Paper Proposal-Rani Khamphilavong

I plan to analyze a website that I was obsessed with in middle school, Neopets.com. Neopets is a game website that people create “pets” and take care of them. There are games that players can play to win money or “neopoints”. What began, as a fun site for procrastination became more of a job in the end. I wanted to get the highly desirable “Royal Paint Brush” and developed a plan that I followed to earn almost 2 million “neopoints”. This is the specific part that I want to analyze about Neopets. Players have to work to get the more special or desirable items that the game offers. But since it is marketed as a game, players don’t realize that they are technically working as well as playing.

Some ideas that relate to what I want to analyze about Neopets are McLuhan’s “Games” reading, E.P. Thompson “Time, Work-Discipline, and Industrial Capitalism”, Caillois and Huizinga. There was definitely a sense of task time while playing Neopets, because I would play all the games I needed to earn the quota of 30,000 that I set for myself. I would use the Caillois, Huizinga, and McLuhan readings to explore the play aspect of Neopets.

-Rani Khamphilavong