CAMBRIDGE, Mass. — New research has cast doubt on the long-held assumption about what happens to the millions of Neopets whose owners meet a romantic partner, begin working and paying taxes, or simply get bored.
“A Neopet cannot die, at least not in the traditional sense,” said Jeffery Quinn, professor of metaphysics at Harvard University. “As beings who exist only when observed by their owners in the digital ether, an abandoned Neopet is neither dead nor alive, but rather permanently suspended in a sort of limbo between these two states of being. They simply cease to be.”
Malcolm Branson was an avid Neopets player until he stumbled onto a picture of boobs on the internet in ninth grade and lost interest in the virtual pet site.
“Yeah, I saw a boob and thought, man, what am I doing on Neopets, so I kinda just lost interest,” said Branson. “Since then, I’ve wondered what happened to my first Neopet. He was a Darigan Draik named Dragondragon61892. I always thought that he probably died, so I was relieved when Dr. Quinn said that Neopets can’t die. But that stuff about being suspended in the bardo between life and death for all of eternity seems kind of messed up.”
Quinn’s thesis was not without controversy.
“It’s really too soon to be making these kinds of proclamations,” said Linda Conrad, a neuroscientist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. “I’m currently on a team that’s studying the processes the brain goes through as it dies, and it seems much more likely to me that an abandoned Neopet actually experiences an eternal dream in which they are forced to relive the confines of their experience over and over until the heat-death of the universe. That may seem a minor, semantic difference from Dr. Quinn’s findings, but we’re talking about the ontological status of digital beings. This is an ongoing debate.”
At press time, Branson wondered aloud whether Neopets might prefer being dead after being locked out of his account for failing to guess his password five times in a row.
