RIP to the digital playground

people who say gen z don't know third spaces have obviously never been to the club penguin pizza parlour

Like most of us on the Gen Z x Millennial cusp, much of my childhood playtime was defined by the static graphics and hoarse hum of the home computer. With its own dedicated room (or perhaps desk), the family computer was home to hours of online play on beloved sites like Barbie, Disney and more. I became mesmerised by the fuzzy flash graphics of these digital worlds. No social media. No high-speeds. Just vibes. 

These extended playtimes on the metallic, meaty fortress of the home Windows PC was a collective experience for my very specific age group. I was at the right place, at the right time: computers had begun to enter the home but were only just beginning to find some sophistication. More importantly, outside of the professional realm, they were understood as a thing for recreation and pleasure rather than a life source itself. 

I see those essays that mourn the death of the third place and give their regards to Gen Z for never knowing one. But oh boy did I know one: it was the Club Penguin pizza parlour. And some corporate chumps it shut down.

While we grew up at the beginning of the digital revolution, there’s a huge irony to this perceived era of advancement. I might have benefited from high-power technology finding its way into suburban homes (and into my heart), but much of the childhood I experienced online has fallen to obscurity – vanished entirely from the records. The urls return error signs as these playgrounds where I spent hours of my childhood just disappear. In their wake, they leave no well-loved toy, childhood pictures or even the physical site of a beloved playground-turned-Ezymart. 

The rampant decline of these sites by the 2010s – which has seen the loss of game concepts, graphics and personal accounts from the public realm – begs the question of the historical preservation of the pre-cloud age. For this very specific blip in time, modern technology failed to preserve one of the most cherished of possessions, childhood memories. I know I experienced real joy during these childhood playtimes but I can’t find any trace of it in my box of childhood relics under my bed. 

Applying a term like ‘public archiving’ to something as trivial might seem too dramatic. Just a touchstone of the Zillennial navel gazing tradition. Things get remembered but most get forgotten. The Library of Alexandria was burnt and the moon landing’s tapes were recorded over. It’s the victor who tells history and by god, the victor should probably not be a nine-year-old me running rampant in PollyWorld. But what eeks me most is these once gloriously democratised digital worlds have been reclaimed by the crutches of corporations — who haven’t been historically great at preserving sentimental things. 

Where did BarbieGirls go?

There’s a unique sadness to googling: “Where did BarbieGirls go?” on my lunch break. If internet games were crucial to the Zillennial invasion of the digital world, Barbie was the warrior-woman leading the charge. Barbie’s digital games served to destabilise the heavily masculinised order of the internet – widely credited as responsible for getting generations of women into tech. Or in my case, my ascension into a good little capitalist.

One of my first memories is the cathartic push of the power button; the click of the release and the whoosh of the fan as the PC started up. A few clicks and I’m on Barbie.com. Exhale and knuckle crack. I was home. 

The original suite of Mattel games (along with plenty more of this era) has been diligently archived by independent internet users. Thankfully, I could hypothetically still play MyScene, hear the comforting soundtrack of PollyWorld and get my nail art creations printed. I rarely ever do but even its sheer availability is comforting.

But my quest was focused on the fate of BarbieGirls – which for the unconverted was a digital world chat room like ClubPenguin or ToonTown. With a tie-in toy line, BarbieGirls was Mattel’s foray into the second-life gaming world. While the website mechanics might have left something to be desired, I still played on here for hours. I thought it was genuinely the coolest thing ever as this renewed Barbie served an angular face and Hilary Duff-esc choppy layers in her hair. 

My Googling led me to a jackpot. A YouTube channel called BarbieGirlsRewritten, a public project started by everyday internet users to literally rebuild the website. It’s not the only one – if you search your favourite childhood digital haunt, you’ll likely find a rewritten project in its name. This fascinating phenomenon unites developers, designers, coders and ex-players to collaborate on rebuilding fallen worlds. With so few records remaining, many websites are being built from memory and you can find chatter in Reddit threads where people exchange hazy memories of the game, trying to piece together a clear picture of this world for them to rebuild from scratch. A post-digital dark ages oral lore gets passed down from user to user to construct a patchwork of the game.

Digital worlds like these are a far departure from the internet we know and experience today. They’re co-signed by creativity and more importantly, an anonymity that today’s social media just can’t compete with. While IG and FB offer a space that’s an extension of our irl reality, these were proudly an alternative — forging their own realities through whimsical aesthetics and play.  

Perhaps that’s the core motivation behind this work: to recapture the lightning-in-a-bottle experience that was the limitless world of these websites. It’s a nostalgia for a childhood that maybe felt over too soon or maybe some childhood regression in the face of seeing our once playtime haven (the internet) get turned into the weapon that’s ruining democracy. Who knows. 

But a core tenor of nostalgia is that it’s a longing for something that never existed. And while BarbieGirls offered plenty of joy, connection and fun, it also represented an unregulated era of the internet that was defined by a lot of shit. ClubPenguin, ToonTown and more have received several reflections since their decline that have cited the prevalence of racism, grooming and bullying. We tend to remember them as utopia in comparison to today’s internet, but in reality, they lay the foundation for the hellscape we’d co-exist with today — the Elon Musk meme DP just replaced the Diavlo Moshi Monsters avatar. 

Still, there’s something oddly moving about an international community coming together — for a cause as seemingly unserious as BarbieGirls or games like it. The skill, money and time required to achieve something like this, not to mention, the sheer passion, is practically inconceivable to me.

We tend to title these relics as lost media and its era as a ‘digital dark age’, a phrase that encompasses a whole continuum of media that’s now obsolete and unavailable. Maybe it was preserved, but like a forgotten language, there’s no technology left to read it. The website of the rewritten project phenomenon differs from traditional lost media, mostly because they barely meet the definition of ‘media’. In reality, second-life games are closer to lost cities, just in the virtual plane. Like places, these websites were a crucible of their own cultures, languages and lore. In every way other than physicality, BarbieGirls was a place. A cosmopolitan children’s epicentre – that turned to decay when the corporate forefathers locked out its faithful residents. I think I personally just lost interest in the shitty user experience. But still …

While rewritten projects might thrive (BarbieGirlsRewritten has teased a beta by the end of 2024!), they are purely just that: rewritten — replicas of the original. Sort of like those old-timey towns you can visit. They might reproduce everything perfectly, without a trace of anachronism but they’re a tribute, they’ll never capture the truth. That is likely just forever gone. 

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who wrote this?

Kitty is a Meanjin-based writer and self-proclaimed pop culture fiend who’s obsessed with overthinking all things media. As a copywriter by day, Kitty writes words for some of Australia's biggest brands. By night, she channels her spiralling over the political undercurrent of culture into long-form writing. Find her occasional musings on The Lore of the Land and more yaps via the regrettable handle @sweetchillidoritos.

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