Is It Ethical To Be A Billionaire In Neopets? | Defector (2024)

Before I ever wanted money, I wanted Neopoints—the currency of Neopets, the website that ruled my life for much of elementary and middle school. Neopets was a yolk-yellow portal to an Earth-like planet called Neopia, which prickled with miniature biomes you could explore with your virtual pets. You could wander the mazes of the haunted woods, steal treasure from a snake-like beast in the ice caves, and help yourself to free omelette on a prehistoric plateau. You could spin technicolor wheels for prizes and paint your pets rare colors in a rainbow fountain floating in a cloud in the sky.

I didn't just want Neopoints for Neopoints' sake, of course; I was a child, not yet a capitalist. But I desired the pixels I could only buy with Neopoints. I wanted to buy a paintbrush to transform my pet Shoyru—a stubby sort of dragon—into a sea turtle in the rainbow fountain. I wanted to buy the fragments of a secret laboratory that would zap my pets into rare colors and species. I wanted to buy each of my pets pets of their own, aptly named petpets, and I wanted to paint the petpets too. Even as a child, I understood this world would not be delivered to me because of the goodness of my heart or the depths of my desire. To live out my dreams, I needed to amass wealth. By any means necessary.

As a nascent entrepreneur, I went to the Neopian equivalent of LinkedIn: dozens of "how to get rich quick" guides other users wrote on their Blogspots, all of which recommended a mixture of playing flash games, buying stocks on the NEODAQ, and trying your luck in an arcane competition called Food Club, in which you place bets on which pirates will eat the greatest amount of food. As a child I understood neither stocks nor betting, so I toiled in the Flash games. I counted potatoes flying across the screen, whacked a gothic purple bird with a bat, connected tubes to give toothy rodents juice, and led a somersaulting reptile over hills and tree stumps in pursuit of berries. The best moneymakers were advertisem*nts disguised as games, in which I tested my knowledge about the back-to-school items at Target or the charms in Lucky Charms. I saved slowly. It was unimaginable to me how other players managed to afford expensive paint brushes that turned their pets into stuffed animals or baby versions of themselves. (If you were lucky, a raygun-toting penguin would zap your Neopet into a cuter, infantile version of itself for free.) I figured everyone else was toiling in the Flash mines like me—faring better, I assumed, because they were working harder.

After years of playing, with very little Neopoint savings, I turned to other means to achieve my virtual goals. I trawled online forums where people who planned to quit the site—many people, myself included, found Neopets addictive—tried to adopt their pets out to good homes. Ironically, this forum also became a lesson in capitalism, as I read the life stories of parents who needed to take on extra jobs to make ends meet that left no more time for a virtual pets game. I wrote effusive essays explaining why I would provide an ideal home for their pets, spruced up by my rudimentary knowledge of CSS. More often than not, I got them. So while actual wealth still eluded me, I slowly accumulated markers of luxury: stables of expensive pets with petpets of their own, some of which had even smaller pets, called petpetpets. I fashioned myself a member of the Neo-elite. I had not yet learned the word "capitalism" when I started playing Neopets, but I had already become a neoliberal—a Neo-liberal, if you will.

I stopped playing Neopets when other things in my life became more important: applying to college, getting a job, paying rent, being with people in the real world, etc. In my more precariously employed years, I'd occasionally read stories about how Neopets helped indoctrinate millennials into capitalism by encouraging a generation of kids to accumulate wealth by privately controlling trade in a largely unregulated economy. Neopoints didn't have an exchange rate with any real-world currency (at least not officially; a black market of covert sites sell Neopoints and pets for cash), but the site offered a powerful fantasy of capitalism: the one place on Earth where you could splurge without any need to invest in a 401k or set aside money for healthcare, for life's emergencies, to ease your eventual death. Death, unlike capitalism, does not exist in Neopia.

The older I got, the more disenchanted I became with capitalism in the real world. The signs of wealth inequality in New York City were inescapable, but it was difficult to grasp the scale of it all. Billionaires were literally unimaginable to me, as I had no sense of how such an absurd amount of wealth could be made, let alone spent. I only visually grasped the obscenity of billionaires when I read Mona Chalabi's piece in the New York Times Magazine, "9 Ways to Imagine Jeff Bezos's Wealth," which states that a full-time Amazon employee who made $37,930 in 2020 would need to have started working that job 4.5 million years ago to amass Bezos's $172 billion. Billionaires also exist in Neopia, but aside from users that actually steal accounts and cheat, their wealth is not dependent on the exploitation of the teeming masses of a Neopian underclass. Many Neo-billionaires earned their riches by playing the game for two uninterrupted decades, and they offer advice on Reddit that is less helpful than it is demoralizing: Grind every day. Buy low and sell high. Never stop working. Always play Food Club.

Sometime in the last few years, probably during a period of depression, when my sense of fulfillment in the real world was lacking, I returned to Neopets. I logged on to see my account had about a million Neopoints—a sum that my childhood self had toiled to achieve but had been diluted to little more than a tuppence by more than a decade of inflation. I felt, eerily, like I was foreshadowing one of my greatest fears: growing old or retiring without the savings I would need to support myself. I didn't know anything about building wealth in the real world, didn't even have a high-yield savings account, but I knew the great koan of LinkedIn: You have to spend money to make money. I realized I could take steps to address my retirement despair ... or I could distract myself by taking one last shot at my childhood dream of virtual wealth. I had a million Neopoints; could I turn that into more? I was nearly 30, no longer a child, which meant I had never been in a better position to actually make money on Neopets, one of the last places where it seemed ethical to aspire to making stupid, unnecessary amounts of money.

Every piece of advice I'd ever read about getting rich on the site had nothing to do with the Flash games. As a child who had never gambled before, I could never make sense of the game Food Club. But I was now an adult, with grey hairs and a fully mature frontal lobe, more equipped than ever to learn the obscure rules to an odds-based betting game.

Despite its simple premise—an eating competition for pirates—Food Club is daunting to navigate. The game's homepage is not full of charming images of pirates chowing down, but rather extensive and continually updating charts. One lists the pirates, their strength, weight, wins, and losses. Consider Ol' Stripey, strength 74, weight 189, 1,724 wins and 6,470 losses. Clicking on each pirate reveals their allergies. (Ol' Stripey loves meats and slushies, but is allergic to all breads.) Another chart lists the courses for the upcoming competition: Wriggling Grub, Fresh Seaweed Pie, Anchovies, Eye Candy, and Worm and Leech Pizza. There are five eating competitions per day, and the goal of Food Club is to weigh all these factors and bet on who you think will win. There is no flash or spinning wheel here, only the inputting of various numbers. In Food Club, the amount you can bet is proportional to the age of your account, which in my case is 18 years old, allowing me to bet quite a lot. (Account age is the closest thing to generational wealth in Neopia.)

Alas, this all still felt too complicated for my adult brain. But as I read explainer after explainer on Reddit, I realized that for most people, Food Club does not require any understanding of logic, statistics, or any kind of math. Instead, all you need to do is follow someone else's betting guides. This initially felt disappointing, but also made sense in a LinkedIn koan kind of way: Why do the work yourself if you can outsource it for free? It wasn't cheating, I reasoned, because this is simply what everyone around me was doing. I started following the Reddit user nsheng who created an algorithm that operates according to modern portfolio theory to estimate closing odds and win probabilities, calculate means and covariances, construct the efficient frontier, and score sets along the efficient frontier. That make sense to you? It sure doesn't to me. But the beauty is that I don't need to understand it to make money from it, which I have been doing for nearly a year now, netting more than 36 million Neopoints—a sum that would be unimaginable to my childhood self, even with inflation.

Unsurprisingly, amassing all this wealth has only made it easier for me to generate more. I collect nearly 20,000 Neopoints each day in interest alone. Dreams that once felt unattainable now feel boring, rote. As a 12-year-old I dreamed of buying a single baby paintbrush to turn my pet JubJub into a yassified blob with feet; I can now buy 90 of them. In Neopets as in life, the best way to get rich is to already be rich.

After I painted all my pets (and their petpets), acquired a lab map, and spun a bunch of gambling wheels, I realized I had no idea how to spend my rapidly increasing wealth. Extremely rich Neopians often pivot to collecting rare stamps or dolls, but the site was always about the pets for me. Months passed where I placed my bets, collected my winnings and interest, and watched, passive, as my bank account climbed. Sometimes I'd see other users post about their own goals, how they were saving up for stuff I'd obtained long ago or paintbrushes that wouldn't have put a dent in my savings. When I was in their shoes, I'd have done anything for a charitable benefactor. But now I felt reluctant to give up any of my savings, even though they were the opposite of hard-won.

Somehow, without my realizing it, my only goal on Neopets had become to make more money. Sure, I told myself, I had 50 million Neopoints, but by Neopian standards I was not even considered rich, but upper-middle class. Why, I asked stupidly, weren't any of the real Neo-wealthy billionaires giving more of their wealth away? For the first time in my life, I felt like I understood how the ultra-rich make their money—not by doing anything that could be described as work, not by creating anything meaningful with their time and efforts or by making the world (Neopia) a better place, but rather by manipulating systems that were not designed to be used and exploited in the way I was now using and exploiting them.

Maybe it's embarrassing that everything I've ever learned about capitalism, I first learned from Neopets. But my newfound virtual wealth happened to coincide with a period of my life in which I finally started saving real money, thanks to the stability of my full-time job and freelance income that trickled in from my book. I stopped immediately looking for the least expensive thing on the menu at restaurants. I went to Italy without feeling existential dread. I bought goofy and expensive outfits so inappropriate for most social events that I could never logically justify their purchase. I knew that I still made less than half of the lowest salaries of my friends who work in tech, and yet my daily life had been utterly transfigured from my days of internships that paid me $8, $10, $12 an hour.

As I started to spend more freely, the guilt seeped in. The thrill of opening a package of some technically unnecessary luxury—beautiful plates, linen sheets, moisture-wicking workout shirts (every violently sweaty person deserves this)—would be accompanied by a pang of dread. If my disposable income was dwarfed by that of my friends in tech, it dwarfed that of my friends who were working in service, who were freelancing or unemployed, who were paying off student loans or supporting families or loved ones. In trans and queer and otherwise marginalized communities, there's an adage about how we constantly pass around the same $20 in a giant circle. I felt glad to now be in a position to send $50, $100 to friends and strangers who were fundraising to get top surgery or facial feminization surgery, to attend writing workshops and conferences, to pay rent and get groceries, and later on, to survive or flee a genocide.

Yet my attempts at redistributing my income felt slapdash, random. I donated to Gofundmes when they popped up but kept no records of how much I had donated, and set no goals for how much I would donate. I didn't know how much of my income I should be giving away, but I always suspected it would be more than I was currently giving, and more than I felt comfortable giving. In an ideal world, a meaningful proportion of that redistribution would not be up to me. I knew a portion of my income was already being redistributed via taxes, which would be entirely pleasing if that money were being entirely funneled toward public services like public housing, healthcare, education, transportation, and disaster relief. But my taxes also fund things like Israel's assault on Gaza.

The obvious meaningful solutions to wealth inequality in the U.S., such as taxing the rich and ensuring they can't snake their way out of it, exist outside of my power as an individual. Real wealth redistribution is never going to come from the largesses of the hoarders themselves, too greedy to be moved by pleas, shame, or even the law. Obviously billionaires should not get to decide where they send the shavings off their fortunes, because a billionaire's sense of what is important and right is as untethered from life on Earth as George Clooney in Gravity. To exist as a billionaire in our society without feeling and acting upon an all-consuming urge to give your wealth away is to be morally bankrupt. But this didn't apply, I reasoned, to my wealth in Neopets.

Despite all of Neopia's flaws, the site has more robust social welfare programs than we do in the United States. The soup kitchen feeds your Neopets for free if you have under 3,000 Neopoints in your pockets. The giant perpetual omelette offers everyone, regardless of income, a free daily meal. The Baja Blast–colored waters of the healing springs provide the chance, every half hour, to heal your pets of illness or injury. Instead of navigating arcane healthcare bureaucracy for HRT, there is a wonky laboratory scientist you can battle in exchange for switching your Neopet's sex.

Just like in the real world, wealth disparity in Neopia has only increased over time. Part of this appears to have been driven by an alleged real-life scammer who stole more than 40,000 abandoned accounts in order to place automated bets on Food Club. This generated billions of Neopoints, which the scammer used to purchase rare items and sell them to desperate users for actual U.S. dollars, to the tune of $15,000 a month. Over the years, the Neopets Team (TNT) have tried and failed to reduce in-game inflation, which had ballooned so much that a weapon called the super attack pea—exactly what it sounds like—was going for over a billion Neopoints. Last October, TNT launched a new strategy: simple quests that users could complete to receive items once valued at millions of Neopoints for free. It was as if the state had begun handing out Subarus and goldendoodles to anyone who wanted them, leaving some ultrarich users absolutely fuming and everyone else extremely pleased. Items people had been saving up to buy for years were suddenly within reach. I don't know enough about economics to articulate what a real-world equivalent of this Neopian handout system would look like. But it was clear that these handouts had improved the experience of playing the game for most users.

Since I started writing this blog, I've realized the ethical questions of Neopoints billionaires don't really matter because Neopoints aren't real; though they can equate to some degree of happiness, they do not correlate to a more secure life in the real world. I thought this blog would help me resolve what felt like a burning question in my life—what proportion of my income should I regularly be donating without screwing myself over for future retirement or current pleasures, because what is life without pleasure—but I now realize this is also not a question with an objective answer. I still believe it is important to have a practice of redistributing funds, to friends and strangers and non-human entities in need, but there is no clear right answer to how much that should be. Still, the more you think about this question, the more you feel you might able to give. A rule of thumb I've seen friends offer: Think about how much you feel comfortable giving, and give a little more than that.

I don't want to be a billionaire, not just because I don't want to go to hell. But sometimes, selfishly and embarrassingly, I find myself desiring wealth. I spiral watching people's Instagram stories, digital portholes into lavish European vacations or elegant, light-filled homes with gardens. I scroll through Zillow and imagine the dinner parties I could throw in a lilac Victorian house in San Francisco. I ogle the Loewe beaded asparagus bag. I unironically watch Subaru commercials and imagine myself driving on a mountain road, or even to pick up groceries without lugging them home in totes that make my back ache.

But when I really think about it, what I desire is not capital for the sake of capital, but the life it offers me. Maybe my desire for a car is actually a desire for better-funded, more extensive public transit that would offer New Yorkers more access to nature. Maybe my desire for savings is actually a desire to live out the rest of my life without the dread of knowing I'll have to uproot from my apartment when my landlord hikes up the rent. Maybe my desire for wealth is actually a desire for the kind of mental peace that only comes with not having to worry about emergency medical bills or unexpected layoffs. Maybe it's actually a desire to die in relative comfort. I believe the way to achieve these things for the greatest number of people is not in the capitalist solution of amassing personal wealth, but in a fundamentally ethical restructuring of society.

The question I am left mulling over may not have an easy answer, but it has a clearer vision: How can we build a world where each of us and our communities no longer rely on the whims and unreliable philanthropy of the ultra-rich to ensure our basic needs are met? Neopia's hoarders were never going to redistribute their wealth to the masses. It took action from the state to uplift the poor and close the wealth gap, to hand out paintbrushes to anyone who wanted them. What if it's actually just that easy? If Neopia is where many millennials play-acted capitalism, perhaps it is what can push them to embrace and enact socialism, or some form of it, in the real world. Let the memory of the Giant Omelette inspire us to work for a future where everyone can be fed, everyone can be healed, everyone has the time and space to play, and where death feels closer to impossible.