We don’t announce every time we add a new magazine to our library. But this week, we’ve added the complete run of Neopets The Official Magazine to our digital archive.

This might sound like an extremely specific, silly thing to make an announcement about, but we didn’t scan 2000+ pages of this magazine without a good reason.

During its four-year run, Neopets Magazine covered the latest news and strategies for the influential 2000s-era web game. It also had a lot of articles about Neopets merchandise and trading cards. In fact, it’s mostly ads for Neopets products. Or long articles about Neopets lore. At best, it is mostly an off-topic magazine.

So why did we focus on this magazine of our archive? Simple: it’s about the game’s audience.

Neopets was, arguably, the defining girl game of the 2000s. An entire microgeneration of girls got their start in the world of digital entertainment by raising virtual pets and playing Flash games to get Neopoints.

As VGHF’s library director, I acknowledge that this audience is not yet well-served by the material in our digital archive. Plenty has been written about the boy-centric marketing and messaging of the video game industry, and game magazines are a reflection of that culture. A magazine like Electronic Gaming Monthly is an important historical resource, and it is also—no judgment!—a magazine that had multiple supplements about football games.

That’s only one part of gaming culture. Outside of Girl Gamer (and a weird promotional magazine by Ubisoft), I don’t know that the Neopets audience has a place to see themselves represented in the history we’re capturing.

So when we received a set of Neopets Magazine back in 2023, we were ecstatic. I’ve wanted to add this magazine to our digital collections for years. But at first, we didn’t have scans we could use.

Game magazine collectors have mostly ignored Neopets Magazine, to such a degree that community groups don’t even have it cataloged. We did find a Neopets fansite that hosts a collection of scans; however, they declined to let us use these for our digital archive. Jellyneo appears to have a close relationship with the Neopets company, so they may have agreements in place preventing them from resharing their site’s content. We want to build on community resources whenever possible, but we don’t want to do that without permission.

Still, we really, really wanted this magazine to be part of our digital library. So we decided to rescan the whole thing, and at higher quality. With help from the community, we were able to source a second set of Neopets Magazine to debind and digitize.

It was, in my professional opinion, totally worth it.

On the one hand, yes, Neopets Magazine is a good record of what was happening in Neopets. It’s unusual to have a print source that covered web games or evolving live games. That alone is interesting!

But Neopets The Official Magazine is also a great resource for seeing how games were being presented to girls in the mid-2000s. At a time when publishers were trying to launch edgy magazines like Incite Video Gaming that overlapped with pro wrestling and extreme sports, here’s a magazine with monthly 10-page section on fanart. Occasionally, there are ads for games, but they’re often for casual games like the EyeToy, or web games like MapleStory.

Notably, many of the magazine’s articles are about creativity and customization. There’s shades in here of the gameplay styles that have become more popular in the last decade with the rise of cozy games and farming sims.

My favorite quirk of Neopets Magazine is in the audience survey that came with some issues. In one survey question, they asked whether readers bought this magazine at a clothing store! That would have reached a completely different audience than we usually associate with game magazines. Can you imagine PC Gamer being sold at a Charlotte Russe?

The point is that Neopets The Official Magazine represents a different slice of gaming culture, one that we know matters to researchers and to our extended community. But magazines like this are poorly documented! When you do see them, they’re usually not part of a “serious” game history.

For that reason, we’re excited to make this part of our digital archive, alongside Hardcore Gamer and other magazines that do not give you advice about the best food bowl for your Petpets.

I may have learned too much about Neopets while scanning this.

The post Why we scanned every issue of Neopets The Official Magazine appeared first on Video Game History Foundation.

Roost is a messaging app where messages aren’t instant; they travel between users at the speed of whichever bird they use to send it. Note sending is limited by the # of birds in your rookery…if they’re all out, you have to wait until one returns.

In my English and writing classes, I ask my students to interrogate fictional character bots. 

The first time I assigned this project, I worried that I would get them addicted to Character.AI — arguably the most seductive and addictive type of chatbot for young people, because it gives students exactly what I assumed they wanted: a friend who never says no, never gets tired and never pushes back. 

The exact opposite happened. Months later, I asked if they wanted to interrogate another character chatbot. The answer was a resounding, “Nah, that’s old news.”

Those students didn’t need to be told AI was addictive. They didn’t need a policy or a warning. They came to their own conclusions because they had been given a structured encounter with the technology — one that required them to interrogate it rather than consume it. 

Their attitude answered a question that many in education are struggling with: What does it mean to be “AI literate”? No, it is not a fake concept — it just hasn’t been fully defined yet. We’re still researching it. We’re still trying to understand it.

Related: A lot goes on in classrooms from kindergarten to high school. Keep up with our free weekly newsletter on K-12 education.

The exercise had helped build their resistance to AI addiction. I believe that is what AI literacy actually produces. Not dependence — antibodies. We’re still looking for the right dosage, but finding the right balance and type of AI exposure helps the body build up its protective layers. The activity I engaged my students in helped them learn to interrogate AI, one of the best ways there is to build up the cognitive defense system. 

It is possible that a small amount of AI in a student’s life might even be good for them. Or, in another way, it might act as a vaccine.

AI is being sold as a product that increases productivity and even creativity. The only way to articulate its dangers is to engage in research. 

That research, subsequently, will shine a light on its ills. Scientists thought cocaine was good for the body before they realized it was bad. Researchers claimed cigarettes could reduce stress before they realized it caused cancer.

The AI companies don’t want you to know about AI’s harms. They don’t want you to be aware. Every ruling class in history has understood that a literate population is a dangerous one.

Related: TEACHER VOICE: Students must be taught about the potential harms of AI along with its benefits 

AI is a drug: Heroin. Cocaine. Cigarettes. Alcohol. Uneducated AI use is like getting behind the wheel with no training. 

It’s as dangerous as can be. I have felt that way since ChatGPT was first released three years ago. I feel that way — often — whenever OpenAI CEO Sam Altman speaks, or even if I just see his face on my iPhone screen.

But this drug is here. It’s being peddled on the streets. It’s freely available, and our students are consuming it in mass quantities.

And yet, despite its dangers, we shouldn’t turn away. Learning this new technology does not amount to capitulation. It is — or can be — an act of subversion.

Look at it this way: What do we do when a new drug hits the streets? What do we do when a new virus enters our world?

Well, for one, we contain it. We capture it. We make a vaccine out of it. And when we find the right controlled dosage, we give it to everybody. We build up the antibodies. We develop a natural resistance. 

Related: OPINION: Schools cannot teach AI literacy without a way to measure it

Physiological resistance is developed through exposure. Not through uncontained exposure, but via monitored exposure. There are no “doctors” of AI literacy yet — but anyone can become one.

With respect to narcotics, we know that “Just Say No to Drugs” doesn’t work. Drug education works. Drug literacy works. 

The more a person knows about what is out there and what it can do to them, the more they develop discernment. It’s the same with AI as it is with viruses. We know that the only way to develop a vaccine is to test it out in small increments. Document the findings. Toggle the dosage. Combine it with other elements. 

We are all already part of this. The more we ignore the permeation of society by a technology that never asked permission to enter our lives, the more it invades our systems undetected.

The best strategy is proactivity. Proactivity is not resignation, it is strength. It is revolutionary. Action, not inaction.

AI is a drug. But if history has taught us anything, it’s that drugs need to be researched.

So please — engage. Understand. Learn. Because the more you know, the more you help build up our antibodies.

Mike Kentz is an adjunct professor of writing at Fairleigh Dickinson University and the founder of AI Friction Labs — an educational technology platform that provides challenging, story-based simulations to educators for training and evaluating student skills. 

Contact the opinion editor at opinion@hechingerreport.org.

This story about AI literacy was produced by The Hechinger Report, a nonprofit, independent news organization focused on inequality and innovation in education. Sign up for Hechinger’s weekly newsletter.

The post TEACHER VOICE: AI is an addictive drug that must be researched, studied and confined appeared first on The Hechinger Report.

This is a saying stolen and adapted from the splendid Paynter people. I talk about it in the Do Interesting book. And I've been thinking of it because I've been reading Inside The Box by David Epstein. It's about the fact that freedom doesn't make you more creative etc, constraints do. Relatively well-trodden territory but he has some good accompanying stories and he tells them well.

I was trying to think what constraints I use to make things interesting and I came up with these three examples. I'll confess, I've never made any of them stick as much as I'd like because, well, constraints are hard. But I still think they're worth a go:

Unusual word insertment

I used to have a challenge with a writer I worked with. We'd both give each other an unusual word and we had to try and get it into the copy we were writing each month. Webcopy, marketing emails, that kind of thing. No one else knew about it so the copy had to get through all the usual approval processes.

We didn't do it as often as we should, but it was joyously effective at making us think harder about our words. Once you get a 'tone of voice' in your head it's really easy to churn it out unthinkingly. Which is fine. But soon gets boring. Having to construct a bit of writing so the unusual word didn't stick out was a good constraint. It made us sound more human and caught the ear better.

Scheduled for monthly deletion

I like to ask web teams to delete something from the website every month. Just something. Whatever they reckon. Big or small. It makes people look out for the bloated and the unnecessary. Do we really need that FAQ? Is anyone reading that stuff about our mission? No one has ever noticed/complained about stuff we've deleted.

No more words for you

One of the major contributors to the planetary problem of document bloat is collaborative editing. Technology has made it very easy to add stuff but social niceties (and the fact that it's hard) make people very reluctant to remove things. So when sharing documents for thoughts/approval I try to say 'you can change whatever you like, you just can't increase the overall word count'. This used to go down very badly with the civil service. But it's a good constraint because it makes people much more careful about what they say. Do they really believe that their contribution makes the story stronger or is just a bit of drive-by randomness? And if you're determined to get something in, how do you express it succinctly, and what has to come out.

Video version:

I know the technology, I understand what it's doing and I know the impact, so I am vehemently anti-AI.

I do not believe any positive outcome is possible with this form of AI that is worth the harms that it has already done and is continuing to do. Nor do I believe that “just one more model bro” will make something that is “intelligent”. Of course “AI” is a marketing term so it doesn't mean anything, neither does GenAI or the latest buzzword “Agentic”.

This makes me an outcast. In tech, and out of it.

A post was sent to me that really resonated. On the acceptance of GenAI

I am so tired of defending this stance that I am reaching the point of cutting entire communities out of my life because they will promote[1] AI usage.

People do not realise how much of a toll it takes on you if you actually care about the environment, exploited workers, theft from the people who can least afford it, the impact on people's cognitive skills, the centralisation of power, the spread of disinformation, the ruination of the web and/or the destruction of entire career paths (not billionaire of course, that's always a safe one), and not endorsing (either distinctly or tacitly by using) AI.

If you're not in this group with me, you see the adverts for it everywhere, from emails to TV to posters that have clearly been created with it and probably just roll your eyes or have a sensible chuckle about the rediculousness of it. For me it's actually stomach-turning to see people I respected endorsing or using it openly.

A theatre group I was with decided to take a picture of the group and make a “band poster” of us. Great, that's fun. Oh, they used ChatGPT and now I feel sick and they didn't even ask me.

A friend asked “siri” how long a medication is effective for and when it responded “would you like me to use chatGPT to find the answer” he just said “yes” as if he'd said yes a thousand times already, and just accepted the response as right. I don't want to hang out with him any more because he'll have his phone with him and it's automatic for him now. Also I hope he doesn't die because he trusts some made-up stuff it tells him.

I walked out of a presentation the other day because they were somehow making a point of how bad AI is, by arguing with copilot live on stage. Great, so you acknowledge how bad it is by.... using it?!

Do you like using wikipedia? Cool, I work for one of the chapters behind the site. Guess what? People are using AI to get the information that was scraped from wikipedia and accepting it, “hallucinations” and all. Guess what none of those people do? Become editors, fix mistakes, keep the thing alive.

Worse still, AI is gaslighting you into believing it works. That's the whole point of a model that is designed to provide output that “seems reasonable”. Power users know to argue with it, whereupon it will “admit” that it was wrong, and pipe that to another AI ad infinitum to try and reduce the “made up” stuff. Regular people don't.

So yeah, I'm an outcast, and yeah, it sucks, I'm done with it, I can't take “a week off” from the constant barrage of the stuff. Funny how if it were actually a technology for good, it wouldn't be advertised everywhere.

Yes, some people are forced to use it at work, they have my sympathy. Yes, some people need to use it because for one reason or another if they don't they won't survive. I do not judge you for that.

If you know all the harms (see the post linked to above) and use it “because it's convenient” in spite of all of that, damn right I'll judge you (mostly silently). I won't do more than attempt to provide you with the information of the harm it's doing and if you continue to use it after I've done that, avoid interacting with you.

If you know the harms and do something like “I can get a bonus for being the person who uses the most tokens so I'll just make an infinite loop between two AI agents” I will most likely really dislike you for putting your self-gain over the impact and cut you out of my life.

If you push people to use it however subtly (e.g. “You should just use copilot for that, it's really so much easier”), I will avoid you at all costs. If the place you're posting such to doesn't have rules against that, I'll probably leave that place. I might try to encourage that kind of rule, I might just vanish (depending on the group dynamics).

Does that make me unreasonable? Maybe? I will not change my morals or ethics to suit someone else, nor do I expect other people to change theirs.

Does it mean I loose friends and influence and have a good cry now and then as I close chapters of my life because people don't have the same moral structure as me? Definitely.

[1] As in “You should rub some AI on that”, “Claude is great for that”, “no apps are good for this situation, use AI to make your own” or similar. Not “Hey, Claude is cheap right now, go buy some tokens!”. This usage of promote is not common in the US it seems.