Neopets

Oh! my dear old lover!

Or more like my old addiction. It's a very surreal experience to step into the virtual world you lived in years ago. It started with seeing the websites, blinkies, graphics I used to make. Visited the site, the message boards, the pets, the items, the neopoints.

Some things have changed. Chatspeak is no longer cool, and "being literate", maturity and "15+, 18+, 21+" guilds are in. There is a lot of advertising on the site, and the money hungry website developers schemes to have premium accounts, paid merchandise etc. Fascinating.

However, most things are constant. There are strange disputes over small matters in the message boards, typical young teenage things that we got into back then... The kind of "world" these virtual communities create, with rich and poor, those with power, those with pretty houses and pets, the immature brats and old, "mature" citizens.

I guess it's escapism, and gives everyone an opportunity to own a little kingdom, even if it's virtual. Especially the guilds - recruiting members, organising activities... The status of being a guild leader, a council member, especially of a large, active and prosperous guild - I think I used to have such aspirations. The student organisations at uni are not too different in nature (but are grounded in reality).

I was 13 back then, and anyone above 18 I would wonder at what in the world were they doing, still playing such a game. Now I'm 20, and I myself am the freak, playing the child's game. Though there seems to be a disproportionately large adult population there these days, which is scary.

Nostalgic, slightly, but glad to have gradually lived more and more in the "real world" over the last few years. Glad that I no longer care for pets that don't exist, virtual money, or neofriends - most of whom you talk to for a short while and disappear from your life (with a few exceptions). Now on a journey to learn to care for the people around me, do the work or study God has put before me, use real money wisely.

"Everything is permissible"--but not everything is beneficial. "Everything is permissible" --but not everything is constructive. - 1 Corinthians 10:23

This is a "believer's freedom" - as the NIV bible titles it. Not talking about blatant sin here. But things not inheritantly evil in themselves - games, surfing, facebook, TV, partying. Freedom is not to do whatever we like, whenever we like. But to be free of those things that have a hold on us, that saturate our minds so that we no longer consider the truly important things in life, no longer strive for growth and understanding in Christ.