Neopets is a relic of early-2000s internet, a once-popular site whose heyday has since come and gone. The site is a shell of its formal self: beloved staff members are gone, weekly puzzles have been on hiatus for years. Advertisements pepper every aspect of the site in a last-ditch attempt to suck as much money as possible from its former glory.
I have had my current Neopets account for almost seven years, but have been playing much longer- a previous account I used for several years was frozen. I have participated in multiple site-wide events, I have meticulously customized each of my Neopets, I have submitted comics to the weekly newspaper. I also have spent hundreds of hours playing minigames, with which you can earn Neopoints, the game’s form of currency, amassing over 2 million Neopoints over the course of all these years. There are many reasons for hoarding so much money: saving for an expensive item, for example, or simply for the satisfaction of having it.
The economies of online communities operate in surprisingly complex ways and have actually been the subject of several academic studies. In the case of Neopets, money can be made by playing games, but the money isn’t being ‘taken’ from somewhere else. So money is constantly and easily being generated without being spent or destroyed; the amount of money circulating is almost always rising. Because of this, constant inflation is a problem Neopets (and many online economies) face. Neopets has implemented several features in an attempt to curb inflation, for example an extremely expensive wheel that almost never gives a return on investment (so proportionally it removes more value than it puts back into the economy). There are also options like donating money and literally throwing it down a well.
For my project, I have elected to throw away all of my accumulated wealth as quickly and senselessly as possible, removing myself from the Neopian economy and signifying a rejection of the game and its market. Arguably a project seven years in the making, I destroy a significant amount of invested time and effort (as well as emotional investment) in a matter of minutes- with no apparent gain in the process.