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The Unexpectedly Educational Features of Neopets


by jaylahcat

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Author's Notes:

    This article was written in response to a prompt for a speech I had to give as my final assignment for a class I took in 2016. The speech had to be 8-10 minutes long, so the over 3,000 words I enthusiastically wrote about the unexpectedly educational features of Neopets were too much for the speech. I loved the written work I had produced while attempting to write the speech and wanted to share it with the rest of Neopia, especially the users who would be starting college soon or had just started college, but because the piece focused on real-life applications, I thought it couldn’t be considered to be accepted into the Neopian Times... until I saw and read “Only On Neopets!” by Indulgences and “Neopets; the financial education all kids need” by Intoxique. (Thank you very much for submitting your articles Indulgences and Intoxique!) I then resolved to eventually type my handwritten piece. I finally finished typing this article in January 2020 after making the task my New Year’s resolution. My article was originally written to educate non-users, so it’s one you can share with anyone. Without further ado, here’s my article:

    Would you ever have imagined that designing and decorating a virtual house in a game could introduce you to interior design? Or that if you like to use the level-builders available in some games, you might want to consider a future as a game designer? Both of these and more features on Neopets, a uniquely structured online game, can help players develop job skills. Some can even teach life skills as well. Let’s explore these features.

     The first feature I would like to mention is the creating and decorating of Neohomes. There are two types of Neohomes: Classic Neohomes and New Neohomes, which are also referred to as Neohomes 2.0. Each type of Neohome has unique features that let Neopets users play with interior design and landscaping. The process of building either type of Neohome begins with the player choosing which land to build his or her Neohome in. In the New Neohome system, this step is free, but the user cannot choose to build a Neohome in a different land after the Neohome is made. In the Classic Neohome system, plots of land have different prices based on which Neopian land they are in. Properties will increase in value as they are built up, each property is assigned an address, and owners may sell their properties and move them to a different land as desired. Classic Neohomes will let users “play architect” as they get to construct their virtual home room by room, choosing how many exits (plus where the exits are) the room will have if any, and even the material that each room is made out of! Each material gives the walls and floors of the room a unique appearance. Classic Neohomes display furniture in rooms from an aerial view. Certain items for Classic Neohomes have special features, such as animations, the ability to be turned on or off, or even the ability to play music! Each furniture item can be rotated and has a depth level that can be adjusted so Neohome designers may choose which items can appear on top of other items. All of these features together form a useful tool for anyone who is considering the interior design field. Neogardens, which will appeal to those considering landscaping, can be built on a Classic Neohome’s ground floor. Neogardens feature an elevated first-person perspective and can be decorated with not only plant life, but also patio furniture, stepping stones, garden sheds, bridges, unique rock formations, birdhouses, statues, outdoor fountains, and even more types of miscellaneous items such as swing sets, lawn toys, and trampolines. The color of each lawn can also be adjusted by the use of buttons that can increase the amounts of red, blue, and yellow that are in the background color. Individual items can also be flipped horizontally.

      New Neohomes feature 2D graphics from a fixed diagonal aerial perspective, a fixed viewable outward appearance of the building itself, a fixed landscape outside complete with preset scenery that users can add to with garden items, and a fixed amount of space both inside and outside of the Neohome that players can work with, all neatly arranged on a layout of tiles. Users can customize the appearance of the interior walls and floors by laying down their choices of floor tiles and wallpapers. The interior of each New Neohomes is only one large room with no option for adding new rooms, so users commonly use different colors of floor tiles and wallpapers to distinguish one area of the interior from another. Some even place mirrors or posters turned backwards to give the appearance of walls. The tiled design of the New Neohomes makes it easy for players to form an image with items or floor tiles. Also, another feature that distinguishes New Neohomes from Classic Neohomes is that users may let any or all of their Neopets appear along with the Neohome items they decorate with. Overall New Neohomes provide the future landscape and interior designers a professional-looking customizable 2D template that may be easier for beginners to play with.

     Home design isn’t the only type of design that Neopets can inspire, however. Neopet customization, which is essentially the art of dressing up a Neopet, can inspire a few more types of design. It involves much more than just clothes and accessories, though. Players can also use backgrounds, foregrounds, handheld items, and more to customize their Neopets. I wasn’t trying to say earlier that the accessories were all boring or predictable, though, because in addition to the hats, glasses, and shoes you might have been expecting, wigs, colour contacts, eyeshadow, facial hair, artificial wings, and even wax lips are available for players to customize their Neopets with! Add in paintbrush colours, which can create patterns, wings, textures, or even change a Neopet’s entire body shape, to observe even more options in customization, which can inspire budding fashion designers, costume designers, makeup artists, photographers, or even pet groomers.

      Neopets offers even more customization options than Neohomes and the appearance of individual Neopets, though this next one might surprise you: Neopets allows its users to code their own graphics and links to other pages on Neopets on certain pages that every account has or can have. The first of these I would like to mention are user lookups, which are essentially user profile pages on Neopets. If a player codes his or her own original Neopets-themed graphics into this page, it can be entered into a contest fittingly called the User lookup Spotlight, the winner of which earns an exclusive trophy on the winning user lookup as well as a mention and small screenshot of the user lookup on the New Features (Neopets’ news) page. Pet lookups, which are pages that list statistics for each individual Neopet, can also have coded layouts. In addition to the profile-like pet lookup, each Neopet also has a petpage: an entire page a user can code and type text into. A fully customized petpage can be literally almost any kind of page — a thorough Flash game guide complete with screenshots, a collection of artwork that other users are free to use, a list or tutorial of some sort, or even a unique and completely new idea! Exceptional Neopets-themed petpages can be entered into and win the Site Spotlight, a contest with similar awards to that of the User lookup Spotlight. Probably the most unique example of self-coding opportunity exists within a user’s Item Gallery, which is his or her collection of chosen items on display. The major difference in the coding opportunity here is that the user does not need to know how to format the CSS or HTML code, but can instead manually fill out a form in which he or she can select the color that the links and/or borders on the page will appear in. The gallery owner may also set a background for the gallery from Neopets’ own collection of computer backgrounds. There is also a Gallery Spotlight, though it is much more focused on gallery item content than coding. The final codable feature I will introduce is the user shop. User shops existed before and have very similar page layouts to galleries, but do not have the manual coding form. In addition to backgrounds and miscellaneous images, a popular type of image many users like to use in their shops is a shop blog. Shop blogs are large rectangular images containing a space on which a shop owner can type a message or superimpose other images, which often include links. Users with shops of impressive sizes like to team up together and form “malls” by having each individual’s shop stock a different kind of item and linking to each other’s shops through image links in shop blogs. If you visit one of Neopets’ marketplaces for user shops and click on a hut, you will encounter pages and pages of shop blogs before you enter any shop and will likely find one or more shop blogs inside of each shop you enter.

      By now I’ve mentioned a handful of contests on Neopets that correspond to site features that help develop job skills. Some of Neopets’ contests, however, are their own site features that help develop job skills.Two main examples of these are Neopets’ two art contests— the Art Gallery and the Beauty Contest.

      The Art Gallery is there to inspire all kinds of artists, as it accepts submissions of all mediums, from sculptures to 3D models, traditional artwork to digital art, animated GIFs and even sticky-note murals; if it’s Neopets-themed, a user submits it, and the contest judge likes it enough, it can win a permanent spot on a page of the Neopets Art Gallery for all to see. The user who submitted the chosen artwork will receive a trophy, Neopoints, and a rare virtual item.

      The Beauty Contest is a completely different breed of contest. To enter, users must submit artwork of one of their Neopets. The artwork will then compete head-to-head against other artwork of the same Neopet species. An image of any medium except traditional sculpture can be entered, and unlike in other contests, users can submit edited images from the Neopets website as well. The Neopets whose images collected the most votes in their species categories will win a gold, silver, or bronze trophy for their pet lookups (two if they won the first, second, or third most votes overall). Users whose Neopets win for the first time will receive an exclusive displayable virtual badge called an avatar.

      Besides art contests, the other contests that are their own site features are seven of the writing contests: The Neopian Times, the Poetry Competition, the Storytelling Competition, Pet Spotlight, Petpet Spotlight, and Caption Contest.

      The Neopian Times is Neopets’ user-made newspaper. Each written work inside (except the Editorial), including articles, comic strips, short stories, and series was submitted by a user and approved by the editor. Creating a Neopets-themed work for the Times is great practice for budding writers. The entries selected to appear in the Neopian Times will be permanently displayed in the copy they appear in (with past issues accessible through the link labeled “Archives”) and the writers of the selected articles may receive various prizes (which always include a trophy). There are more opportunities to practice story-writing than just the Neopian Times. One of the writing contests solely dedicated to stories is the Storytelling Contest, which runs on a unique format that is useful for developing speedwriting skills. A story starts every week from a user-submitted beginning, and the other parts of the story, including the ending, are selected from user submissions every day or so. By this method, users compete collaboratively to write a story.

      While the Storytelling Contest focuses on plot, the Pet Spotlight focuses on the art of character development. In order to win, players must submit a story or introduction of one of their Neopets that presents the Neopet as a thoroughly developed character. To win the similar Petpet Spotlight, users may write a similarly-structured story or introduction about one of their Neopets’ Petpets or they can write a story about how the Neopet met or obtained the Petpet.

      The Site Spotlight can also be considered one of the writing contests, as story pages and thorough game guides have been past winners. This spotlight is truly made unique when the most creative of the writing entries win. One great example is a click-to-advance poem that was rhymed and illustrated line-by-line.

      The simplest, most brief writing contest on Neopets is the Caption Contest, in which users write witty captions to “busy” pre-selected images. This contest is good practice for writing humor, jokes, and captions to other images, of course!

      Poets are not forgotten either! A page of user-submitted Neopets-themed poems that won the Poetry Contest is posted every week.

      The Neoadventure feature deserves its own category because it seems to be in-between story writing and a game’s level-building feature. Neoadventures are choose-your-path stories: the writer writes a storyline and gives the readers/players actions to choose from on every page of the story.

     Readers/players must select one of the actions to progress the story. Neoadventures may have multiple correct paths and endings, options that will immediately generate a solution to the story, options that will immediately cause the player to fail the story, or even “red herring paths” that the readers/players can choose that will allow the story to progress but will never lead to a correct ending! If you visit the Neoadventure Spotlight page, you may view and play Neoadventures that have won the discontinued contest. Both story and quiz Neoadventures have won. The winning story Neoadventures could be of almost any genre.

      For the game-designer-in-training, Neopets has four Flash games that also allow players to construct their own levels. Faerie Caves II, my first example, is a difficult board-based puzzle game in which the player must navigate across the board to collect the door key and reach the exit. Players building levels can choose where to place the borders, movable objects, obstacles, destroyable barriers, gate switches, gems, treasure chests, keys, and more objects that complicate the levels. The next game I will refer to, Tyrannian Mini Golf, is—you guessed it— a miniature golf course game. When building their own levels, players may determine everything about the shape of their golf course level as well as where the hazards and other objects of interest will be placed. Tyrannian Mini Golf level creators practice the job skill of being able to design not only miniature golf video games, but also physical miniature golf courses!

      Hannah and the Pirate Caves and Hannah and the Kreludor Caves are Neopets’ two platforming games with level building features. Hannah and the Pirate Caves is the original game, in which the protagonist Hannah must reach the level’s door, which only opens once Hannah has collected every treasure chest in the level. When players construct their own levels for this game, they can design the structure of the cave as well as laying down platforms, bridges, obstacles, dangerous Petpets that Hannah must avoid, boulders that Hannah can push, crates (some of which can open to reveal items with effects, and of course, treasure chests. Hannah and the Kreludor Caves is the newest addition to the Hannah and the Caves game series and contains new features such as keys that open matching doors, rocket-propelled boots that players must use to slow rapid descents, and fuel that Hannah can collect for the boots. Once again, in the level-builder, the players can lay the structure of the cave as well as the objects inside of it.

     The final feature I will explain that may yield job skills is the feature that allows all users to own and manage their own shops. I had previously mentioned user shops to highlight how they could be coded, although the mechanics of operating these shops themselves are also a valid learning opportunity. A player can found his or her own shop by making a small investment that creates a shopfront with extremely limited space for inventory. It is completely the user’s responsibility to stock the shop, price each item, invest in more shop space, restock items that sell out, and even collect the shop’s earnings; nothing in the process is automatic! Other users can find each other’s shops through their user lookups, through links posted elsewhere on Neopets, or they may stumble upon them while searching for an item within the shop’s stock via the Shop Wizard, a price-searching feature. Although owning a real-life online shop involves much more than investing in shelf space, stocking the shop, pricing items, advertising, and designing the layout, it does provide an experience that is neither too complex for most players to approach or too simple to create teachable moments.

      Job skills aren’t the only kinds of skills that Neopets users can learn from the game. Neopets can also teach players about and how to use some financial applications, information that may come in handy in daily life.

     The first of the financial applications that I will be describing is the Neopian Auction House. Users can auction off their items here by choosing the starting bid, the duration of time the item will stay in auction, and the minimum amount of Neopoints that bids must increase by. Players who bid on and/or auction off items will learn by experience how a real auction works.

      The National Neopian Bank is yet another unexpectedly educational feature. For a small fee, users can set up an account at the bank, in which they may store their Neopoints. The bank offers sixteen different levels of accounts, any one of which a user’s account can reach if it meets the balance requirement. The advantage of a bank account upgrade is that the higher-leveled the bank account is, the higher the percentage of interest it can earn. Neopets can teach users about bank interest through this experience. However, there are two main differences in how the virtual bank’s interest differs from how real bank interest works. National Neopian bank interest can be collected every day rather than every month and it must be collected manually: the user must click the “collect interest” button before depositing or withdrawing any Neopoints from the bank that day.

      The final life-skill-teaching feature I will describe, which is also probably the feature least expected to be found in any game, is the very accurate Stock Market. The Stock Market features a list of companies (each of which has its own ticker symbol) that users can purchase stocks in. It also features a scrolling list of stock values, which fluctuate every day like a real stock market. Players may sell their purchased shares of stock at any time. This stock market even has its own stockbroker character who encourages players to purchase stocks at low values. (He will sometimes appear randomly to the user to suggest investing in shares of a stock that is low-priced for the day.) The only thing Neopets’ stock market seems to be missing is terminology for bull and bear markets.

     As you can see, Neopets is not a game that only provides simple and mindless entertainment: whether users immediately realize it or not, Neopets provides simulations of real-life jobs and financial applications in a format that is so entertaining that it feels nothing like a typical educational game.

 
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