Webkinz

My Story

when I was about seven years old, around the tail end of the summer between first and second grade, a friend at the Girl Scout cookies booth we were manning told me that she was going to get a new Webkinz at the end of this. I didn't know what a Webkinz was, so she explained that it was a toy that you could play with on the internet in a virtual world. I had never heard of something like that before, but it was exciting. I asked my dad if I could do the same, and he said yes, so long as I behaved during this.

we were in a small shopping plaza built out of a former tannery and a toy shop that sold Webkinz was maybe six feet away from where we were set up. I went there with my friend after we finished for the afternoon and spent so long peering at the Webkinz available that she left by the time I decided on one. I was particular about getting stuffed animals that had a nice face after being smooshed by transit. once I found the one I liked, a gold and white cat, my dad bought her and I took her home.

when I made my account, put in the Webkinz's code, named her Tangerina, I was amazed by the virtual world I was brought to. I didn't actually know what the internet was as a seven-year-old, believe it or not. for a while, I thought that Webkinz and the internet were synonymous. the internet was simply where I played Webkinz.

my favorite thing to do in Webkinz, both then and now, is customize the rooms. I love customization, to the point where a game either has to have a lot of customization or a damn good story for me to have any interest in it. the rooms on display here are from my current account, since I don't have access to the old one. I also like dressing my Webkinz up, but I have some rules in my head about how I go about that. I generally don't like giving them shirts, pants, or shoes... it just feels weird. one of the artists that worked on Club Penguin, Chris Hendricks, expressed a similar sentiment about giving the penguins hair. they're pets! they don't wear shoes!

I collected a lot of Webkinz growing up. at some point, I made a second account so that my dad could sometimes play with me. I didn't know it at the time, but he would often play Goober's Lab on me and my sister's (main) accounts at work when there was nothing else to do, so when I logged in later in the day, I had a bunch more Kinzcash without knowing why. in fact, he played so much Webkinz that it got banned on the company wifi! I won't say what the job was to avoid making him and myself a little too identifiable, but it was blue collar, not some office job.

around my teen years, I started losing interest in Webkinz, in part because I didn't have many people to play with or talk to about it. my bio mom was also very fixated on donating old things, including childhood toys. she didn't force me to do it, but it was heavily implied that I should, and without thinking much about how I'd feel later, I donated every single one of my Webkinz, including Tangerina.

fast forward to college—I found out that Webkinz no longer requires you to buy a new plush yearly to play. I couldn't remember my old account information, so I made a new account and chose a Sun Fox as my starter Webkinz, who I named Kyoko (after the character from Madoka Magica). I played on-and-off for a little while, but there were a lot of features that I couldn't access without having a Webkinz I paid for. After a certain point, I stopped playing personally, but the interest continued with a then-child alter (we'll call her P) who would either play herself or sit with Frey, someone she is close with, as he played for her. I asked for Webkinz as a birthday gift, since the body's birthday was also P's birthday, and then I was back to being a paid member.

all the way until I was living in a subsidized apartment, Webkinz was a hobby that only child parts and Frey engaged with. P was a teenager by then, so she had lost interest, but the younger kids still cared, and so did I. one of the results of slowly going from multiple to median is that our interests became more shared, and since the child parts no longer had to explicitly front to benefit from playing Webkinz, I played myself. I bought a deluxe membership, a pet that was virtual only, and a bunch of items that had to be purchased with real money, much to my friends' chagrin. I am obsessed with the food dispensers and had money that I wouldn't have been doing anything with otherwise, so I didn't think much about spending seven dollars on a single virtual item that gave me a random bucket of virtual popcorn daily.

there aren't a lot of Webkinz I have a big pull towards, but as I added a few more Webkinz to the collection every so often, I started noticing the hole in my heart where Tangerina used to be. a gold and white cat with a code isn't hard to get, so I bought her from an eBay listing. she came without a W on any of her paws, which is something that made me sad, because it was a reminder that this was not my original Tangerina. I cried about it a few years later, but I felt better after crying. I can live with the fact that this Tangerina is a reincarnation of my childhood Webkinz, not the original.

anyway. I put Tangerina's code into Webkinz and brought her to life on my new account. when I was a kid, her room was the big one that I got at the start of the game, but since she was only given a medium-sized room, I worked with that. I recreated as much of the old room as possible, which made use of the Groovy Girl theme quite a bit. I eventually felt satisfied with it, and I just… stayed satisfied. I played for a little while longer, attempting to finish rooms that I thought were cool ideas, but there wasn't much interest anymore. the part of my childhood that I couldn't let go of had been restored, and that gave me closure.

I still occasionally log onto Webkinz to tweak rooms, do dailies, and check on my pets, but the pull it used to have on me just isn't there anymore. I think part of that isn't just about me growing out of it, but the fact that the game is very different than it used to be, and it'll never go back to the way it was before. many items once free so long as you bought a Webkinz once a year now require a deluxe membership to buy and a good portion of the newer stuff can only be purchased through microtransactions. a lot of the most fun features broke a long time ago, and because Ganz can't develop in Flash anymore, they'll just stay broken. the state of it now doesn't take away what I had before, though, nor does it change my feeling of closure. Tangerina will continue to exist in this virtual world and her real-life counterpart sits on my desk. the ending is bittersweet, but nonetheless a happy one.