10 Years in Neopia: Reflecting on a Decade

My friend, however, drifted away from Neopets many years ago. My brother and sister barely log in. Many users I knew in my early days are gone. What sets my Neopian experience apart from others? Why have I stuck through it when so many others have quit, or simply forgotten the URL Neopets.com?

I contend that I have enriched my Neopian experience with everything the site has to offer. Beyond the games and the pet collection, beneath the cutesy surface of Neopia lies a rich world filled with unending experiences. Through the Neopets site and its community, I have learned things with practical life applications, become a better—and a published—writer, learned new art skills, become involved with the Neopets community, and made so many dear, dear friends. I would not trade this past decade on Neopets for anything.

How can you enrich your own time on Neopets? I will share the ways I have done so.

Practical applications

When I arrived on Neopia, I had never even heard of HTML. Now, I use the basics without even thinking. The bold section title just above was written in HTML coding! Sometimes, when working in a normal word document, I forget I don’t need to code and I write the HTML coding anyway—when there’s a button that will do it for me. Through studying the Neopets HTML guide as well as looking up other coding questions, I am now able to write basic codes and create simple layouts that would have been far out of my reach ten years ago.

I had heard of the stock market in real life—who hasn’t heard of stock market crashes, anyway? But I had no idea how stock markets work or what to do with them. That is, until I became involved on the Neopets stock market. “Buy low, sell high!” is the basic and very simple tenant of any stock market exchange. Today, much of my Neopian wealth is a result of buying low stocks and selling them again when they reach their peak.

Speaking of wealth, I joined Neopets just before I began working my first job as a teen. While I saved Neopoints on the site, I also saved money from my new job. Over the years, I’ve had many big Neopets purchases—paint brushes, morphing potions, the secret laboratory map. I have learned the value of saving for and celebrating the achievement of monetary goals—and the value of eating cheap food while I’m saving for something worthwhile!

Writing

Though for years I had considered myself a writer, when I joined Neopets I had never allowed other people to read my work (except my mother, of course!). While clicking through Neopets links, I found the Neopian Times and wondered if I could ever be good enough to write for it. Turns out, I was! Inspired by my favorite author of a series featuring a Gelert—tdyans’ Needed series—I began to write about my own Gelerts. Though I’ve been rejected a few times here and there, I have also been published over and over. Other Neopians wanted to read my work! They wanted to celebrate my ideas! Writing for the Neopian Times, whether through stories or in articles, has been a vastly rewarding experience. Having others read my writing has strengthened me as a writer—plus I’m proud to be published!

Despite being published in the Neopian Times, I still struggled for many years with developing dynamic, believable characters. I began dallying in literary roleplaying during my first years in Neopia, and now it’s a part of my daily life! Roleplaying has shown me how to write amazing and complex characters. From detailed backstories to logical outcomes to realistic dialogue, roleplaying has become my foundation for creating characters that really speak to the reader.

These deep characters need equally deep plots to really shine. The Neopets team has run many site events and plots in the decade since I joined—the discovery of Altador, Tale of Woe, Faeries’ Ruin, and others. With audience participation as a major part of all Neopets plots, I came to realize that it’s important for readers to feel like they are involved in the lives and events surrounding a story. Even though I don’t write choose-your-own adventures, I do want my readers to be able to relate to the plots I write. Story events can follow themes that everyone has experienced—jealousy, fear, joy. Well, sure, the reader probably has never met a real ghost or found a buried treasure, but they can still relate to the emotions behind it!

Artistic expression

Growing up, I used to only occasionally draw—sometimes I would illustrate a school report or doodle a favorite cartoon character. But it wasn’t until I began to see some of the wonderful art around Neopia that I really wanted to improve my drawing skills. I have drawn some of my pets over the years, but I really started improving in how I shared my art when I read a guide by longtime Neopian comic artist, ghostkomorichu. Through Komori’s guide I began learning how to draw digitally, which really helps when I wanted to share art in an online format like Neopets. I’m still not the best, but I am proud of how far I have come as an artist.

I never was one for fashion, but Neopets is the extreme exception! Using certified fansite Dress to Impress, I create amazing outfits for my pets that reflect their personalities and stories. Before the customization feature was added to Neopets years ago, I barely ever thought about what my story characters wear. Nowadays, I use a character’s sense of fashion as a way to enhance the story they tell the reader. Visuals are a rich world I had never truly explored until wearables became available to my pets.

The Neopets art gallery and old random contest often feature handmade works by users. Board games, sculptures, even plushes—plushes! I have collected plush toys throughout my entire living memory, or perhaps even longer, since I don’t remember acquiring my very oldest plush animal, who I still cherish to this day. In recent years, I have discovered a new superpower: making my own plushies using crochet! Someday I still hope to enter a completed Neopets plush into the art gallery.

Community

Beyond the games, the real-life applications, the art and writing—beyond all these things I have done to improve on my own, are the wonderfully warm, loving arms of the greater Neopets community. Above all other things in Neopia, the community on the boards and certified fansites remains the greatest treasure in my 10 long years on Neopets. I have made friends, become involved in the Neopets subculture, and have received, and in turn given, so much invaluable support through the hard times and in the good times alike. My life has changed so much in a decade, but my Neopian friends have been here through it all. Get involved with the Neopets community! Head for the boards, look on the fansites, meet people with similar interests. Join a community-wide project, like the collaboration issues organized by the Neopian Times Writers Forum, or the adoption agencies on the pound chat.

I started fostering pets a few years ago and it’s been one of the most rewarding experiences I’ve had with the Neopian community. Helping people find their dream pets, and seeing formerly abandoned pets with a loving owner, has changed the way I think about these seemingly simple bunches of pixels. Taking a starving pet from the pound and giving them to someone who wants them is an amazing feeling. I’ve seen my foster pets become characters in stories and comics, Battledome heroes, and even virtual representations of users’ real-life pets. Fostering has allowed me to be involved in the “lives” of hundreds of pets and nearly as many users, even though I can only have 21 pets at a time.

Just weeks before my 10th anniversary on Neopets, I finally found NTWF, a forum dedicated to Neopian Times writers. Their most recent collaboration issue came out on April Fool’s, and featured a fan-inspired Neopian land. It was a pleasure to be involved in the collab, and I now look forward to many more collaborations in the future. It’s like being involved in a mini Neopian secret!

The next decade

What will I be doing 10 years from now? How will Neopets have changed? How will I have changed? Maybe in 10 years we’ll have holographic Neopet projections that we can play with. Maybe I’ll be a famous novelist. Who knows!

But I do know that all my Neopian experiences that have so enhanced my time here, can also be your experiences. Your first—or next—10 years on Neopets can be just as rich as mine have been. Start coding! Buy some stocks! Draw, write, crochet! The possibilities are endless—and, I think, these endless possibilities are what make Neopets.com so special for me and many others.

So here’s to the next decade! May years 11 through 20 be every bit as wonderful as my first 10 years on Neopets.