Does anyone else remember Neopets?

An exploration of teenage girlhood nostalgia, writing communities, and Neopets guilds.

After a department meeting earlier this month, my coworkers and I were reminiscing about the days of yore on the internet in the aughts. It occurred right after an intense discussion about teaching Shakespeare to our band of middle schoolers, the comedies and the tragedies, and particularly regarding our eighth graders reading Romeo and Juliet. And because I am lucky enough to work with friends, we engaged in an enthusiastic discussion about our own childhoods. We giggled over the doomed Club Penguin, about silly internet games with questionable sound effects, about how we spent our ample free time growing up.

Suddenly my friend asked from across the table, “Do you remember Neopets?”

“Who could ever forget Neopets?” I laughed.

Our scant free time quickly devolved into chaos while we searched up nostalgic haunts we visited in our youth. I read more than I watched television at that age, spent time in the library discussing books with our librarians, and–oddly enough–fostered a love of writing through turned-based RPGs. These collaborative roleplaying games were elaborate in their lore and at first contained in near entirety within several spiral bound notebooks I’m sure have been lost to the ether. But, in their wake, there is a ghost of a memory. I grew up on the internet, practically, in the early years of MySpace and Facebook when the interface of websites was clunky and mostly text-based at that time. This time period was the height of popularity for the creative, risk-taking pursuits of youth; a time for LiveJournal, for Fanfiction.net, for DeviantArt, and other sites of creativity and creation.

But for me–as a middle schooler with only a few close friends–the cutesy, animal-adjacent game of Neopets filled much of my time, and not for the reasons you’d expect. While my coworkers remembered the mini games, the shops, the actual pets and pets for your pets, I spent much of my time on a different corner of the website. Neopets, to an average middle-schooler, was a goldmine of entertainment. The premise of Neopets was that each player was tasked with taking care of virtual pets; it was essentially a cornucopia of vibrantly-colored fantasy creatures who you could name at will. There are some really interesting articles about the questionable origins of the website’s founding and its history through the late 90s to today, but in those years, my small, tight-knit friend group didn’t use it for the game itself. We used it for the guilds. These guilds, built up by a community of users based on shared interests, were the touchstone of our friendship in some ways. In fact, they were the first writing community I engaged with and the birth of a shared writing experience. I didn’t think of it as such until I was reflecting recently on the origins of my passion for the written word, but the guild forums were the foundation of some of my creative pursuits and my own identity as a writer.

As our friend group built upon our shared interests in reading and storytelling, we did much of our joint writing sessions by engaging in an RPG-like experience. Old text-based RPGs usually began with text prompts–think Dungeons & Dragons–which would be parsed out by players over the course of several sessions. The tried-and-true “choose your own adventure”-style interactive fiction and games gained popularity in the 60s and 70s alongside the games we know and love today. A newfound obsession with not only experiencing the narrative, but influencing it–shaping it–gained traction. As a society we love a good invention and reinvention, and so it was only natural to eventually have an evolution of the genre. But at that time, in the midst of the middle school chaos of the aughts, we simply had no idea what we were doing. We didn’t play a role-playing game so much as we invented one as we went along. We just wanted to have fun, to write fiction, to play around with our words and our world.

There was one particular novel that many of us read cover to cover over and over again, sharing a single copy amongst us until the spine was in tattered ruins–David Clement-Davies fantasy work The Sight. I still have it and its successor Fell sitting on my shelf in my office, and occasionally I will pull it down for a reread to relive the nostalgia. If you’ve never read it, the novel follows a prophecy given to a wolfpack at the inception of the book’s narrative arc. It never gained the popularity and cult following of anthropomorphic narratives like the Warrior Cat or Animorphs series, and I’m not even sure if it’s still in circulation. But something about the worldbuilding and the characters captured us, and we wanted to be a part of the story somehow. To write ourselves into something we loved. We, as labeled “gifted” kids who were just a tad odd around the edges, created a whole world riffing off of Clement-Davies ideas. We conjured our own characters, our own relationships, and built a community for ourselves from the ground up. It started in a spiral bound notebook, with the pages filling up quicker each day as we handed it over to another writer in our group during passing periods as we built a collaborative narrative. We quickly outgrew it. We were hungry for a more accessible platform, because there was just not enough time in the day and we didn’t want to stop once the school day ended.

So we built an online writing forum in a Neopets guild, of all places. I remember at the end of each school day going home and spending a few hours on that guild’s forum between the end of my mom’s workday and the beginning of our evening family time. It was an extension of the work we began earlier in the day; the last person to have our spiral bound writing was the first to post that afternoon and then it continued from there. But at that time, even through the wonder and the excitement and the variety of enthusiastically generated typos, the guild forum was clunky and difficult to navigate. There wasn’t a proper organization system, and so our work was quickly lost in between conversations that overlapped with our creative writing. What else could we do? As a result of our hemming and hawing about our lost work, we built a whole ProBoard community and expanded. Our story arcs became more elaborate and complex, the characters developed over the course of multiple stories, and they transformed us into the types of fiction writers we loved to read.

Since the intensity of our interest in these stories manifested through a collaborative effort, I remember our engagement with the formatting of our stories was looked upon by our peers as odd. I was already awkward and self-conscious, a book nerd and fandom enthusiast early on before the subculture’s popularity really took off. I wore terrible, thin metal-framed glasses and I wore braces for three years before finally being able to take them off. I was often ridiculed or my interests dismissed in wider social circles, but I found a group in which I belonged, where I could be myself as a teenage girl. After becoming a teacher, I have found that there is something to be said about teenage girlhood–more specifically middle school teenage girlhood. Girls at that age are delightfully weird, unafraid to be themselves, but are also still trying desperately to fit it. It is a time to experiment, to try on different identities like you would put on a fashion show–wearing out new accessories with each new outfit. That Neopets guild allowed my young girlhood to thrive even when I didn’t feel like I fit in–I found my people there. But with the advent of the internet (and by proxy, social media), I think the entirely necessary “weirdness” of adolescence is not always available to young people these days. Whether it is because of the social pressures or expectations, as an educator I see it vary widely. Even as adults we find ourselves comparing our own lives with our friends, neighbors, and peers–sometimes to our own detriment. And sometimes I wonder if quitting it altogether would be a simpler solution to such a complex problem, but I remember then that the writing community we formed in those early days was a life preserver in the sea of teenage angst.

Our little community lost touch somewhere in the chaos and maudlin reality of high school and the distance we faced going to different schools. Many of us struggled with our queer identities in the face of conservatism on what seemed like all fronts–all of us used those forums as an escape. One of the reprieves it granted us was the ability to choose our own reality instead of living within one that limited us to our most palatable parts. I think much of online writing is intimate in that way. We as participants place the most vulnerable parts of us in front of the wider world. It’s a grasp for connection. The Neopets guild we built and then later abandoned was the beginning of our identities as writers–as artists. Several of us went on to study literature or the arts at university, and we still continue to weave stories despite the distance. I still see their Instagram or Facebook posts and feel grateful to have watched all of us grow up. I admire their strength and tenacity, and when I have the privilege to read or see some of the work they’ve done I’m at peace with the closure of that chapter of our lives even though we no longer speak often. I learned about myself more intimately through those years of collaborative writing. They are the reason I went on to write novels. To write into existence my own kind of magic. Although children’s games like Neopets of course are built around silly little mascots and taking care of digital pets, online platforms can provide the basis for establishing some really beautiful communities. We found that in our own little guild and later in the forum we ran as a group.

Writing and authorship can be done in isolation. But the beauty of a writing community, and the experience of creative connection, can sometimes only be achieved by taking risks. Those risks, regardless of the mistakes we make, help us learn more about ourselves, our crafts, and the worlds in which we live and create. The bones of that Neopets guild and the subsequent Proboards forum are probably in the recesses of the internet graveyard: a ghost of its former self, but still haunting the halls of our youth, serving as an embarrassing monument to the fledgling writers we were. I often tell my students nowadays that you must be bad at something first before you can ever become good at it–and you have to fail an exponential amount of times to become an expert. But writing is an expression of self, and I often still have difficulty being perceived as a writer even though it is an integral part of my identity. What happened to the girl from middle school who was unafraid to create alongside her peers? I like to think she’s buried somewhere within me–that I am all of my past selves layered over one another, but never truly lost.

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