MOSHI CAPITALISM

Animated monsters, capitalist fantasy, and the strange exception at the heart of the Internet age

My Moshi Monster’s name is Diavlo. He enjoys Lady Gaga and steak, and his favorite Moshling is called Clickr. He isn’t doing so well, but he’s feeling hopeful; at least, that’s what he tells me when I log on.

Moshi Monsters was a browser massively multiplayer online role-playing game (MMORPG) aimed at children ages 6-12, one of many online worlds such as Webkinz, Club Penguin, and Pixie Hollow that flourished from the late 2000s through the early 2010s. Users chose between six monsters to customize and tend. They could navigate Monstro City: a landscape of streets, beaches, candy mines, and islands populated by shops, games and other monsters. They purchased items with Rox, the virtual currency; collected Moshlings, in-game pets; and played games and story-based missions. They also interacted with each other by posting messages on their bulletin boards, an early taste of social media for children, and an enduring draw to the game. Members paid a monthly fee for access to exclusive goods, Moshlings, events, map locations, and games. Lady Goo Goo, for example, was a members-only Moshling and superstar baby.1 Her hit single “Peppy-razi” was featured in the Underground Disco, a members-only rhythm game located inside an offmap sewer nightclub (49 Pence’s “Catch a Pitch or Try Cryin’” was also available to play).

Between the years of 2008 and 2013, Moshi Monsters grew to over 80 million users worldwide. In the UK, one in two children played. Games like Moshi Monsters all ran on Adobe Flash Player, a software platform initially released in 1996 that delivered web, audio, and interactive content on computers. When Flash was discontinued in 2020, all were forced to shut down. And even though this shutdown happened long after most of these platforms’ heydays, many of these discontinuations provoked mass outpourings of public grief online. The YouTube video titled “Club Penguin’s Final Minutes” has been viewed over 16 million times. The last minutes of Pixie Hollow were also recorded and uploaded to YouTube, amassing over 85 thousand views. Users flooded the game. The screen filled with speech bubbles. Goodbye, and SAVE PIXIE HOLLOW, and I love you. I’m not ashamed to say, I cried watching this... read a comment. The music, the outfits, the speeches, the everything when all the fairies died, all at the same time, on September 21

The demise of Moshi Monsters was not so dramatic. Although the public was an important feature of the game, the streets of Monstro City weren’t visually designed to contain everybody at once. The environment has a two-dimensional shallowness, viewed straight on; avatars may only exist along a single plane of the street. (The view in Club Penguin, on the other hand, is from slightly above, adding depth and allowing for more users to occupy a single screen.)

Most players who stayed until the end described waiting in their carefully decorated houses until a sudden goodbye message appeared from Roary Scrawl, editor of the in-game newspaper The Daily Growl, on December 13, 2019. The message encouraged users to download the new Moshi apps, now widely considered to be failed attempts to convert the franchise from Web to mobile.

In fact, browser games in general were in decline long before Flash shut down: aside from requiring significant capital to build and maintain, mobile gaming was fast overtaking the browser as the most popular children’s entertainment format. The children who made up the player base were growing older and leaving the platform in droves. In 2013, Moshi Monsters’ parent company Mind Candy reported that its revenues fell 34.8 percent from £46.9 million in the previous year to £30.6 million due to a drop in online subscriptions and resource-intensive attempts to develop mobile-friendly content. As the tablet replaced the computer, the age of online children’s worlds came to an end.

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My mom used to take me to the neighborhood Jo-Ann’s every year to buy fabric for my Halloween costumes. When it closed this year, I encountered the disconcerting feeling of defamiliarized space, the onset of estrangement: the place I knew, the object in its truest form, was different from the place that now existed. We attended the closing sale. We walked around the store with a handful of other people—old ladies, another mother-daughter pair, a family with small kids—and felt a community with them, as if we were all scavengers descending upon the same fallen animal. It was to be replaced by an Aldi. The store moved, suddenly, from reality to memory. It was disturbing to think that one day—maybe soon—I might feel this way about the entire world, and be lonely.

My discovery of Moshi Monsters Rewritten (MMR) almost felt like a direct response to this sense of loss elicited by the changing physical landscape. Its antidote to the “lost-ness” was a remarkable sense of “found-ness,” in the form of a fan-rewritten reboot of my childhood world. When I downloaded it, I was startled at how true to the original it was. (The fan rewrite of Pixie Hollow, by contrast, is extremely limited, only allowing for users to customize a fairy and explore a single setting.) Down to the soundscape, MMR was an exact replica. The loading screen features the Moshling Iggy chasing the cursor around, accompanied by a crisp, evocative chomp upon capture. The map locations—

The Port, Ooh La Lane, Bleurgh Beach—blink with animation and interactive features: clicking on the monster hiding above an archway elicits a giggle and a wave. The Flash mini games in the Moshi Amusement Park work flawlessly. It was just like stepping into an old dream. It struck me that even the absurdity of the Moshi aesthetic—worms bursting out of the animated teal lake; Moshlings based off of an illegible mix of animals, objects, and shapes; a purple Cyclopean tree bearing a glittering, searchlight gaze—is, in its way, perfect for our present time. It echoed the absurdity of our environment in the digital age, where it’s inevitable that we get our grip on technology just in time for it to change, where few things in the immaterial digital sphere feel as stable as the old Jo-Ann’s.

This was, by far, the most successful project of its kind I had encountered. MMR is a fan-made and independent recreation of Moshi Monsters that is not affiliated with Mind Candy. It’s available for free as a desktop app on MacOS, Windows, and Linux. Unlike a physical Jo-Ann’s, it seemed like it was possible to reach into the past, grasp it firmly, and bring it losslessly, perfectly, into the present.

But not without a significant amount of time and effort. Making a fan rewrite of a defunct online world is a task that demands programming knowledge and detailed familiarity with the original online world. My investigation into how the MMR team created the app proved to be frustratingly opaque, as no one had really documented the process, and those directly involved with the project and its small existing community were hard to reach. However, I found some commonly known approaches the team probably used.

One common method is to create a new version of the online world using a different platform. Many fan rewrites are created using a combination of HTML5, JavaScript, and other actively developed and widely supported web technologies. In this context, HTML5 is used as the markup language to display the website’s visuals, while JavaScript and other web technologies are used to add interactivity and animation. (The original Moshi Monsters ran on basic HTML and Adobe Flash Player.) MMR also uses the tool Nativefier to package the website into a standalone desktop application. The development team of MMR most likely obtained the necessary data to fill out the online world by scraping (copying the data from) the game’s original files, which are currently available to download online as SWF (Adobe Flash) files.

This is where the legality of fan rewrites of defunct online worlds can be controversial. While the information might be publicly available, the Moshi Monsters game files are copyrighted by Mind Candy. Rewrites usually circumvent this by ensuring that they are non-commercial projects created for the purpose of preserving a piece of cultural heritage, and thus considered “fair use” under copyright law. Although MMR has collapsible ads in the desktop app, suggesting that the project is generating revenue, it might still be protected if the ads are being used for a purpose other than financial gain—for example, if the revenue is put toward hosting the app or other costs related to the development and maintenance of the game.

That these fan rewrites exist in a legal gray area helps explain why every user is a Moshi Member in MMR, with full access to parts of the game that were formerly hidden behind membership paywalls. There are (finally!) no restrictions on all the various types of play that are possible in Monstro City. This feature adds to my feeling that these fan rewrites are special, miraculous, that they can rise perfectly from the dead, but in a far more accessible, democratized, equitable version of what they once were. (I was never a Moshi Member until now.) Unlike Google, my data isn’t being harvested and sold. Unlike Twitter and Instagram, the platform isn’t optimizing itself to keep my attention, or trying to get me to spend real money. These rewrites are a rare case of something on the Internet feeling right to me—fundamentally, existentially, even spiritually high-quality, and yet totally free. That they exist in a legal gray area seems to have put the user into an extraordinary sweet spot.

And, indeed, MMR is technically imperfect. There is such a thing as a lost file: several minor features didn’t quite make it to the present, like certain quests, cut scenes, and the mysteriously, permanently roped-off Food Factory. A lost file is an absolute hole. It made me begin to ques- tion the “purity” of the game, signaling that even the most compelling returns to the past are false. +++

Ten years before Moshi Monsters, another sensationally popular children’s game based on pet collection and social interaction swept the globe: Pokémon. Cultural anthropologist Anne Allison argues for a postmodernist interpretation of the Pokémon economic system, which she calls “Pokémon capitalism.” This system is defined by a core contradiction: while its world relies on the logic of the noncapitalist “barter economy” (Pokémon trading), its objective is one of acquisition and accumulation, and its relationship between player and Pokémon is characterized by the capitalist overtones of control, dependence, and ownership. It also conforms to a preexisting market economy—and yields the game’s corporate owners tremendous monetary profits.

My term “Moshi capitalism,” then, describes the specific form of capitalist fantasy that arises when, under the legal conditions of a non-commercial fan rewrite, the game is forbidden from pursuing any form of profit incentive. The Moshi world represents a dream economy where the goods are great (the Black Pearl of the Potion Ocean! a tessellating silver egg! and more), and, for an extended initial period, capital is effectively limitless. The use of one-time secret codes to reap Rox in large lump sums of up to 1,000 is encouraged. There’s even a list on the official website. I kept thinking that there must be something wrong: a mistake, or a catch. It felt like I had discovered a get-rich-quick scheme that actually worked. The biggest obstacle in the game is luck—in the pursuit of planting the right combination of seeds to attract rare Moshlings. In short, you can get everything you want. And everything is really good.

The coupling of capitalist fantasy and nostalgia merges to create a uniquely appealing media object. In contrast with the current digital entertainment landscape dominated by social media forms that often relegate the user to the non-agent viewer and offer a highly curated and algorithmic user experience, MMR feels freeing, playful, fresh. Its point is to embody you. It recalls endlessness and wonder. It allows a user to vanish into the impossible, dream-like consumer landscape that existed briefly during childhood within these online worlds, a landscape that at least promised that you could have, and be, anything. It’s important to note that while the aims of the internet of the past may not have been any less capitalistic than the present, its methods were less refined and less pervasive. Since Moshi Monsters predated the widespread use of sophisticated algorithms online—there was never a concept of data-based personalization in Moshi Monsters or any of its contemporary worlds—its rewrite also feels like a unique place on the Internet where it is possible not to feel constantly observed. It was a feeling I wasn’t even fully aware of until it lifted. Once I realized this, I felt an almost heady sense of relief.

Its appeal is also that its form of dream capitalism is detached from most of the violence associated with consumption under late-stage capitalism: no resource exploitation or environ- mental damage; no scarcity or homelessness or inequality. Just pixels. But here is the subtle message of the lost file, easy to miss under the seductions of consumerist fantasy and nostalgic escapism. The game is a fantasy of escaping the violence of capitalism online, and nothing more. The game conditions us to desire what we should desire under its system: a steady accumulation of capital and private property. A comfortable existence in a city built upon the labor of the fictional subaltern class of Glumps. These Glumps figure into the canon, which is mainly expressed through the story-based Super Moshi Missions, as round, ugly minions of the world’s principal antagonist. They are also shown in the background of game landscapes working at the candy mines and at the electric plant. The rewrite’s fantasy doesn’t dream its way out of the violence of labor exploitation and the underclass—despite having the freedom, and the incentive, to do so, simply by being unaffiliated with the original company.

The original world under Mind Candy had incentives to maintain the game’s canon: it was their commodity. The fan rewrite has different incentives to maintain the game’s canon. It’s possible to transform the canon by allowing users to create their own storylines and even their own avatars. However, fan rewrites largely give up this freedom, instead seeking to maintain the old world and its logic as by definition a nostalgia project. We have powerful emotional and psychological attachments to capitalist systems. We choose nostalgic dreaming of the past over claiming the freedom to transform the future. While community members have, in the past, added custom goods such as Star Wars: The Clone Wars posters to Moshi stores, the canon is otherwise painstakingly reproduced and maintained.

So, while it seems strange that the developers would include such a detail in their fictional, pixelated city for children, as essayist Sam Adler-Bell wrote in a recent analysis of video games and capitalist fantasy, “Games, like all entertainment products, shape us into the sort of subjects required by capital’s present.” The original Moshi Monsters worked to inculcate children into futures of wage labor and consumerism. Its rewrite attempts identical aims under a thin veil of escapism. All of this pleasure serves its ideology, showing us the possible rewards under capitalism and defining our goals under its demands. Thus, MMR’s goal to bring something back from the dead restates, and strengthens with repetition, the exact capitalist systems it seems to defy. Fan rewrites stop short of being quite as revolutionary as they seem because, by definition, they focus on replicating the past. And, indeed, capitalism is flexible in that it allows for its own multiplicities. It’s possible for games and their related media to have ambivalent relationships with capitalism and still perpetuate a capitalist logic.

It’s obviously not true that everyone who played Moshi Monsters as a child, or even plays the rewrite now, is an obedient and undiscerning servant of capitalism. But as our appetite for nostalgia grows and more physical and digital structures begin to fall into our past, the message of the lost file, the absolute hole, sits and waits like a judge at the Underground Disco.

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The existence of this model, however, may suggest new and hopeful possibilities for the creation of entertainment projects that enact noncapitalist forms of labor. It’s incredibly striking that absolutely no one is currently profiting from a game that was painstakingly and expensively developed, for years, by a wealthy corporation (at least, not anywhere close to the amount of profit it could, “should,” be making). This is a stunning feature. It challenges every expectation we have for what types of relationships can exist between user and game. The model makes space, maybe just for a moment, for the possibility of publicly available, democratized, non-monetized media objects that are carefully created and designed to be valued, and valuable. This breaks the law of commodity exchange: the value of a product should, under traditional capitalism, reflect, or refract, the value of its labor. Is this genre of product unique? Are fan rewrites lucky exceptions? Or does the internet still contain utopian possibilities outside of capitalism? Even if not, there is still something extremely powerful about experiencing this format. It contains echoes of care and refreshment that, in our increasingly atomistic and disembodied world, I never even knew I missed.

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In the beginning, I opened the desktop app. I created my monster. I assigned him colors and a name. I entered the universe and traveled into the virtual world of yesterday.

The biggest surprise was still waiting for me. When I logged on for the first time, I was astonished to not be alone. MMR felt as populated by users as the original! Even better, the users I encountered were mostly women between seventeen and twenty-nine. What I had happened upon was an entire world of young women escaping together, impossibly, into the simplicities of a collective childhood where we all played with the same toys. We were landing back in another age, one in which the Internet felt like a playground built just for us—not a site for domestic terrorism, before the endless scroll, before any of us knew the anxiety of imminent death by climate change, before mass surveillance, mass disillusionment, and the attention economy. It was just like entering an old dream. It feels like a miracle to reach into the past and find everybody there.