“ just literally introduced me to the concept of, ‘you can build a thing on the computer and it shows up on the screen,'” Freeman says. It’s a story in set the height of “Neopets'” influence, an exploration of the girls who connected through it. A story is told through the tangled conversations and switching of pages. The focus switches between a website editor and a chat screen, both of which require intermittent attention. Originally commissioned for the Manchester International Festival, “Lost Memories Dot Net” is a dialogue-driven drama that allows players to interact with the digital dashboard of 14-year-old Nina. “Cibele” and “Kimmy” creator Freeman’s “Lost Memories Dot Net” embodies the early 2000s era of girls’ digital creativity. The buying and selling of an aesthetic enabled the community to proliferate and expand outside of the site in search of DIY media expression. Neopets was framework for creativity for its community of girls. From there I just started tinkering around and experimenting.” “I just wanted to create something really cool, and on Neopets, you could do anything you wanted. “I didn’t start coding because I thought it’d be a promising career,” Kanna explains. That’s what I was doing in my spare time.” I had a ‘staff member’ when I was 14, also writing tutorials. And what came out of that was my first tutorial site where I was teaching people – other girls, mostly – to code. “I designed my profile page, my shop,” Garcia says.
GAMES LIKE NEOPETS FOR OLDER PEOPLE CODE
“Just going on and knowing I could create anything I wanted was huge.”īoth women taught themselves as girls to design and code websites for their “Neopets,” and, in turn, started “businesses” designed to use those skills. “I would build profiles for people with HTML and CSS and exchange that for goods and supplies,” Kanna says.
GAMES LIKE NEOPETS FOR OLDER PEOPLE SOFTWARE
Garcia and other girls like her, including Madison Kanna, now a software engineer, looked outside “Neopets'” set system to earn Neopoints, capitalizing on the skills that drew them to the site. The community eventually expanded past the bounds of the “Neopets” platform and began to spread elsewhere on the Internet, as explored in game designer Nina Freeman’s 2017 title “Lost Memories Dot Net.” Now a software developer and founder of CoderDojo NYC, an organization that teaches kids to code, Garcia started her first business in “Neopets ,” with virtual employees and everything. A vague story pushed the evolution of the site, but it was the economy and community that drove much of the culture. Creators set out no objectives for “Neopets” users. “Neopets” provided the overarching structure of play, but it was girls like Garcia who expanded the web game’s presence. It was the idea that it was really an open playground and that you were, in a way, self-made.” “Neopets” had this separate world to connect on whatever hobbies you had. You could open your own shop and sell items. “There was a stock market where you could buy fake stocks you could make digital money from there. “It was an unlimited playground,” Garcia says. Such a space allowed for girls to create a culture of play that supported a breadth of creative endeavors. “Neopets,” and other sites like it, was deemed acceptable as a safe place for girls to play in an often unfriendly Internet. But like plenty of girls her age in the late Nineties and early 2000s, Garcia wasn’t just caring for a digital pet or battling with it online – she was experimenting.
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