Today, teenagers grow up with social media platforms that have been finetuned to maximise addictiveness. But I remember a time when social media didn’t mean TikTok or Instagram — when the way I interacted with people online was via fantastical game environments — such as Neopets.
Australians 16 and under could soon be banned from using social media. The Albanese government, enjoying rare support from Dutton’s opposition, has been firm in its mission — our children shouldn’t have apps like Instagram, Snapchat and TikTok in their pockets.
Labor’s plans have brought the conversation about the impact of social media on children’s development into the mainstream. A lot of research describes the terrifying world of social media and its effects on teen mental health and educational outcomes.
But our digital world didn’t always look like this. As a pre-teen, my internet was a digital playground — offering imaginative worlds where I gained my first experience of building a community online, saving towards financial goals, and learning to spot scammers.
Let’s indulge and take a trip back to Neopia – the fictional world of Neopets, my favourite internet game growing up.
My family computer was a chunky, whirring grey monitor, located in my dad’s study. Every day, I would run home from school, and between the hours of 4pm and 5pm I was allowed one hour of computer time — on the proviso I would dedicate myself to homework in the following hours.
In Neopets’ virtual universe, I adopted cartoonishly colourful anthropomorphic pets. These Neopets were now entrusted to my care; I had to feed them regularly, buy books for them to read, buy petpets for them, and level up their stats so they had an advantage in the Battledome. With ‘bloomzie’ and ‘charmed_ixi_2004’ by my side, I explored Neopia and learned some crucial life lessons along the way.
Neopia had a quasi-economy, based on earning and spending a virtual currency called ‘Neopoints’. Neopoints could be acquired through playing flash minigames, investing in the stock market, and running a shop. This was my first experience with entrepreneurship — I started a dedicated shop for furniture and garden supplies.
In running this shop, I learned about loss leaders and ranking well on the Shop Wizard. I developed a strategy to get people through the door. When a customer purchased many items, I sent them a Neomail to thank them for their patronage. I would have made more money if I’d learned to dropship sneakers — but I loved the opportunity I got to curate my humble shop.
But I did pick up some practical skills. I learned some basic HTML code to make my pet’s profiles stand out. Unlike school, I had an actual incentive to learn to code.
With Neopoints in the bank, I collected cool items, took part in seasonal activities, and made friends with other Neopians. I was a good citizen. I had lofty goals such as painting my pets special colours, and grinded towards saving $600,000 Neopoints to buy special paintbrushes.
My lessons weren’t just financial. Neopets had guilds — communities of Neopians who had common interests or shared goals. There were guilds about Harry Potter and Zelda, and others dedicated to helping people become better writers or at HTML. I assumed a leadership role within a guild and I learned how to engage and grow an online community.
Everything was going well, until disaster struck. I was scammed. I fell for a promise that was too good to be true — a get-rich-quick scheme. I gave the Pied Piper my login details, and I paid a handsome price. Not only did I lose hundreds of thousands of Neopoints that I had painstakingly saved, they also took my beloved charmed_ixi_2004. As a 10-year-old, it was one of the worst things that ever happened to me. In hindsight, it was the cheapest way to learn a valuable lesson about not falling for scams.
Knowing who to trust, an intuition for a good deal, and the confidence to reach out to strangers are essential skills schools don’t teach or reward. The magical realm freed me to take risks in a playful setting. Other games, Club Penguin, Moshi Monsters, and Poptropica, all taught similar things to the millennial cohort.
When my parents banned me from Neopets and told me to focus on my studies, I was heartbroken. Eventually I moved on, but so did the rest of the world. For most of us, Neopets is a fond but quaint memory, unrecognisable from ‘social media’ today.
Neopets was regarded as one of the ‘stickiest’ parts of the internet for children. This meant it was a site with many return visitors, children encouraged to return to their Neopian responsibilities. But sites are no longer ‘sticky’, they are addictive.
Children gravitate towards social media — bastions of consumption and comparison — a destroyer of confidence, development and freedom. The stakes are higher. Instead of playing with fictional pets, children’s own personas, in their names, profiles, representations and relationships, become their toys. There’s little room for mistakes. It’s all real now.
Games are important for children, and they don’t seem to be playing anymore. Instead of a magical virtual world, we find ourselves in a cookie-filled, misinformation-rampant dystopia. It’s no longer a digital playground. Children can’t log off.
After playing for my allowed hour each weekday, I logged off. I’d think about my Neopets and my world, but it existed beyond the everyday, in a compartmentalised, fantasy world.
Our world will become increasingly digital. The government can’t mandate that all under-16s join Neopia – but I wish teenagers could cut their teeth in a comparably harmless environment to prepare them for the world.
Never miss a story: sign up to SmartCompany’s free daily newsletter and find our best stories on LinkedIn.
Jessy Wu is a former VC and the founder and managing director of Encour — a strategic communications agency emboldening clients to command the narrative.
