My Internet History

That's a clickbait title, but not entirely inaccurate. I just wanted to talk about some of the internet spaces I've inhabited over the years.

I am the oldest kid to some more-conservative-than-average parents, so a lot of times I was a bit behind technologically. I got a cell phone later than most kids, and I didn't anything we would really consider a videogame until high school when a friend recommended steam, and my dad thought it was a virus and made me uninstall it. :p

Some of my early internet memories include flash games, Webkinz, and Neopets, though I don't feel that I have anything unique to say about those. Maybe I'll come back and add comments about them later.

My LEGO Network

A big internet memory was My LEGO Network - which was some long-gone "kids social media" type of website by LEGO. If that sounds weird, that's because it kind of was. I didn't meet any other kids on there, but my brother and I would message each other as if we weren't in the same room.

The other "people" on the platform involved a lot of LEGO characters, like a professor who would trade you for items, or a matoran who would have you do bionicle-related challenges. They were essentially bots that would send you messages or interact with you in a limited capacity. They wouldn't have full conversations or anything, but this seemed like a pretty safe way for kids to interact online.

There was a surprising amount of customization for a kid-oriented social media type of site. You could make your profile picture out of a minifigure-esque selection of heads, hairs, and stickers, and you could pick the colors and pattern themes of your page. There were also drag-and-drop modules that you could arrange all over your page. It was a really neat little homepage and I loved customizing it.

The coolest thing was that you could get different little pieces of soundtracks, either a drum track or a cello or anything else, and layer them on top of each other to make a song play on your page. I was trying to get a certain achievement so that I could have the song Creeping In My Soul by Cryoshell play on my page, from one of the Bionicle advertisements that I'd seen. But there was some club achievement that I didn't have, and I was young and stupid so I didn't know I could just google how to do things in games. So I kept trying to get this one specific song I loved.

That brings me to the other aspect of the platform - there was this encouragement to keep striving for something by ranking up and getting back on the social media grind. There were ranks up to 10 that you could have to level up your profile. On top of that, there were different colored bricks of different values. You'd start out with red bricks, then eventually you could add a little module or box to your profile to "grow" a different type of brick over time.

This reminds me a lot of modern MMO's, particularly how they keep you logging on with new level-ups, daily log-in bonuses, and rewards to strive for. While that can be fun if you don't give in and turn all your free time into a grind fest, I just don't really like intentionally addictive mechanics. With this form of "baby's first social media," the reward was more pictures or sounds to put on your profile - while now, most social media tries to use the algorithm to try to serve up rewarding (and addicting) content as you scroll through it. I guess this was early on in experimentation as websites figured out how to keep people coming back and clicking on their stuff.

Funnily there's a fandom wiki page on My Lego Network, if you want to see more about the strange bricky website that once existed. Thanks to that wiki for the picture.

Club Penguin

Club penguin was super cool and I'm sure many people remember it. This was essentially a chatroom, but each room was set up like a map or a location on an island, full of avatars of penguins. These penguins, and sometimes their pets, would walk around, dance, and play minigames. There were yearly events - like a visit by a pirate penguin, Rockhopper, who looked like a normal avatar except for his outfit, but he was surely controlled by the staff. There were also occasional redecorations of the island for something like summer break or halloween.

This game also came with some things you could either pay for or work towards. You could customize your penguin and house, but some aspects of it were locked behind your parents' willingness to pay money (a subscription) for an online game. There was also a title of "Secret Agent" that you could earn through doing some more drawn-out minigames, which got you access to a secret room and some other stuff. But in all honesty, I never felt like I needed to do the microtransactions to fully experience the game.

The game also had some really silly little quirks. There was an iceberg map, and there were always people standing on the iceberg, heavily on one side, hoping that the iceberg would one day tip and flip over. People would be cheering in all caps for the iceberg to tip at any hour of the day. I really doubt the developers planned this, and there was no way this would ever actually happen, but it was fun to imagine. You could also get into genuinely difficult games of hide and seek, because there were some areas of the map where your penguin could hide behind some of the landscape. If you had an even better spot, then your name would be hidden due to being off the edge of the screen. And if you just stayed in the "spawn point" of a really busy map, then you'd be obscured underneath the other penguins who were constantly coming and going.

Club Penguin was my first experience making friends on the internet. I started logging on around the same time every day with my brother. We were supposed to have an hour of computer time a day, and by keeping our timing consistent, we would see the same people every day. Nowadays I'll have a static group to play videogames or board games online, but I had accidentally stumbled into this concept as a kid. We would develop a bit more friendship than just one conversation, we would notice if someone was missing, and it was overall a really wholesome experience. I view that as my best childhood internet experience because of how there was a genuine sense of community.

Closing

I think I'll probably come back to this later, as there were more internet spaces I inhabited. But for now, I just want to get this entry out there into the world to fly free.