SmallWorlds

» see smallworlds.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the last words ~

smallworlds launched in 2008 out of auckland, new zealand. the developer was outsmart games, a small studio led by mitch olson. the pitch was a flash-based browser virtual world that worked roughly the way habbo and second life did, but tilted younger and less explicit. you made a customizable avatar and visited public locations to interact with other players, decorating a personal room of your own along the way. the integration story was the differentiator. you could embed youtube videos in your room and pull flickr photos onto a wall as decoration. soundcloud tracks queued in as room background music. for a 2010-era teenager this was the closest a single platform got to bundling everything social on the web into one isometric room.

the audience skewed female. mitch olson said in 2012 that around 65 percent of the user base was women, mostly teenagers and young adults. the platform was designed to be teenage-friendly, with rules tighter than second life and a generally less provocative culture. there were seven skill paths a player could grind through, with arena combat and farming on opposite ends of the spectrum. each path had its own progression and badges. monetization came through a vip subscription that unlocked clothing options and customization items unavailable to free players.

peak traffic landed in mid-2012. outsmart games reported around 3.8 million visits across july and august of that year. the site was sometimes described ive writing as "habbo for older kids", or as a less provocative second life with a teen-girl audience instead of an adult one. the audience that stayed was loyal and habit-forming. user-generated rooms could get elaborate, with custom artwork on the walls and embedded videos serving as social-watching backdrops for hangout sessions.

the audience started shrinking from 2014 onward. flash itself had begun its long decline, and mobile platforms were where teenagers actually were by 2015. smallworlds was a desktop browser product with no mobile equivalent. by 2017 the company was operating at a loss. new zealand business law required directors to disclose insolvency risks, and outsmart games could not commit to continued operation past mid-2018. the closure announcement went up early that year. the platform shut down on april 8, 2018. the offline message promised a successor product called towncenter that the team hoped to launch later that year. towncenter never shipped.

i never used smallworlds. by 2012 i was 28 and working as an engineer in turkey, well outside the teen-girl audience the platform was built for. it was also a niche new zealand product. it never had a localized turkish presence and never showed up in turkish nostalgia coverage. i learned about it from post-shutdown retrospectives in late 2018 when i was reading writeups on the flash games and virtual worlds that had quietly died together that decade.

~ the record ~

~ what it actually was ~

a flash-based isometric virtual world where you walked an avatar around customizable rooms. the closest comparison was habbo hotel, but smallworlds was bigger and a bit older-skewing. you bought clothing and furniture with gold for free play and tokens for paid play. quests across the seven skill paths handed out collectible items. personal rooms could be decorated and shared, and friends could drop in. for the audience that found it, the platform functioned as the meeting space second life never managed to be for the teenage cohort.

~ the youtube and soundcloud integration ~

the differentiator was that smallworlds was wired into the rest of the social web. youtube videos played inside your virtual room, embedded into a screen on the wall. soundcloud tracks queued as room background music, and flickr photos could be hung as wall decorations. in the early 2010s most virtual worlds were closed sandboxes that did not talk to anything else on the open internet. smallworlds was an exception. it folded the rest of the social web into the experience and let players build mood-coded spaces around shared media files.

~ how it ended ~

the closure was a slow one. the audience peaked in 2012 and started losing engagement by 2014. flash itself declined on the timeline everyone now knows, and mobile platforms moved on without a smallworlds equivalent. by 2017 the team was operating at a loss. new zealand business law required directors to disclose insolvency risks, and outsmart games could not commit to continued operation past mid-2018. the april 8, 2018 shutdown was on schedule. players were given an offline message promising a possible successor product called towncenter, which the team hoped to launch later that year. towncenter never appeared and the team dispersed.

~ the legacy ~

the mass exodus thread on the smallworlds subreddit still gets new comments years after shutdown. the audience that had built rooms and curated playlists inside the platform lost the context those creations belonged to when the servers went off. some screenshots survive. very little of the embedded media still works in any meaningful sense. smallworlds joined club penguin and habbo's older european servers in the cluster of flash-era virtual worlds that took years of teenage social memory offline together when the underlying runtime gave out.

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