Neocities celebrates ‘old web,’ offering relief from 24/7 social feeds

The 2022 Gaming Year has seen gaming become more connected and social than ever before. You can quickly record video and upload it online with a click of a button. The pandemic is causing streaming to grow as barriers to entry are being removed. Discord allows you to chat with your friends and share updates or memes. Many gamers consider gaming a pastime that can be enjoyed via constant connectivity. For others, the modern internet is so busy and chaotic that they’ve been looking to the old internet as inspiration for how to connect with the games they love.

If you look beyond the big websites, there are many other communities who play games in different ways. Glitchwave and GG encourage the categorization, discovery, and classification of games. Substack, Multiverse.plus and Medium are full of gamers who write about their games. It’s at Neocities though, that many are finding the most solace in the old web.

Neocities is an online community that has existed for nearly a decade. In 2013, Kyle Drake created Neocities out of frustration at the internet’s increasingly restricted nature. Drake said that Facebook was frustrating, as all content needed to conform to a company-controlled model. Drake, however, cherished the nostalgia of creating content entirely by users and how the internet allowed for creativity to flourish. He created Neocities initially with a limit of 10 megabytes and set up a community that would help people create their pages. It was not a forum for content designed to conform to standardized formats or algorithmic preferences bubbles.

Neocities started as an internet network of lofi sites. Websites are usually built around one piece of information, or an idea. Sites could appear like this HackersA fan page using an oversized GIF, which can provide plain text information or a collection of ambient internet artwork. However, the site has seen more users use it as a place to interact with games over the last few years.

Neocities sites can focus on just about anything, because they aren’t restricted by post formats and most of the users are creating web pages for their own personal enjoyment. Peachy’s Page archives RPG magazine advertisements. Rabidrodent has lists of NES/SMS Games based on seasons. It also hosts high-resolution retro maps and homebrew GBA game collections. Melonking.net hosts a hidden text adventure, a tile-based explorable town, and news about the creator’s games.

Anita Diaz

What’s special about Neocities game pages is how the community shares content formats which best allow them to express themselves. Rather than adhering to platform restrictions, users can design their pages in ways that best suit them and then take inspiration from one another’s designs. While this creates common templates that are easily accessible across Neocities they are not required. At Faiyubu’s page, the creator hosts pages with a tamagotchi log, a journal, and a gamelog. The gamelog organizes what games she has played recently, what’s new, what is currently being played, and how many games she plays each year. It’s an index of Faiyubu’s taste and feelings about her library.

The creator of Faiyubu’s page, Anita Díaz, says that she went to Neocities because of her love for older webpages and the distinct DIY aesthetics of “the old web.” The gamelog came afterwards, from a desire to find a new space to express her feelings about games.

“I started the gamelog because I wanted a place where I could share my impressions on different games instead of leaving them on a notebook. I had decided I didn’t want to post them on a Twitter thread,” she says. “And while I think that websites like Backloggd are great for cataloging and discovery, I’d rather have people read them all in the same place; that way they can get an idea of what I like and dislike in games and better understand where I’m coming from. They have to go out of their way to read them too, so no one has to see them if they don’t want to.”

For Díaz, and so many others on Neocities, the platform provides a space that isn’t organized to be consumed and indexed. Neocities is not an information juggernaut. It’s more like a place where you can fix things up and spend some time with them. While there is an overarching tag function to look through sites, networked socializing isn’t put front and center like with so much other social media. They instead connect with other sites via email and site comments. Díaz tells Polygon, “A cool thing about Neocities is that it has some optional social features like following and commenting, so some folks reply to the entries when I update. I’ve even got emails from readers playing a game I covered and telling me about it!”

Sites like Soft Heart Clinic on Neocities show the intimacy of domestic life. They are full of pages that provide comfort, such as lists and collections of games fashion photography or lists of healing game options. You can see this in how users make shrines to the media that they care about.

The common structure for Neocities pages dedicated to games is the shrine. To show their appreciation, each shrine is one page that creators dedicate to a particular game or part of games. At Pomelo’s Final Fantasy X-2shrine is a dedicated page to characters, systems and the world of Final Fantasy X-2. At Baby’s Animal Crossing: New LeafBaby is a shrine that documents times entered into the game. It also contains a checklist of museum items and information about the area. Shrines are available for the following characters: MotherDuster shrine is a site with just three pages dedicated Duster. Mother.

They are not just informational pages, like wikis. They aren’t meant to wholly capture every aspect about a game. They represent the meaning of users’ intimate relationship to games.

Bagenzo took the Neocities home experience and created a house for users to explore. Bagenzos.house is an online tile website that displays the details of each room and then the interior. Each room is themed differently, made to hold different aspects of Bagenzo’s identity. Blue walls are used in the living room, which has a clown painting and a fireplace. In some of the tiles, the user can find Bagenzo’s journal, site updates, and a link to the game engine used to create the house. Click one of the hands and it will take you to the attic, which displays Bagenzo’s games and portrait, or to the kitchen where you can find her touhou blog and virtual pet.

“I’ve always been sort of obsessed with spaces, the actual layout of them,” Kate Bagenzo says. “Part of making games is a way to actually take those spaces and impart them with some kind of meaning. The majority of graphics on the site were inspired by a game I made. You can start and finish the game at my home. So it was an extension of that — I had already made a place that felt like home and I just translated it to a web page.”

Image: Kate Bagenzo

Bagenzo also notes that parts of the website were inspired by a need for something that other social media couldn’t offer. Twitter, for example, is designed so that most content can’t be preserved and presented well aside from what’s most recent. The desire to be on top can lead to overwhelming stress and poor mental health. Alternative social media spaces like Discord messaging or servers don’t really solve this problem either.

Anita from Faiyubu’s page says: “The internet has become really homogenized, with social media sites restraining the customization of their users’ pages, deciding which content gets to be seen thanks to their algorithms, etc. There are times when we engage in unhealthy behaviors and other negative actions on the internet. I believe a lot of people are getting tired of depending so much on social media because of these issues, but a lot don’t know they already have the tools to create their own spaces online.”

The solution for many is simply to think of something completely new. They can find the right community and play the games they enjoy. “Personally, managing Faiyubu has made me realize that on social media I end up seeing a lot of stuff I don’t want to see,” Díaz says. “While on Neocities I can just not visit a page if I don’t like it. My web allows me to post things and let people know what I think. It’s way more relaxed and ‘slow’, if you will. I’ve realized it’s kinda like my safe space online, and I love that.”