this is a post about a virtual pet site, Marapets. i have not been sponsored in any way to produce it. if you want to give the site a try, i’d love if you used my referral link or mentioned my username (denzelle) when you sign up; if you continue to play, I get benefits 🙂 (this link also works if you previously played and have not played in the past ninety days)

I am sort of obsessed with virtual pet websites. lately over on my Mastodon account I’ve been posting quite a bit about my adventures on Goatlings, a small and charming pet site with very little to do and a very in-shambles economy. the problems i have with Goatlings are far from unique to it — in fact, every pet site has them a little bit, to some degree. i play pretty much every pet site, and which one is my “favorite” comes and goes at different times, but i’ve been starting to feel more and more that two specific virtual pet sites are really stand-out mechanically.

one of them, Poppyseed Pets, is unique enough that i want to dedicate another post to it another time, but it breaks most pet site conventions in interesting ways, and this makes it a site that i don’t actually spend *that* much time with, as great as it is. the other site, which i’ll be posting about today, is Marapets, which breaks NO pet site conventions, dials them up to 11, and fine-tunes them in a way that pushes one’s buttons.

do i like Marapets? yes! it’s NOT a fully nostalgia-driven experience for me, unlike Neopets (my first pet site) or Subeta Pets (the pet site on which I met my wife). i signed up in around 2018, well into my twenties. of course, some of the trappings of Marapets are very much like old Neopets, and it is nearly as old (20 years, as of 2024, compared to Neopets’ 25 years) so I can’t say it’s totally divorced from nostalgia, either.

the basic mechanics are familiar: you adopt pets, you can alter their appearance and train them, there are minigames. some of the art is good, some of it is terribly ugly, some of it is offensive. Marapets was made partially in response to the downright puritanical standards of Neopets as it was finding its footing as a game for children, so various weird things can happen to your pet; getting beheaded, going to prison, dying and becoming a rotting zombie.

The first thing I really like about Marapets happens here. My pet was turned “Headless” which is not ideal. Actually, it was a very expensive color/species combination before that, so it’s doubly not ideal. Some pet sites have punishing mechanics for being experimental, which leads people to… not be experimental. For example, you might avoid visiting the “Decapitating Fairy” (really) to avoid the chance of getting your pet’s head cut off, even though doing so can also give you stats and prizes. On most pet sites, being risk-averse pays off.

Marapets, though, rewards you for experiences you have, even if the experiences are not totally positive. By getting my pet’s head chopped off, I added this particular color/species combination (Headless Limax) to its “transformations collection” and this gives me rewards. There’s a bunch of different collection systems on the site that reward you; some are linked to your account (how many quests have I done? How many stamps have I added to my stamp collection? How many days have I logged in?) and some are linked to specific pets (how much health does this pet have? How many books has it read?) and can be received for every pet you reach those milestones on.

I really like the idea of encouraging experimental, risky play. there’s still a point where the risk ends; my pet is not going to end up deleted from existence no matter what, and stats tend to go up, not down. It’s not a mechanic of fragility, but of resilience. Doing anything with your pet counts as progress, even if you accidentally turned it into an ugly color or it got sick.

Interestingly, I think this resilience shows in the player base! One of my problems with Goatlings is that the user base is… very anxious and fragile, and I would argue that the mechanics and communication style of the site exacerbate this and feed into it. Meanwhile, here’s someone chatting with the Marapets owner in the live chat system:

Stuff happens on Marapets. Changes will occur. Tape a piece of paper over your screen if you don’t like it.

As an aside, I feel like you can split pet games up into ones that encourage you to nurture existing pets, versus sites that encourage you to accumulate further pets. Marapets is firmly on the nurturing side of things, though you can also accumulate quite a few of the damn things. For sites that are firmly on the accumulation side, any pet side with breeding mechanics (Flight Rising, Lioden) counts, as well as sites where you can’t do anything with your pets except for accumulate them (Chicken Smoothie and Egg Cave, for example).

“Nurturing” style pet sites are made or broken on the amount of things you can do. Marapets has a lot of things to do. Maybe even too many (this was my wife’s complaint). They’re also made or broken on the economy. Marapets, like many long-running pet sites, has an economy built on FOMO (the fear of missing out) and timed scarcity. That is, sometimes things will be available and sometimes they won’t be; some items will retire and become unobtainable through normal means.

Except Marapets is REALLY, REALLY GOOD AT THIS. Let’s go back to Neopets. There are some site avatars that have been retired for over a decade. If your account has that avatar, great. If it doesn’t, you can never obtain it. If you hope to collect every avatar on Neopets, just stop hoping; it’s not possible.

Marapets also has certain avatars which have retired, as you’d expect for a twenty year old pet site. Do you have to thus give up on getting it? No! There’s a site feature called the Tableaus Temple — Marapets has a few of these temples, which are essentially just a series of daily quests with gradually ramping difficulty — that takes around a month to complete, and when you finish it, you can choose to add any avatar straight to your collection, including retired ones. Retiring means that the avatar became something you can only get through a lengthy process, instead of becoming totally unobtainable.

Items are the same. Retired items which are collectible can still be collected through *some* sort of lengthy process. Some items come back seasonally, which will be indicated in their description. Some come around with shockingly long timers, like the rare Decadal pet, which is only officially obtainable once per decade (but of course there are still low chances of being able to get it some other way). There’s even a page called Retirement Planning that just… lists all the items that are going to retire next, and exactly when they will retire. Compared to other pet sites, it’s a ridiculous level of communication. It’s annoyingly, impressively fine-tuned.

I want to go back to one of the problems that Goatlings, the pet site I mentioned earlier, is facing right now… a pet color was very scarce many years ago, and now, of course, it’s even scarcer. There’s no new way to obtain it. Even some of the pet goats which had this pet color have now been turned to different colors. They missed out on the current boom of people wanting to buy that specific color of pet, because they chose to change the pet to a different one. Do you see where I’m going with this?

Yes! Marapets has a site mechanic to fix this! You can do an annoying quest for something called Dress 4 Less vouchers, which can be used to turn your pet into ANY color/species combination that it has previously had. Is it easy? Absolutely not, but it reduces the pain of experimentation (or of random pitfalls, like, again, the headless thing.)

I don’t think Marapets is my “favorite” pet site. It is carefully calculated to produce FOMO. There are lootboxes if you want to go the real money route. But, mechanically, I continue to be impressed by it… and I keep playing. It started feeling at some point like my Marapets experience actually mattered, and like I was invested, and like the progression (there’s a system where you slowly level up your account by reaching goals) was exciting. That’s pretty cool.