By Anna C. Webster
Italo Calvino frames his 1972 novel Invisible Cities as a dialogue between famous European explorer Marco Polo and the founder of the Mongol-led Yuan Dynasty of China, Kublai Khan. Together the two chat about their many philosophies and commentaries on the world, all sandwiched between various profiles of completely fantastical, fictitious cities. And because of the esoteric nature of the novel, a person could walk away with an enormous variety of meanings and personal ponderings. But one scene in particular often sticks in people’s minds.
Kubulai Khan notes his surprise that after all of their chatting, not once has Marco Polo brought up his equally fantastic (and yet very real) hometown of Venice, Italy. Polo famously replies: “every time I describe a city I am saying something about Venice.”
But this is not about Italo Calvino, Venice, or even literature. This is about Neopets. Because, if you’re like me, and you grew up spending your after-school hours on your family’s singular, chunky desktop computer bathed in the signature yellow of Neopets.com: every time I describe a video game, I am saying something about Neopets.
In case you haven’t heard, Neopets is thriving after once again becoming an independent company. What a time to be alive.
First launched in 1999, Neopets would grow to be practically synonymous with Y2K era internet culture. What wasn’t there to love? With nothing more than an internet connection (and “your parents’ permission,” as I always remember commercials back then insisting), you can adopt a little fantasy creature, play games, complete quests, trade items, and interact with your friends online. But while the gameplay of classic Flash-games like Meepit Juice Break and Faerie Bubbles are nostalgic in their own right, Neopets’ staying-power arguably comes from its penchant for truly having something for everyone. Though merely constructed from a flimsy scaffold of HTML, the world of “Neopia” remains remarkably three-dimensional with its own host of invisible cities.
There are different lands such as The Haunted Woods and Mystery Island, each with their own associated characters, lore, and culture. Site-wide story events, known as “plots,” with names like The Tale of Woe and The Faerie’s Ruin encouraged user collaboration to solve mysteries, find hidden links, and participate in the continued writing of Neopian history. Neopia even has their own supervillain: the diabolical Dr. Sloth!
But it’s not all lofty story details. The world of Neopia has a fully-functional economy, complete with shops, centralized banking, a lottery, and model stock market. Digital collectible items, such as stamps, “Usuki” dolls, avatars, and plushies have their own subcultures as users curate their galleries and albums. Players can customize and decorate their pets with clothes, accessories, and highly-coveted paint brushes. Its forums (known as the NeoBoards) allow users to directly communicate, share their art and writing, and even try their hand at role-playing. Neopets is the ultimate online agora: it was, and remains, a complete package.
As the website approaches its 25th anniversary, it’s easy to put on the nostalgia goggles, overlook the site’s many historical controversies, and declare it the best website to ever exist. But now as a professional writer and narrative designer for games in adulthood, I find myself re-approaching these childhood staples with a fully-formed frontal lobe and an English degree to boot. Neopets wasn’t perfect. But it was impossibly unique.
Neopets is in itself an “invisible city” of the modern age: a very unique application of what anthropologists and sociologists call a “lived space.”
Much like the dedicated Neopets companion website Jellyneo, French sociologist Henri Lefebvre was obsessed with studying, cataloging, and critiquing the minute, everyday details of the world around him—specifically when it comes to space. Yes, I am about to use my aforementioned English degree to apply dialectics to Neopets dot com. I don’t want to talk about it.
As a member of the Marxist school of thought, Lefebvre was curious how spaces could be interpreted within Marx’s famous mode of production—i.e: that everything is a product of effort (be that labor, self-expression, etc). Lefebvre posited that space is neither a place or a “container,” but instead the means of its production: which in this case, is social interaction. This would become his signature theory of the “social production of space.”
Lefebvre divided this theory into three additional modes:
- 1st Mode: Spatial Practice (Perceived Space) – this is the organizational form of social space, characterized by routines and activities. A running club that meets up on Sundays would be an example of this kind of space.
- 2nd Mode: Representations of Space (Conceived Space) – this is the space dreamed up by urban planners, video game level designers, and the like. Invisible Cities falls into this category, as do the fictional towns of Neopia.
- 3rd Mode: Representational Space (Lived Space) – this is the individual and subjective experience of a space, as determined by emotions, interactions, and symbols.
If “lived space” feels a bit tricker to pin down, that’s partially by design. It’s completely metaphysical, predicated entirely on the rather smooshy pieces of the human experience. Think things like emotion, connection, even belonging. And while Lefebvre likely didn’t anticipate this theory would be applied to a bunch of colorful creatures and the magical faeries that govern their world, Neopets was groundbreaking for being a digital lived space: a place where people from all over the world could gather concurrently to engage in symbolic online interactions within a digital society.
Sending NeoMail to a friend, purchasing an item with your Neopoints, and even feeding or grooming your Neopet are all examples of this “representational space.” And there’s a real sense of offline shared identity in being a Neopets player, too.
Even when Neopets left the cultural zeitgeist by the 2010s, a dedicated fandom remained. There are many inside jokes and community headcanons (Jhudora x Illusen 4ever), and don’t get me started about the 2023 Seasonal Attack Pea fiasco. As of 2023, Neopets witnessed the birth of the world’s only Neopets Gamedevguild, which was formed by a group of game development professionals who also play neopets. I am also the CEO of this guild. Sorry.
Neopets as a lived space was, and in many ways still is, the fulfillment of the initial promise of the internet: a way to openly, anonymously connect, create, and share knowledge. In his now-famous 2008 lecture An Anthropological Introduction to YouTube before the Library of Congress, anthropologist Michael Wesch delivered his ongoing observations on what was rapidly being deemed “Web 2.0.”
Web 2.0 was the pronounced shift away from the world of static web pages, which were often difficult to set up given that the new-ish tech required a certain amount of know-how. In this new era of the internet, there were websites which encouraged user-uploaded content, such as videos to YouTube or photos to Myspace. This would pave the way for the social media we know (and love/hate) today. But before we were inundated with the enshittification of the modern web, there was a shining period where the internet felt different. It was something more than static geocities pages with a visitor counter on the bottom. It almost felt…like home.
While Wesch and his team focused specifically on YouTube, they noted a few general trends happening as internet usage became more accessible and ubiquitous to the average person. In short: the more society drives us to be hyper-individual, the more we as people value and long for community. The more we have our independence, the more we long for meaningful interpersonal relationships. The more we experience commercialization, the more we long for authenticity.
Web 2.0 sites like Neopets and early YouTube felt like a haven in this way, creating authentic, connected lived spaces in the increasingly hyper-individualist 2000s. These sites had connection with independence and community with individuality. In many ways, this dawning era of Web 2.0 felt like we were glimpsing the internet’s full potential as a digital utopia. It’s no wonder why so many people were logging on, doing their “dailies,” joining a guild… and just plain ol’ having a good time. “The Metaverse” wishes it could be like Neopets at its height circa 2005.
But according to Lefebvre, lived spaces are predicated on social interactions and lived experience. What happens when people stop logging on and a space threatens to collapse entirely?
Fast forward to the early 2020s: Neopets engagement numbers have been on the decline for years and many feared that the obsolescence of Adobe Flash Player in 2020 might be the final nail in the coffin for the beloved website. After all, without Flash, a large portion of the site would be rendered unusable. Without these symbolic interactions as dictated by Lefebvre, Neopets might lose its “lived space” status entirely—if it even continues to exist! But following the sudden shutdown of edutainment company JumpStart (who had become the IP holder after a variety of acquisitions and corporate shuffling), Neopets announced that it is going independent once more. This move ushered in a renewed interest in the classic website, spurring a “NeoRenaissance,” if you will.
The realm of Neopia, much like the Lost City it contains, was freshly-rediscovered (if not discovered for the first time) by people all over the world. In a 2023 wrap-up graphic posted on LinkedIn, Neopets boasted a whopping 100% increase in playership and 400 million page views per month. Not a bad start to going indie.
The staff has been working twofold: to restore the integrity of the site (repairing broken features, restoring games, etc.) and to forge a new path forward by teasing an upcoming plot and attempting to right the economy which had become wildly unbalanced over the years. “It feels like 2005 again,” Neopets Art Coordinator Ciara Slaton told Shannon Liao of Inverse. Once again possibility is in the air. The 2020s has seen a concerning lack of in-person 3rd places and a lack of authentic online platforms due to the rapid consolidation of social media. But as Wesch and Lefebvre both highlight: humans are social animals who long for the delicate balance of individual identity and group belonging. And with a global pandemic on top of it all, it feels very reasonable that internet citizens long for the comforting reaches of Neopia.
It’s frightening to think that without the shuttering of JumpStart, Neopets wouldn’t have gotten this chance at reviving what was once the agora of the internet. The Neopets Team (affectionately known as “TNT”) have a long road ahead of them to be sure, but it’s worth noting that there are many lived spaces, especially of the online game variety, who aren’t so lucky. Think of previously comparable sites like Webkinz, Wizard 101, and the like: they’re still functional online but many feel…empty. Some may still be staffed by a skeleton crew, where others may be completely unsupported by their original developer. While famous offline spaces are carefully conserved by archaeologists and curators, their digital counterparts have instead been left to rot in “the cloud”—lived spaces turned dead spaces (EA please don’t sue me). We now have a conundrum Lefebvre hadn’t anticipated: what happens to lived spaces if the technology of their DNA becomes obsolete or their dev team just moves on?
The conservation of online spaces (and media in general) has become a hot topic in the games world lately, and with good reason. If the technology sustaining a space does become obsolete (like with Adobe Flash Player) or their development team simply ceases support, a lived space can essentially become “endangered.” Initiatives like The Wayback Machine and hobbyist browser extensions like Ruffle Flash Emulator help stop up the gaps, but it feels akin to putting a bandaid on a gunshot wound.
The Video Game History Foundation is a 501(c)3 nonprofit which has taken up the mantle of advocating for better conservation of these games (and thus, the spaces they facilitate). In a 2023 study, the VGHF found that a whopping 87% of “classic” video games are considered “critically endangered”—meaning that the ability to access them is tremendously low. This seems almost impossibly high of a percentage for such a young industry that brings in billions of dollars each year, but it’s true.
Neopets had a lucky break with JumpStart, and good on TNT for wanting to pour love back into the site. But even as I’m writing this in 2024, much of the site is still inaccessible or otherwise “broken” due to deprecation. The cracks unfortunately still show. But Neopets is an important case study in the intersection of lived spaces and media preservation: if we are to build a more sustainable future for games and the spaces they facilitate, we need to carefully look back at the sociological (and dare I say dialectical) impact of Neopets before we can construct the next generation of invisible cities. 
Anna C. Webster (she/her) is an award-winning writer and narrative designer for video games (and sometimes other things). She holds a BA in English from Virginia Commonwealth University, and much of her work draws on her interests in the performing arts, psychology, and the horror genre. You can find her on most socials, including Neopets, as @annacwebs.