Attention Neopets kids

I've spent the last few days playing an open beta of a uh... a website... a game that is a website... called Dog Online. It is extraordinarily good at replicating the exact impact that Neopets had on me as a child. Dog Online does not have a lot of content right now and definitely is a beta. You should be normal about it if you check it out. I was debating whether I should post about it at all... it does seem like it would not benefit from too many attention laser beams pointed at it. But I did want to talk about the way in which it evokes a specific kind of Neopetsiness to me. Neopets was basically a kind of web art experiment (and also a marketing trojan horse for children). It was full of weird little corners and secrets and flash hotspots, and the whole site felt like a puzzle you could only progress by exploring in many directions at once. Some activities yielded items which could only be used in completely different parts of the site. Some activities required you to explore…