Zumwhere Over The Rainbow

I do, in fact, have a guilty pleasure over which I’ve experienced some spiritual angst. Okay, not only one. But, for the purposes of this post, let us assume that I am perfect in every other way. *delusional* What I’m talking about is, of course, my Webkinz ® addiction.

For those of you not in the know, Webkinz are adorable stuffed animals that come with a secret-code tag. When you go to Webkinz World and ‘adopt’ a pet by entering its code, you get an online version of it that lives in that world. You can buy and decorate rooms (indoor, outdoor, treetop and underwater), buy clothes for and dress your pet, feed your pet, play games, etc. Your pet can sleep on beds, sit on chairs, swing and slide on swings and slides respectively, swim in pools, run on treadmills, drive vehicles and do things like wave at you. Your pet can get very unhappy, hungry and sick, but it can’t actually die (though it was terrifying to see my pet at zero that one time it got scared by a ghost on the pirate ship at vacation island). Some of the items are interactive: fridges, stoves, televisions, some lamps, fireplaces, dressers, fridges, bathtubs, bathroom sinks, etc. Your pet cannot actually pick anything up or make specific requests for what it wants. You buy things using kinzcash that you get by playing games, doing jobs, gem hunting and by telling your pet you love it every day. It’s a pretty cool world, actually. I wish I lived there.

It all started out so innocently: in December 2007 I got a reindeer as a gift. For a long time it lived alone, and I couldn’t see the point of having more than one. Then I got a puppy for my birthday in 2008 and I realized that each pet comes with a ‘pet specific item’ (PSI) you can’t get any other way. And from thence it went. Given that I do have a few remaining shreds of dignity, I won’t tell you how many I actually have. Suffice it to say, ‘addiction’ or ‘obsession’ are both acceptable terms.

I’m not alone in this: as with any other collectible item designed for children, the people most obsessed with Webkinz are adults. When I see people in the forums bragging about having 100+ pets, I heave a huge sigh of relief in knowing I come nowhere near that number. *SIGH* When you think about it, it’s a bit psychotic, really. Anyway, I suppose this puts me in the category of people our parents warned us were lurking around on the internet.

It should be noted at this point that the site actually puts a remarkable number of safeguards in place to ensure people cannot give out personal information. If your pet ‘chats’ with another pet, it has to select pre-fabricated slogans, and it also can’t send its own notes. If it uses the 'open' chat rooms, their chats will not allow them to share anything that looks like it might be a name, phone number, address or anything resembling a swear word. So props to Ganz ™ for protecting the younger generation from various brands of creepy people.

There is a new-ish feature called ‘MyPage’ which is similarly restricted, where your pets can display information about themselves: how many they are, high scores, the games and jobs they like, future pets they want in the family and suchlike. I just realized the other day (being, apparently, a bit slow on the uptake) that what this essentially means is that my pets have their own Facebook page, and can even have friends – though, curiously, they can’t unfriend their friends like you can on the real Facebook. I am struck by the fact that my Webkinz have more stable interpersonal relationships than I do, and that they might get viewed more and be more popular than me. Somehow, this wouldn’t be surprising: they’re a lot more cuddly than I am.

The whole of Webkinz World can be seen as saner and cuddlier than the Facebook-world, in which ‘friend’ is both a verb and a category that has expanded to include ‘that guy I met at a party once for five minutes.’ But that’s neither here nor there.

The only downside is that my pets can’t be Christians: how can they accept Jesus Christ as their personal Lord and Savior and be saved from the eternal fires of hell?? Well, at least I’ll see some friendly, if singed, faces when I get there too. Their menorah does light up though; I guess they can be Jewish.

The reason I’ve felt a bit spiritually troubled by all this is that, well, it sort of goes against the whole non-materialistic thing the Bible’s always talking about. My pets might actually be helping to destroy the environment and to perpetuate the cycle of exploitative poverty enacted by free trade in the global south. Now we really are going to hell.

But I also worry about it for other reasons. Online, I can sometimes obsess over tending their garden and making sure they do all their daily activities, planning and decorating rooms in their massive house (they’re wealthier than me, too, superior in almost every way), seeing what the weather is like and whether or not they can help Dr. Quack in the clinic. It’s a world over which I have almost perfect control, unlike my own life which seems to be continuously spiraling off. It gives me a sense of security and mastery I lack in reality, I think. But maybe I should be spending more time attempting to grapple with my own adversity and less time escaping into a world where those struggles do not exist.

Anyway, there’s been a new development in Webkinz World: they’ve invented these things called Zumbuddies: little winged creatures that hover around your pet. The Zumbuddy lives in Zumwhere, which is itself lodged in the Magical Forest (it gets complicated, oy!). Your pet takes care of the Zumbuddy in its little ‘box,’ which looks like any other room in Webkinz World except that you can see your pet standing behind it. You have to feed your Zumbuddy and give it toys to make it happy: unlike a regular Webkinz, it has really specific needs and a really sensitive happy-meter. (My happy-meter is currently wavering, in case you’re interested.) They can actually pick stuff up and do things with it. Sometimes when they’re happy they reward you with Zummies, 'money' that can be spent in the Z-shoppe to buy them stuff for their rooms. They can sit on chairs and sleep in beds. You can’t control their movements, so unlike your pet they have an independent personality-ish.

This development heralds the dawning of a new era in Webkinz World, one in which your pets have pets. Personally, I’m not sure I’m ready for the meta-level narrative Webkinz World has reached. Boxes inside of boxes inside of boxes…I feel a little like I fell down a rabbit hole.

My Zumbuddy is pink. I usually find it pretty annoying and so ignore it. It would seem that my pets do not have the same attachment to fictional creatures as I do. As I said, superior to me in almost every way.