WELCOME TO A VIRTUAL WORLD!
I was born in South Carolina, roughly three hours away from where I live now in rural Tennessee. The first seven years of my life were spent living in Greenville, where 13.9% of people out of the population of 72,310 live in poverty — that’s just over 10,000 people (U.S. Census Bureau). I was no older than seven years old when I made my first real memory of the internet through a digital avatar of a white poodle named Snowball. Snowball was a Webkinz — a virtual pet that allowed myself and multitudes of other children to socialize with each other and play games in a non-physical world.
This premise may sound similar to other massively multiplayer online games, or MMOs. What set Webkinz apart from games like Animal Jam or Club Penguin, however, was the fact that creating a Webkinz account was restricted to a specific group of people — people that had purchased a stuffed toy, which determined the appearance of their avatar, and the digital access code with which it was included. Though I hadn’t realized it at the time, this aspect of Webkinz was highly unusual; the two games I mentioned previously, Animal Jam and Club Penguin, were free to play, though additional purchases could be made to access more features of both sites. In the cases of those games, spending money was an option, not a requirement. In contrast, the defining feature of Webkinz — that players have a toy that exists both in the physical and digital realms — assumes that players have the means to purchase the physical toy. This assumption is not just about purchasing a toy. The very notion of playing Webkinz assumes players have access to a working car and that a retailer that sells Webkinz is within drivable distance. If this is not possible, potential players might still be able to purchase a Webkinz online and have it delivered to their house.
With this in mind, it is reasonable to assert, then, that Webkinz manufactured a miniature divide in classes. Nowadays, the decline in popularity of Webkinz and other MMOs means this feature is no longer profitable. Webkinz is now available to be played by anyone, regardless of whether they have purchased a digital access code. On websites like Youtube, there exist relics of this ancient state of Webkinz — videos of long-expired Webkinz access codes posted free of charge, though nobody can say whether or not they had already been used before being posted online. On websites like eBay, limited-edition Webkinz can be purchased for several hundreds of dollars.