressive reach. Not bound by the limitations of a traditional
> open-world game built on a console system, Neopets began a collaborative
> building exercise for those that played it. Even in the aspects of play that
> were regulated by Neopets developers, users provided input: A player could
> publish reported and researched stories or opinion pieces in the in-game
> newspaper, The Neopian Times, or build out shops that filled Neopia's
> marketplace. Players gathered in forums and in guilds – partly responsible
> for the Neopets DIY media scene – to forge relationships and share
> experiences. Communities of storytellers, artists, reporters, designers, and
> poets emerged, alongside an economy that fed off its collaborators.

Just remove the "community of girls" part, because Neopets really was a fully
inclusive culture no matter who you were.

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bfuller
I got my start in software development by creating bots for neopets. There
were many many women involved in the cheating scene but it mostly skewed
towards males.

