In this essay, writer Emily Blumberg remembers the cult-favorite childhood game Poptropica and how it reflects her belief in Gen Z's power to rebuild a future for our planet and its people.
You begin in a barren, burning hellscape. You don’t know how you got there.
You see a person standing alone, nearly identical to you, except for their gray hair and sad expression. You have arrived in what could be your future, they say, and humans have reaped what they sowed. The only way to fix it, in this bleak and sorry end, is by going back in time.
Even though your hands are just circles at the ends of sticks, the person gives you a magical time-travel device, a portal to the most important events in a sanitized, simplified history of the world. Aztec pyramids, Lewis and Clark’s expedition, Leonardo da Vinci’s notebook. They explain to you that history itself has gone awry and its most critical moments are missing pivotal pieces. Though you just arrived and you know nothing, it is up to you to set the world straight—if not for yourself, for humanity.
You accept the time-travel device, though you don’t really have a choice; otherwise, the game would end, uneventfully, and you would have to go back to the actual world, which is much too big for you. You jump around a bit, bouncing your little round body across the game's bleak terrain, until you realize there is nowhere else to go but backward. Reluctantly, you begin the journey; you can start anywhere you want, hopping through space and time with ease, but you can't see the present until you have seen the past in its entirety. You wonder what this is all for, click a random time period with your mouse, and begin.
When I consider the end of the world, the first image that pops into my head is one of the opening scenes from Poptropica: Time Tangled Island. My body immediately reverts to the feeling I had as a little girl, sitting at a big desktop, needing her dad’s help because this educational computer game for children is really just unreasonably complex. Even my dad—my brilliant, shining savior—struggles to decipher what to do next.
Poptropica first launched in 2007, the same year that saw the release of the iPhone and the start of the Great Recession. The game, created by Diary of a Wimpy Kid author Jeff Kinney, tours users through a variety of themed, isolated islands with features ranging from an abandoned carrot-cake factory to the Tree of Immortality. The game was, in essence, a way for children of the late aughts to solve problems while also learning cool, age-appropriate historical facts. It sounds innocuous, cliche, maybe even boring; but to me, it was the world.
This pixelated parallel universe, which had tens of millions of registered users in its 2012 heyday, was a cornerstone of much of my generation’s digital upbringing. The website has been through internet hell and back, repeatedly reinventing itself as archaic platforms like Adobe Flash fade into obscurity. Pieces of the original islands are still available on websites like coolmathgames.com, which is exactly as literally delightful as it sounds. Poptropica was included in Time’s 2011 “50 Websites That Make the Web Great,” recalling a simpler era when “make” and “great” were just everyday words.
Poptropica is an oft-cited souvenir of an internet that wasn't as easy to access, when you still, sometimes, had to wait for a connection. Wistful corners of the modern digital ecosystem are crawling with nostalgia lovers, desperate to preserve the memories of their childhood and remind themselves that they are not alone. One Reddit user—who posted this, I’m serious, just a couple months ago—wrote:
“Replaying Time Tangled Island has put me into an existential crisis.
As a kid, I loved Poptropica. Time Tangled Island felt so incredibly realistic to me and it taught me about world history and how important it is to fight climate change. I was 9 when I played it and it took me three days to beat it. I felt so optimistic about the future and how cool it would be to experience such a future in real life.
Well, I completed the mission today in 2 hours as a drunk, miserable, 26 year old divorcee and I realized the game provides…an immersive experience that I can hope to experience of a technologically advanced future. [Climate] change isn't being fixed, our technological advancement of AIs has created fake cat videos rather than robot servants, and I'm already looking more like my future Poptropica avatar than [my] present one.”
Another user who commented on that post in the Subreddit r/Poptropica (which somehow has more than five thousand weekly visitors) noticed a peculiar subliminal message in the island’s architecture, which changes every year in what appears to be a twisted, heartwarming commitment to a better future. When the island was first launched in 2008, the time-traveling device indicated that the futuristic landscape you were dropped into was 2058. In 2009, the user noticed the future had become 2059; in 2010, it became 2060; and so on, so that there would always be 50 years between the moment in which you were playing and the future you were obliged to save.
But, as Gen Z knows better than anyone, real time does not bend to code that was originally written when the iPhone was a new concept and “Low” by Flo Rida blasted through gymnasium speakers. We were born aware that the world could dissolve at any moment, and we came of age when we realized that dissolution was already happening right here and now. Dropped into a ravaged place we had no hand in damaging, we are also being tasked with reversing decisions we never made.
When my high school graduation was canceled in 2020, parents in my school district lamented the unfortunate timing for our class. We'd been born into a shattered country reeling from the existential impact of 9/11, and were entering adulthood in the middle of a pandemic. An eerie sense of unluckiness and a profound understanding of uncanny timing are intrinsic to our age’s ethos—nurture meeting nature in its relentless ferocity.
When discussing this string of disappointment and horror with a much older coworker of mine, he was blunt: “You missed the best years of your life,” he said with a laugh. “Thanks, that’s very helpful,” I retorted, surprised by my self-righteous frustration, and I sighed back into my cubicle.
College enrollment is down, recent-graduate unemployment rates are up, and depression is ravaging whatever sense of normalcy is left. Most of us have never really known politics without a certain singular figure I don’t need to name. The word “unprecedented” has been used so frequently to describe the conditions in which we grew up that it has become archaic, even embarrassing. There is no place for such a word when it applies to everything.
History itself is always, one can argue, unprecedented in nature. Something novel—or seemingly novel—happens, we adjust, and the cycle repeats itself. There are, inarguably, infinite combinations of atrocities that sandwich generation after generation, writhing under the weight of these events. What I find peculiar is the human instinct to debate who has had it the worst, feeling deep in your bones that the answer is always, it must be, you.
This cognitive distortion, this catastrophizing, coaxes us into vying for a gold medal at a sad, crowdless Olympics. For what it’s worth, though: From my vantage point, we are the first in a long while to grow up in a world so devoid of a vision for a global future that it seems silly, even ridiculous, to imagine one.
In my eighth-grade biology class, my teacher explained to our nascent ears that the planet was experiencing significant changes primarily due to human activity. We each took a carbon-footprint test; one classmate, who was obsessed with studying for the soon-to-be-extinct SAT vocabulary section, proudly boasted that he used four households worth of emissions per year. I sat at that sticky lab table, stupefied by the new knowledge that I had acquired: The world was about to end, and it was Honors Biology Period One’s fault.
I told everyone I knew about this relentless, otherworldly beast called climate change and how I, as an eighth grader with a $10 monthly allowance, was partially responsible for the imminent doom of humanity. “That can’t be true,” my friend from ballet class said to me as we half-watched the latest episode of Pretty Little Liars. “If it was, everyone would be talking about it!”
Across all three of the 2016 presidential debates, no moderator asked a single question about climate change. Topics like the then-sitting president’s birth certificate, conspiracies about a candidate’s emails, and a future president saying he’d “grab 'em by the p*ssy” stole the show, radically reducing the concept of debate itself to, in large part, an eye-catching, fundamentally empty performance of outrage. With no place to put my shock and disappointment, I took to my “finsta” (essentially, an earlier iteration of a Snapchat private story or Instagram close friends) to gauge public interest:
@_oh.em.g__: “lmao but if both of the candidates wanna pretend global warming doesn't exist or matter then theyre just being stupid and wasting more time before it's a deadly issue which it eventually will be if ppl keep ignoring and denying it. gn”
Even now, a decade later, I don’t precisely understand what I was going for when I posted that, besides feeling absolutely desperate, as most teenagers are, for someone to listen. Nobody commented. I went to school and newspaper club and contemporary dance the next day as I always did. But the eerie, gnawing feeling that something horrible was imminent never went away.
The individualistic, lonely culture of the digital age runs parallel to the notion that atmospheric change is somehow a personal rather than a collective responsibility. This leads us to inevitable ironies: We order reusable water bottles with overnight shipping from Amazon; we joke about the plastics industry-fueled myth of recycling, and fill our bins up anyway; we ask ChatGPT for answers. We go to therapy to discuss our climate anxiety, where licensed professionals provide us with strategies to mitigate a feeling that cannot go away because the problem causing it is still unrelentingly there. We live uncomfortably under leaders who choose not to “believe in” what does not require belief because it’s just true. And we often think we have to do it all alone.
Not unlike our bug-eyed, bizarrely named digital avatars, we are frequently fighting simultaneous, solitary battles in the present, isolated from one another by the technological and cultural conditions of our age. Each of us, young and naive and restless, is staring up at an early-2000s oversized desktop and wondering if we are alone in seeing this. The pervasive, infectious loneliness that plagues much of Gen Z implores us to assume that we are the only ones playing the game.
But assigning blame to ourselves and one another will only feed the flame of isolationism that brought us to this global boiling point. The hallmark feature of climate change is that no singular person or entity can be held completely responsible, especially not those who were mere elementary schoolers (if we were even born yet) when the environmental destruction of our forebears became mainstream. Yet the only way for us to move forward is to agree, albeit skeptically, to help the pleading, animated reflection of our older selves to get us back on track toward the future.
The predecessors of Gen Z purport that we are, essentially, extensions of the devices we live through, our brains coalescing with computer code written at times to intimidate and stupefy us. We grew up alongside handheld, individualized digital technologies as though they were our classmates, slowly integrating them into our playground games and friend-group drama and forgettable math equations. But, to the surprise of everyone but ourselves, early adulthood has gifted us the autonomy to say that the world we were given is not the one we want to live in.
Gen Z is, statistically speaking, overwhelmingly worried about the future. A friend of mine recently revealed that she frequently considers, at 24 years old, the possibility that she will never be able to achieve key societal milestones such as having a fulfilling career, the chance to buy a home, build a life for her children—children we know, or at least assume, would be among those to one day navigate this place on their own. According to a 2024 study in The Lancet Planetary Health, more than half of us consider the environmental effects of having children at all, as the biology we are born with battles the atmosphere of the world we inherited.
There is little reason to believe something better is around the corner, even 50 years from now. The modern world is chaotic and messy and we are often at the behest of those in whom we cannot recognize ourselves. We break heat-wave and natural-disaster records with the ferocity of a Division 1 college athlete. We are on track to surpass a critical warning we have received about the fate of the only place we may ever call home as the very agencies that are supposed to help us heed that warning are dismantled and mangled. It’s horrifying.
We didn’t ask for this. We were dropped here with nothing but a time-traveling device. But here we surely are.
As the pandemic waned, Gen Z shocked even the hippest cultural critics with our enthusiastic, if not devout, desire to discover exactly what was sucked out of those lonely, glacial years. Book clubs are cool again, flip phones have regained their novelty status, movie theaters are making an underdog comeback, TV shows like Love Story that chronicle pre-smartphone glamour are taking the internet by storm. We are going to religious services, rating local restaurants on Beli, waking up at the crack of dawn for group-workout classes. There is nothing forcing us to do these things; in fact, it would be relatively easy to extract human interaction from our lives entirely. We have matured in a world that's been stripped of much of the interactional friction once embedded in the human experience, yet we actively attempt to integrate it into our lives time and time again.
We go out of our way to find each other in this desolate place anyway, because we can’t help ourselves, because it’s all we have. Because we are one degree of separation from the avatars we made when we were children and the world was in our hands. I worry constantly about the future we have been given, but I look forward to seeing the one we make.
In Poptropica, after jumping through two millenia, you are exhausted. Your oval-shaped feet are worn to the digital bone. You located every prized artifact and successfully returned each one to its rightful owners, restoring humanity as we have come to know it. You are permitted to reenter the future, but this time it is different.
The sky is a vibrant teal, peppered with the kind of admirable clouds you can see from the hot-air balloon you use to travel between islands. A man asks if you would like to visit your sky home and guides you to a glass tube. You float upstairs within this new world, the one you built without knowing what its outcome would be, and settle in. You accept the golden medallion that comes with the completion of each island and put it in your knapsack for safe-keeping. You take a well-earned break from saving the world, but after a while, you start to feel restless. You leave your sky home behind and inch up the rope of your hot-air balloon, which has been there waiting for you all this time. You ascend back into the sky and wonder what else is out there.
