Neopets, the virtual online pet!
Okay, just to show you all how much of my time I like to waste on meaningless activities, I'd like to introduce you to Neopets! This website is kind of entertaining. You create an account, then create a virtual pet that you can play with and feed, etc. There's also an entire world that you can "explore" as well as a fairly large amount of games to play that range from Puzzles to Adventure to Games of Chance. These also range in difficulty, so there are games for little kids as well as games for "adults".
This game does its best to appeal to people from all age groups. There are pets that seem to be aimed more towards boys, and some that seem to be aimed more towards girls. This is a very image and flash driven site. Some of the games have music and sounds to accompany them, and some of the games are very fun. Despite the image laden pages, the load time is pretty fast. The images are colorful and all the pets tend to be smiling in them, suggesting that playing Neopets will make you happy (sometimes it does, sometimes the games frustrate you.) The front page also has a "sign up" image that simply has the words in bold letters and a lightbulb that lights up regularly to indicate that signing up would be a "good" idea. Someone vision imparied might have problems, but this site deals more with images and flash than words. It is a site that is very easy to navigate and I confess that I spend a fair amount of time looking around. Try it, you just might like it! :)
This game does its best to appeal to people from all age groups. There are pets that seem to be aimed more towards boys, and some that seem to be aimed more towards girls. This is a very image and flash driven site. Some of the games have music and sounds to accompany them, and some of the games are very fun. Despite the image laden pages, the load time is pretty fast. The images are colorful and all the pets tend to be smiling in them, suggesting that playing Neopets will make you happy (sometimes it does, sometimes the games frustrate you.) The front page also has a "sign up" image that simply has the words in bold letters and a lightbulb that lights up regularly to indicate that signing up would be a "good" idea. Someone vision imparied might have problems, but this site deals more with images and flash than words. It is a site that is very easy to navigate and I confess that I spend a fair amount of time looking around. Try it, you just might like it! :)
posted by MSolomon at 10:02 PM
1 Comments:
This is a fun site that is quite appealing--I wound up spending much more time than I expected looking around. It seems like a combination of KayBee Toys and the anime-based cartoons my son watches. Your analysis of the images is excellent. The light bulb animated GIF beside the "Sign Up!" link is a visual commonplace, right? We all tend to assume that the flashing light bulb means "good idea," as you suggest.
As do many of the sites discussed in this round of blog posts, NeoPets is based on membership. The idea of "joining" seems to have become the focus of a lot of online rhetorical strategies. What are the benefits of membership? It seems that many sites have to make a range of appeals to steer potential members/customers toward joining. On NeoPets, I noticed that while you can play the games, you can't earn "NeoPet points" unless you're logged in as a member. Whole virtual societies and economies (of "points," etc.) seem to be emerging on sites like this.
I'm also wondering about the overall sweetness of this site. Any virtual pit bulls?
What do you think the motivations of readers/users might be? This is a version of the Tamagochi craze as well as the Sims, right? A cynic (I'm not quite there yet) might want to ask why people are so ready to care for virtual pets while the world is falling apart around them.
A wonderful site with lots of fascinating rhetoric, both verbal and visual.
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