Blipville

» see blipville.se as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the obituary ~

In 2007 the average Blipville player was twelve years old and I was twenty-three, in a Turkish university, on MSN. There was no version of this where I was ever going to be inside it. The nearest thing in my own country was Habbo Otel, which had its Turkish moment for middle schoolers while I was already too old to sign up without embarrassment.

Blipville was a browser-based virtual town owned by TV4, the Swedish commercial broadcaster. It began life as a themed zone inside blip.se, TV4's games and chat site, decorated after the network's own reality show Paradise Hotel. The Internet Archive has blipville.se answering under its own domain by December 2005 with the line Någonstans i Karibiska havet ligger den lilla ön S:t Blip, which is where the whole thing was set: a small invented island in the Caribbean, and on it a town of the same name. During 2007 it was expanded into a standalone game and split off from Blip properly.

The town had no vehicles, so it was all pedestrian streets, with a metro for jumping between zones and skateboards or roller skates for sale if you wanted to move faster. Districts arrived over the years and each had its own character. Blipschgl Gasthaus opened at the start of 2008 with ski slopes and a half-pipe, and Gamla stan arrived that May with a harbor and a jetty you could fish from. A beach with a jet ski track turned up in early 2010, by which point there was also a medieval village where you went on quests and fought monsters. Most districts contained apartments you could buy and live in.

Somewhere between 200,000 and an unknown larger number of Swedish children were registered. Around 2007, about 90,000 of them showed up in any given month. For a country of nine million people that is a real slice of an entire school generation.

~ the case file ~

~ the sheriffs ~

Blipville's moderators were called sheriffs and they wore a sheriff star in their profile information. They had moderator tools and could punish players who broke the rules, but they were not TV4 employees or Raketspel employees. They were ordinary users promoted for being good at it, in three ranks of rising status, with the higher ranks responsible for the ones below them.

Their duties went past enforcement. Sheriffs ran competitions and events for the town, and they performed marriages between users. A commercial broadcaster ran a paid virtual world for twelve-year-olds and handed the discipline and the weddings to unpaid teenagers, which is either an efficient community design or a liability nobody thought hard about, depending on which decade you are reading it from.

~ mynt ~

The currency was called mynt and it could only be bought with Swedish kronor. You paid by SMS or by card, at roughly five mynt to the krona, and most items cost between fifty and a hundred mynt. Buyers had to be eighteen or have a guardian's permission, which in a game whose median player was twelve means the real payment mechanism was a parent's phone bill. Everything paid in went to TV4 and Raketspel.

On top of that sat citizenship, which was the subscription, sold with mynt in three lengths running from thirty days up to a full year. Citizens got priority at events and a free apartment, plus clothes nobody else could wear, and citizenship was required for whole sections of the game, including fishing, because only citizens could buy a rod. Early in 2010 the site introduced gold citizenship at fifty kronor a month, which bundled three hundred mynt with the month's membership.

~ the concerts ~

TV4 marketed the town by booking actual Swedish musicians to appear in Blipville's club, which held about 120 avatars. The concerts became popular enough that most of the crowd ended up stuck outside the door. Markoolio played there on 4 February 2009. Basshunter came on 25 September that year, with Amy Diamond taking a turn in the club a month after him.

~ how it ended ~

In October 2010 TV4 announced that Blip would close on grounds of poor finances. Blipville went with it. Both shut on 3 January 2011, with the stated reason that the number of users had become too few, a sentence that is hard to square with the numbers from three years earlier and easy to square with what a broadcaster's web division looked like on a 2010 balance sheet.

blipville.se no longer resolves. What survives is a Change.org petition addressed to TV4 Sverige asking them to start Blipville up again, opened by people who were twelve when it closed and are in their late twenties now.

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