It's 2 a.m. on a Thursday morning and I'm buying up shares of virtual potato stock. I need to earn fake money to feed my fake llama some fake apples — which are his favorite.

I am deep in the online world of Neopia, home of the Neopets. And I'm not alone.

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Neopets was launched by British college students Adam Powell and Donna Williams on Nov. 15, 1999, smack in the center of the Internet's ugly adolescent stage. It was the era of Ask Jeeves and 12-minute MP3 downloads. Thirteen-month-old Google had just eight employees (a shade under the current 54,000).

The Neopets mission was simple enough: Build an immersive online world where players could create, customize and care for their very own virtual pets. Considering the nearly 1.1 trillion total site pageviews Neopets boasts, it appears the community succeeded, although Neopets declined to comment for this article.

For most Millennials, Neopets remains only in memory, a relic of the dial-up era. At some point, probably close to the fall of Xanga or the sacking of GeoCities, users packed up their virtual belongings and left for the greener pastures of console gaming.

But some didn't give up so quickly.

In fact, among a certain group of twenty-somethings, Neopets culture is thriving. With the Neopets Facebook Page at just over 225,000 Likes and /r/Neopets — the site's Reddit community — weighing in with over 5,000 subscribers, it's clear some members of the connected generation are still very much involved with their favorite childhood game.

Dave Luciano, 23, is still active on the site, though not as much as his adolescent years, "simply because I have a full-time job nowadays that occupies most of my day," Luciano tells Mashable. He believes the number of still-active Neopets users would shock outsiders, "especially considering where gaming is today and the shift towards mobile."

Luciano has been playing Neopets non-stop since 2001. In 2004, he launched the popular Neopets game guide/fan site Jellyneo — which he still runs, with help from about 50 volunteers. A Stanford graduate and web designer, Luciano isn't the ultimate Neopia senior citizen, however. The last released site demographics claim 20% of Neopians are over 18.

Screenshot courtesy of Neopets.com

Scroll through the homepage — Neopets isn't much to look at, visually. It's entirely online, with no authorized mobile platform. It's riddled with ads, a confusing interface filled with dated, Flash-based mini-games, and a color scheme that closely resembles a bag of Sour Skittles. In short, it breaks nearly every current gaming trend.

But for users like Andrew Kornfeld, these breaches in the gaming contract mean little to nothing.

"When I first joined — this was August 2000, I had just turned 10 — you had to be 13 or older to post on the Neoboards. I had to have my dad fax in a signed permission slip to access them," says Kornfeld, a 23-year-old copywriter from New York. "Maybe it's just the kind of people I befriend, but they've almost always had or created Neopets accounts."

Kornfeld boasts four Neopets, each only a month shy of 13 years old. For more than half his life, Kornfeld has fed and nurtured these pets on a regular basis.

"I find it difficult to give things up in general, but I do think there's a bit of goofy cachet you get from it among friends," he tells Mashable, regarding his Neopian loyalty. "Weirdly, I've always been terrible at Tamagotchi maintenance."

Many Gen Y users cite Neopets' array of adult mini-games as reason for their continued devotion. The NeoDAQ, or Neopian stock market, is one example.

"This might sound strange, but what little ability to handle money I have comes from Neopets," says Kornfeld. Within the game, users can earn Neopoints to buy their pets clothes, houses or petpets, a virtual pet for your virtual pet. The in-game economy is surprisingly complex — item prices are largely based on what users are willing to pay, and the site experiences inflation and deflation.

But plenty of games offer an updated and improved system to that of Neopets. So what's keeping users there? Video game psychologist Dr. Jamie Madigan thinks it has something to do with identity.

"Neopets players may have invested a fair amount of their identity in the game and in their pets," Madigan tells Mashable. "Marketers and those studying consumer psychology have known for a long time that people tend to incorporate brands and specific products into their identity. It's an effect that keeps snowballing." The community can become somewhat insular, he says, to the point that players quit worrying whether it's the coolest game out there.

In his popular TED talk, tech theorist Tom Chatfield details "seven ways games reward the brain:"

Instead of grading people incrementally in little bits and pieces, you give them one profile character avatar which is constantly progressing in tiny, tiny, tiny little increments which they feel are their own ... And they own that.

This talk of stock markets and brand identity feels contrary to the principle factor that keeps users coming back every day: the pets themselves.

"If someone was to hack my account and take away my pets, I would be so upset. I've had all of them for almost 11 years, and for whatever reason I have a strange attachment," laughs Neopian veteran April Lavalle, 22. "It's kind of like having a favorite childhood toy, I guess. But I still play with mine."

What is this attachment? Why have Lavalle and other users devoted so much time to their fake pets? Why do I care that my virtual llama, "mr_bubbletrousers," is famished and crying? Neopets, like all virtual pet games, works in part by exploiting the basic human instinct of sympathy. Feeding your pet makes it "happy," neglecting your pet makes it "sad" or "angry." If you cook your pet a bad omelette, it gets "sick."

Although the pets aren't living, the attachment users begin to feel for them is most certainly real. Social scientists have concluded that humans have succeeded as a species largely due to our nurturing and compassionate traits.

"There may be something involved called loss aversion," says Madigan. "In short, people hate losing something — more than they love gaining something of equivalent value. If Neopets players feel like they have to keep playing in order to maintain everything they have built up, loss aversion in general and psychological reactance may have set in. And if logging in every few days is all it takes to keep options open, they'll do it."

So, are these devoted users enough to keep the slowly diminishing Neopets community operational in an evolving games market?

Luciano is hopeful, given a few conditions. "I think that Neopets will be around for awhile," he says. "It's an old game, and the nostalgia factor is big. But it definitely needs to keep recruiting new users, as well. Nickelodeon has been trying out mobile games in their other ventures, so something mobile for Neopets probably isn't too far a stretch."

And if it doesn't work?

Laughs Kornfeld, "I guess I'd just miss my stupid pixels."

Images: Mashable composite, Neopets.com