![]() ![]() ![]() I played this horrendous online game/chat-room/whatever the hell it is when I was aro und 12 or 13. If you kill a monster you will receive a super rare item 1/1000 times, so you become addicted to clicking/killing the monsters on the off chance that the next kill will give you that item you so much desire. These games are really unhealthy and mind-numbing because they completely manipulate our psychological addiction to variable-ratio reward schedules e.g. Luckily, I nipped these MMO addictions in the bud once I reached a certain game level (around 100 on Runescape and 50 on LOTRO) and realised I wasn’t really getting much enjoyment out of clicking the same bloody buttons over and over. I remember playing it like crazy for around 3 consecutive months, mainly because it has loads of content and lore from the LOTR books which aren’t in the movies, so it satisfied my desire for more LOTR without having to read a book. But LOTRO was a pretty charming and beautiful game. Runescape was a horrible waste of time, most of my memories of it consist of terrible clay-like graphics, and standing in a laggy marketplace area surrounded by 300 other players typing “selling tan cavaliar for 200k!!!!!!!!!!!!” over and over. But I did almost develop an unhealthy addiction to Runescape and Lord of the Rings Online. 2) MMO games: Runescape & Lord of the Rings Online (leave your life at the door)Īs an internet-loving teenager, I always managed to steer clear of World of Warcraft (also known as the “life ruiner”). It was probably one of the more useful of my internet addictions. Most kids run lemonade stalls or secret clubs, but Neopets was like the 21st century version of those things and actually taught me a lot of worthwhile skills (I taught myself HTML and Paintshop at age 8!). Looking back, that was a pretty awesome period of my childhood. Years later, we tried to access his account, but it had been hacked, which was a shame. Nevertheless, my brother played with me for a while and somehow became crazily rich through neopet battles, he literally had something like 10,000,000,000 neopoints. ( The website still exists! Unfortunately, all the images are now broken.) I tried to get my real-life friends to play neopets with me, but the losers were all too busy doing real hobbies like rhythmic gymnastics and synchronized swimming. I remember feeling so proud whenever I stumbled across a random person who had used one of my images. I also had a little sideshow creating neopets-themed banners and layouts with Paintshop Pro, and uploading them to an Angelfire website so people could use them on their own neopets pages. ![]() But like the Mongol Empire, it didn’t last long running a guild is a full-time job, and I was just a mere 10 year old who still wanted to ride my bike around the park and play with my friends. I fiercely recruited members for the guild and ensured their loyalty through holding fun competitions they could participate in for prizes. I ran a neopets guild (a club which other online users can join), and taught myself basic HTML and CSS so I could decorate the guild homepage and create a website for it. I wrote backstories for them, gave them personalities, and even learnt how to draw using Paintshop Pro so I could create and enter drawings of them in the site’s “Beauty Contest”. All my neopets were hilariously girly of course I had the white & pink striped Wocky (a cat-like creature), a purple fairy bunny, and a fairy deer. I spent ages collecting as many neopoints as I could so I could kit out my neopets in the fanciest colours. It is centred around cute virtual pets called “neopets”, and a virtual currency called “neopoints” which you earn by playing games. If you didn’t know, is an online virtual community aimed at kids. At the very least, the internet has the ability to bring out the really lame side of humanity.Īnd so I present to you three lame internet past-times I have indulged in that, luckily, most people don’t know about me: 1) Neopets Entrepreneurįrom around the ages 8 – 11, Neopets was my life. Real life is cool and all, but the internet never lets you down (…providing you have a good broadband connection).īut the diversity and freedom of the internet also comes at a cost… there is a lot of strange, unusual, and sometimes downright dangerous stuff accessible at the click of a button. From Neopets to Runescape, Habbo Hotel to YouTube, Reddit to Twitter I’m a fully seasoned traveler of the interwebs. Ever since my dad showed me this magical thing where you could type in “Barbie” or “Beanie Babies” and be greeted with pictures and interactive games and quizzes, I was hooked. I’m a typical child of the internet generation.
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