| There is also a virtual equivalent to hobby horsing called "virtual stables". A virtual horse is just a webpage for a fictional horse. There are usually pictures of the horse that hobbyists find on the internet/buy on forums/illustrate themselves [1].
The horse obviously also has a name and usually a description of its personality. Horses sometimes age "in real time" but most stables seemed to have a somewhat arbitrary aging rate (e.g. the horse would turn 4 within a few weeks of its "creation", but after that age normally). Horses can also be registered in a database called "Virtual horseback-riders society" [2]. You can use the "Virtual horseback-riders society" to advertise your competitions. A horse/horseback-rider can usually participate in any competition by just signing up (by sending an email to the organizer) and the winner is randomly picked. Another way to interact with other stables is by "taking care" of somebody else's horse - meaning you write a story in a guestbook about what you "did" with the horse, e.g. "I took Cupcake for a walk in the forest. Cupcake was in a bad mood and really reluctant to leave the stable, but cheered up when it saw a patch of grass". You can always create a new horse (obviously, you just create a new webpage), but to be in with the cool kids, you "buy" horses from other hobbyists. The "best" horses are ones that have a long family tree that has been documented in the Virtual horseback-riders society database. There is no currency, there are "selling topics" in the forums, where you try to provide compelling arguments as to why you should get the horse. The forums were pretty active 10-15 years ago and most hobbyists were girls in their early teens. The community is much less active and older now. However, the community is more tech-savvy than back in the day - people have their own domains and use a database to track their horses (back in the day, most pages were static sites hosted on Freewebs). Some stables have been running for 15 years, the most iconic one being Ionic [3], a stable with around 800 horses. There is probably something to be said about virtual stables dying out as the Internet has become more centralized. Virtual stables also introduced a lot of young girls to coding and for example, the owner of Ionic works in IT now. [1] http://www.seppele.piirroshevoset.com/hevonen.php?id=298 [2] http://www.virtuaalihevoset.net/ [3] http://www.hevosmaailma.net/Ionic/ |