December 7, 2006
Researching Neopets
I've just posted a short conference paper here on work I've been doing with Heather Horst on Neopets. I've been trying to get some traction on researching Neopets for quite some time, and have been slowly making some progress.
Despite the fact that Neopets is one of the most trafficked sites on the web, and probably the most popular web site for kids, there is remarkably little research on it. The relatively young user base and the structure of the communication on the site are probably the main reasons for this lack of research attention. In comparison to MMORPGs or online forums, it is a challenge to research because the site attracts a large number of casual gamers, and there are no easy ways for researchers to hang out with participants on the site. We are, however, slowly accumulating some interviews with Neopets players as part of our digital youth research, and hope to have a more sustained description of Neopets engagement before too long.
This current paper was presented at the American Anthropological Association meetings, and describes some of the economic activity and exchange that kids engage with on the site.
Posted by Mizuko Ito at December 7, 2006 3:49 PM
Comments
Dear Mimi!
It’s true! I I do agree that it is hard to get to know the profile of the Neopet user. This basically because they are too many. It’s like trying to get a user profile on a Disney or a Star Wars fan. Where to start? How do they look? Are they a creative director from San Jose or a punk rock guitarist from Oslo, Norway ? Both! And we know that for sure.
Still the Neopet Phenomena is very special and raises a few questions and points out a few guidelines and facts.
Let me give you my view.
In a age where user created content is said to be the force and” the real thing”, “the future of media”, where the Time Magazine (http://www.time.com/time/covers/0,16641,20061225,00.html) has declared “you” to be the “the person of the year”, there really should not be room for a thing like Neopets.
Still, in this age of “the user created content mega hype”, a given world, and a very well orchestrated site/community with delicately created graphic and a very very advanced architecture and philosophy behind the code, seems to be the greatest thing around for the moment ?
Is it because the young audience (I doubt its only kids here although) can’t create their own content or is it because they do not care about the hypes of the adult world? Or is it so that most user created content never ever reaches the quality that kids demands? Well actually we have to ask our self’s, where is the user created equal to Donald Duck? Or Mario, or Wind in the Willows or The little prince or.. well I can go on for a long time.
I love the user “created content thing”, but to be honest, it’s hype. It’s great that content creation has moved from studios, companies and money to be created by anyone who wants to express them self. It’s great!
Still, quality and craftsmanship will survive and always have its given place. I think what we are looking at here, is a new way of creating community’s for young people. Cause Neopets is not only a community or a tamagotchi site, it is a complex and deep as any online roll playing game and it is well adapted to user behaviour and needs. And it has a active on line development.
A community is bound to the same laws and sometimes suffers from the same phenomena as with a online game, a so called mmorgs.
I pointed this out years ago, and I think what we see today is examples of this.
The site and the game with the most content, the best designed world with most strings of quests or content information, gadgets, toys, levels etc to play around with, will be the winner. And the one’s that lack this will suffer from declining member/user participation.
WOW and EVE is great examples of this.
These two games have great differences in their background stories still they share the same qualities of “on line development”. From start they both have been aware of the need to constantly update and to bring more depths into their game world and the user experience. And they have succeeded in development of add-ons and expansions. EVE, who suffered from one of the worst distribution contracts I ever saw, took them self’s from nothing to something and today EVE is a well established phenomena in the mmorg world
The strength of a user interaction site/community with a given design, a strong architecture and a strong on line development, is that beyond the hype there will be life.
I have several million Neopoints from investing in the Neopets Stock Market. What should I do with them?