Revisiting Animal Jam: social inequality

As I maneuvered my character, Spooky Stinkypaw, through Jamaa Township, the center of trade and activity in Animal Jam, the severely pixelated brick streets hit me with a wave of nostalgia. Players went in and out of shops as different animals performed repetitive dance moves in the center of the Jamaa square, sending a variety of chat notifications: “trade me fairly,” “rare spikes on trade list” and “party at my den!”

When Animal Jam was launched in 2010 by National Geographic and WildWorks, my parents viewed it as a zoology learning tool rather than a video game and were perfectly fine with me spending hours upon hours online playing it — not their brightest decision. While Animal Jam is full of zoology facts and features, my friends and I really didn’t use it for learning purposes.

After many years, I finally decided to make a return to Animal Jam just to see what I’d missed. Players control in-game characters such as seals, tigers, bunnies or wolves that they can customize and use to interact with other players: basically Club Penguin but with more animals and zoology.

I immediately noticed that there are considerably more things to do in the game including making jammer walls, which are basically mini blogs and hosting parties rather than just attending. There were also many, many different clothing and den items. 

However, I couldn’t access any of these features because they all required a membership. In fact, a lot of things that used to be free for all players (such as gifting items to other players) were now restricted to members only. Not the best update, as I’m sure everyone whose parents won’t get them a membership agrees.

Just then, a dramatically dressed diva tiger caught my attention with the overhead chat bubble inviting me to “party at my den!” It had been years since I’d attended an Animal Jam party, so I clicked on the player profile, selected “visit den” and vanished from the township square.

I was transported to the middle of a gigantic pink castle, decorated with matching sparkly pink furniture. 

 In the garden, there were tables of virtual punch lined up on either side of the gazebo, and players messaged back and forth with their animals seated at classy booths. 

I tried to make friends with some of the players, but my attempts at conversation kept being dodged. They even rejected my friend requests! I was being so nice to them, too. The only plausible conclusion I reached was that I wasn’t rare enough.

You see, in Animal Jam, your worth is determined by how many rare items you have, such as those only sold in the beta version of the game. You could trade these “rares” and “betas” for other items; they were basically a social status symbol. 

When I’d initially played the game back in 2015, my older brother passed his old beta account to me. His account was filled with rare and beta items, so I didn’t even have to work to achieve in-game clout — everyone wanted to be friends with the cool beta player.

It soon became clear that if I was to get anywhere in this replay of Animal Jam, I had to become a rarer jammer. Occasionally, you meet a person who has a rare item purely out of luck. Then you convince them that what they have is complete trash and whatever you have is priceless. Then make the trade, unfriend and disappear forever. 

Sounds cruel, but kids online aren’t really the nicest people. I attempted this strategy many times with Spooky Stinkypaw’s charms, but I had really bad luck and made little to no progress. I was getting pretty tired of it, and the game began to seem a bit pointless.

Without the cool items I had possessed when I used to play, nobody wanted to talk to me, a newbie jammer. Anyhow, I wasn’t even really sure what items were considered rare anymore, as I was so out of the loop. At last, I decided that my journey in Animal Jam had come to an end. 

Or did it? A few weeks ago, NatGeo announced a new version of Animal Jam, Feral, that is scheduled to be publicly released in 2020. Feral is meant for a teenage audience, specifically the generation of kids that grew up with Animal Jam. 

All I can say is that my old friends who obsessed over Animal Jam with me were ecstatic. This announcement revived old Google Hangouts group chats that have been buried for years.

Whether or not Feral will live up to my more mature gaming standards is still to be revealed. I think I can safely say, though, that Animal Jam’s materialistic societal standards are not to my liking. I’ll stick to my gamepigeon for now.