Neopia World, and why I’m not excited about Free Realms

It’s no secret I’m a big fan of Neopets, but it’s just come so close to being a fully fledged virtual world, it was just a matter of time before they took the step and made it one. I just happened to be browsing the post-mortem of Virtual Worlds 08 (about which I made some posts on Massively), that Raph pointed to and saw this crumb about Nickelodeon making World of Neopia — finally! Pet-raising, minigame-playing action in 3D!
Some have asked how I can like games like Neopets and yet have few good things to say about upcoming titles such as Free Realms. Well, for one thing, being as it is (currently) just web pages, they can and do many surprising things. Neopets in particular has a very deep stock trading simulation, full auction house with lots of means of arbitrage, hidden quests, many many combat arenas with a surprising depth to their combat… since their barrier to innovation is set so incredibly low, nothing gets in their way. They have built-in blogging, guilds, player houses (which you can make *however you like* — mine is three stories tall with a tower at each corner, a courtyard, and landscaping I designed myself). Player stores with shopkeepers you can script — plus hundreds of great minigames. And more LOTS more.
Because there is so MUCH there, you can find yourself in little areas where you can make your own challenges — like solving the Shapeshifter puzzle to 100, a challenge that requires you to create a very involved program and teach yourself efficient tree-search and pruning algorithms. I met some fascinating people along the way to solving it; it took me about nine months (with breaks).
All I can be certain of with Free Realms is that SOE will have decided everything I can do before I even make my character. There won’t be any puzzles that require months to solve. There won’t be things to do that a kid would find hard or impossible to do — and so there won’t be anything that a kid could be challenged by. Like, I dunno, maybe a part of the game where a kid would need to know how to read and write in French, just a little. And if you moved deeper, you needed to know more French — and native speakers would be comfortable there, giving kids opportunities to speak to other kids all over the world in their native tongues.
There is so much opportunity in MMOs to not only socialize, but to learn and enrich people. If people can learn incredibly complex raids or how to fight in arenas in WoW, then they can learn other things as well.
If I’m going to let my kid play an MMO, I’m going to want to know what the tangible benefits of it are, or they won’t be playing. Learning how to shop — not a tangible benefit. Advertising a vendor’s products — also not a tangible benefit. Marketing does not usually benefit the target.
I guess what I’m saying is, what justifies a new MMO? It can’t be its own justification. WoW was an iterative collection of MMOs to that point, but has now matured and taken its own path. Lord of the Rings Online, to take advantage of the movie buzz to let you roam a famous world. EQ2, to remake EQ with better tech. Why Free Realms? (or Playstation Home, for that matter?)

13 thoughts on “Neopia World, and why I’m not excited about Free Realms”

  1. I really don’t understand your question. Why anything? Why free realms? To make money, to get kids hooked at a young age on your product, to make something fun that kids and their friends would want to play together, there are so many reasons!
    I completely see what your saying about actually learning something, and having depth and complexity, but what makes the Neopets IP any better or different than Free Realms?

  2. It isn’t the IP. It’s what they’ve done with the game. Since Neopets is basically a collection of web pages and Flash games, they can add new things with as much effort as it takes to make a new web page or Flash game. They could have left it at that. But instead, they mixed in a vast number of hidden gems and ways to interact, entirely new things, because it cost them nearly nothing to do so. They are able to move quite fast in new development. Also, a lot of the minigames are overtly or covertly educational, yet the rewards for doing well are substantial. I’m making 750 NeoPoints every day for doing nothing just because I won Shapeshifter this month. You can do the same by getting the high score in any game, and the edutainment games are really the low-hanging fruit here.
    Games for adults don’t need an agenda. Games for CHILDREN DO. They need to explain why playing this game is better than playing with their friends, or reading a book, or sitting in the living room watching TV and eating Cheetos. You’re adult most of your life, but only a child for a very short time, and what you do when you’re young colors your entire life from then on.
    I wouldn’t let a child play World of Warcraft or EQ2 (or similar games) because they are essentially wastes of time. Wastes of VAST AMOUNTS of time. Empty calories for the mind.
    I haven’t seen Free Realms. Maybe it is worthwhile for children to play and I just haven’t heard about those parts of it. If it turns out to be worthwhile for kids, I will be shouting about it — with joy. But color me skeptical. The trend these days is to use online games purely for marketing purposes.

  3. The secret is not aiming the product at children 🙂 Neopets was aimed at things myself and Donna (in our early twenties) enjoyed, were challenged by and found funny. Never underestimate how intelligent younger players can be.

  4. That’s it exactly. Neopets challenges children and has stuff there for little kids straight through to their grandparents.

  5. Great post Tippy! I’m right there with ya.
    I was a dumb little pumpkin when I was but a lad because I played a lot of senseless video games. Today I have weird bouts of emptiness and depression that I wholeheartedly blame on all my video game playing in the past. I am in decent shape now, but it took a long time to get that way thanks to my sedentary lifestyle video games gave me growing up (and through most of high school). I also feel I have insufficient confidence and “life-experience” because I was never paying attention and always looking down at a Gameboy.
    I still enjoy my video games today, but I make it a point to take time off for books, friends, hobbies, outdoor activities (heh, sometimes), and even television. I feel better, but like just about everyone I wish I had listened to my parents sooner.
    I can remember some of my first teachers suggesting I might be “gifted with exceptional intelligence”. And for a while it was true. But at some point I stopped growing. While the brackets for each grade level got larger, I stayed where I was mentally. I believe the mental growth hit the doldrums around the time I discovered Nintendo, come to think of it. From there, perhaps my own free will betrayed me as I opted to play video games instead of read, play outside, or complete my homework. It made life very hard and confusing for me – but I lucked out on numerous occasions.
    My brother seems to be doing alright with his daughter. She’s about 3, and is honestly one of the brightest little people I have ever met. She was brought up watching those “Little Einstein” videos, and I feel pretty confident stating that those were a huge influence. Now I look back at myself and wonder, will she also hit a plateau in learning? Will her free will betray her too?
    They have developed better television for children which has been proven to take them to newer levels of intelligence over previous generations. I would love to see something similar for the bracket of preteens and beyond that would keep that learning going so that it doesn’t just drop off like I allowed mine to. School is not enough – there needs to be something to do in the off-time that will not only reinforce what they’ve learned, but also be entertaining. Homework is not fun, not at all.

  6. I’m a parent — I have raised two children to adulthood, and I even have a wonderful grandson. So I know something about parenting. And no parent wants to be the big baddie making rules and terrorizing their kids. But come on. Kids can’t be trusted to make the good decisions. Even when they say they don’t need their parents and just want to do what they want… you have to be guiding your children at all stages. You have to be an active parent and make sure your kids are balanced. This may have been easier when I was a kid in the 60s. My mom used to order us outside; we simply could not be inside for several hours each day. So we found things to do outside, with other kids, even though I wanted to be inside watching TV and reading books 🙂 My mom FORCED us to get a life, and now I look back, and I have all sorts of good memories of time spent with friends, exploring forests, riding my bike everywhere (up to Grafton and down to Rhode Island), learning to swim… I wouldn’t have done any of that stuff if I’d been inside watching TV.
    I consider playing MMOs the modern-day equivalent of watching TV. If someone plays an MMO four hours a night, in my mind, I am thinking, “they watch TV four hours a night”. Same thing. I play EQ2 about three hours a night — I could be watching TV with friends to the same end. Some kids play WoW five or six hours a day, and their parents do nothing — I have an article about that today over on Massively — and then blame WoW when their kid turns weird. Would those same parents have let their child watch TV for five or six hours a day? No? Then why is WoW not held to the same limits?
    MMOs can seriously disturb a kid. Parents need to take control. Probably best would be if a parent played WITH their child — and if the kid can’t take it, well, they can go outside.

  7. *Father and Son team kill a rare loot-dropping Devilsaur. Kid dies the same time the creature does*
    “Dad throw me a rez!”
    “Sorry son, you should have learned to manage your hit points better. You had all day to farm whipper-root tubers and potions. I also warned you that arms/fury wasn’t the best spec to tank in, but you wouldn’t listen to me.”
    “Oh, come on!”
    “Now you have something to think about on that long corpse run through Un’Goro.”
    *kid finally gets back and goes to loot the corpse but Dad beats him to it*
    “DAD DON’T NINJA LOOT!”
    “Just trying to teach you some reflexes son, snatch the pebble from my hand, you know that sort of thing.”
    “GIVE ME THAT SWORD IT’S A HUGE UPGRADE!”
    “Remember when we did Maraudon and that hammer dropped that you just HAD to have? Well the druid in our party could have used it too you know, and it was a much bigger upgrade for him.”
    “I DON’T CARE, AND NEITHER DOES HE! THIS IS A GAME!”
    “If you want it so bad, sport, maybe you’ll get it for your birthday. But you’d better show me some improved judgment.”
    “I HATE YOU!”
    “Now, that is no way to talk to your father, young man! You hearth to your inn and think about what you’ve done. And don’t even think of tradeskilling while you wait – if I come in there and see you looking at recipes you’re grounded.”

  8. oh…. my… GOD. Laughing out loud. Einhorn, you need to get yourself a blog or I need to give you posting rights on this one. You’re too good for comments.

  9. My son plays Dungeon Siege, Starcraft, Civ, Zoo Tycoon, etc…
    We don’t let him play Runescape or WoW at all. Which annoys him to no end, but since we limit him to a max of one hour a night for video games, it works out well. Runescape and WoW aren’t well suited to one-hour blocks of time.
    That said, he’s got such a desperate desire to play WoW that I can say ‘hey, fish for me for 30 minutes’ and he’ll do it, since it doesn’t count against his video game time. I know this makes me a bad person, but he loves it.

  10. Aw, you trained yourself a little fishbot. You should get him to farm you really rare pets like the firefly from Zangarmarsh, or any of the Dragonlings and then CASH IN! Put that boy to work!
    But seriously, it must be so difficult to be a parent – letting them do what they want destroys them, but ruling them too much makes them resent you and in turn makes them do whatever they want out of spite.
    I’m in no place to give advice on parenting, but I would hope you at least explain WHY he can’t play those games – I can’t imagine hearing someone tell me I can’t do something and then watch them go do whatever they said I can’t do. That would drive me insane.

  11. Primary reason to not allow our 13 year old free access to online games with a chat component: the chat component. have you seen the language in these games? I, as a grownup, can ignore it. But he’d be more likely to take on these speech patterns. It’s bad enough in real life, where if a grown up or teacher hears something, they can say something, but online there’s no moderation.
    There’s also the sexual predators… that’s not a huge issue in the games he’s interested in playing, but it’s there.
    Then there’s the fact that unlike single player games, that have a purpose, MMOs are specifically designed to make you play more and more. You can beat Starcraft. You can’t beat WoW. This encourages addictive behavior, which is a bigger deal (in my opinion) for a teenager than an adult.
    Couple with that, in WoW/Runescape, you are competing directly with other players. Once you get into that competition, all of your availble gaming time gets poured into ‘keeping up with the joneses’. If you need to play to level, gear up, whatever, to keep up with your peers, it means you’re focusing too much on one thing.
    Right now, it’s pretty much a toss up if my son is going to play Dungeon Siege, Starcraft, Zoo Tycoon, Civ III, Zork, Pokemon, Smash Brothers, Zelda, or some random action game on the Wii or GC or DS. If we allowed him to play WoW, it’s my opinion that within a week, it would be the only game he ever played. And we’d be getting pressure to let him play more, as WoW is specifically designed to make you want to play more, and let me tell you… marketing works AMAZINGLY WELL on 13 year olds.

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