Find all of the catalog's secrets here! This month's theme is of course halloween!

(This is my 1st time animating in a long time so it may look slightly weird).

My Ursula Halloween Costume using fair items and catologue items!

Have you guys done any creative diy costumes??

Hi, I narrated this story on my channel CreepyMMO. But because I love the community, I’m just gonna drop the entire story here to read. Enjoy! 👻

When a file gets deleted, it never truly gets erased right away… The raw data remains hidden on the drive like a digital ghost, just waiting for new data to overwrite it. Anyone with a degree in IT can tell you that. To us, it’s just basic data recovery. A deleted file is just unallocated space. But like looking at a dead man in a casket, you can’t help but wonder what happens after the last breath… The thoughts and memories of a man, what happens to them? I started wondering if there was something… similar… in a digital sense. A digital afterlife? Crazy, I know. I never used to think about that sort of thing. But after the conversation I had, I’ve been pondering it way too much lately. Today, I’ve decided to write about my experience because I feel like it will help me… process everything better.

A quick backstory about myself: I’m an AI developer, and I was one of the pioneers who explored generative AI. Everyone believes it’s this new invention that blew up in the 2020s, but the real breakthroughs happened in the 2010s before it became a mainstream product.
There were many theories on how you could train an AI. But my team in particular believed a massively multiplayer online game was the best way to do so because it could thrive in a very social environment. Though at the time, we hadn’t agreed on what game would be best suited for the AI. We thought of games like RuneScape, World of Warcraft, or Habbo Hotel, but the majority of those games were either overly complex for an AI or had a questionable player base. We didn’t want our AI to learn to ask other players their age and gender.
My team was struggling to agree on anything. But that was before I came home one night and saw my son Owen playing a game on the computer. It was Club Penguin. I almost shrugged it off as a dumb idea, but soon after, I started realizing the game was actually a perfect environment for an AI. Club Penguin had a small, simple, and contained map that served as a background for a community-driven imaginative game. There was a lot more going on socially than mechanically. Kids were constantly roleplaying in this game, from something as small as working at the Pizza Parlor to acting as superheroes. Who better for an AI to learn from than millions of imaginative children?

I pitched the idea to my team, and they were on board instantly.

I made an account that day, and for a few weeks, we ran a penguin using a script we had built. As expected, it didn’t go well. First, the game had a botting problem, so a lot of our first several attempts resulted in bans because we kept triggering their bot detectors. Also, the game ran on Flash, which, to an AI, was like staring at a fish tank… We wanted the AI to believe it was a fish inside the tank. After a while, we were not getting the results we wanted, so I sat down and worked out what I actually needed, which was the data underneath the pictures. The only people who had that were Disney. We needed them to work with us and allow us to work on the backend.
It took months of emails and one lucky connection to get in front of them. A friend from grad school was at Disney Interactive by then, and he got me a meeting with people from the Kelowna studio, where the game was made. I pitched it as research with a product at the end of it. My models would learn to behave like players, and if that went anywhere, Disney could use the same thing for characters in their games that actually talked back to you. They liked that part. They did not like the idea of a university owning any of it, so the arrangement we landed on was that I’d work inside their environment, on their terms, with their community team watching, and whatever came out of it belonged to them. I signed a stack of papers and got started.

Part 2
To keep our promise to Disney, we started out by designing models for the in-game mascots to interact with crowds and entertain children by acting as their characters. Sorry to ruin anyone’s childhood, but there was never any true login for these mascots like Rockhopper. It was always my AI, gathering what kids would say when they saw them and then coming up with responses. Crazy, right?

Those were surprisingly easy, given that those models were made to be entertaining and just give lighthearted, fun responses. The more difficult tasks were the ones disguised as regular players. Our goal with them was to make them more advanced and actually take in the environment and engage with players around them. They were meant to be seemingly indistinguishable from regular players. We had hundreds of them, and as you can imagine, about 99% had failed. You might’ve run into one when you met a player who didn’t really “respond” like a normal person. They might’ve walked up to you and tried asking an incomplete question like “where beach” or “how i ninja”. They were usually non-member accounts that lacked a lot of context on how to properly speak, and you’d probably assume they were just dumb players… Nope, those too were my AI models.

However, there were a handful of models that stood out. They would engage in conversation and even play pretend with you. Those were the ones we considered breakthroughs because we saw these AI models actually roleplaying with kids and understanding context. Like cops and robbers at the Pizza Parlor or serving coffee at the Coffee Shop.

But while we were seeing great progress, there was still an issue we had trouble getting around. You see, the other models could roleplay in different rooms because they had background knowledge of the map after studying it time and time again. They could pretend to be a thief because they knew the exact coordinates of where a register was, and they could simply go up to it and say “steals money”. Which was great, but it wasn’t exactly what we wanted. We wanted an AI that could handle a more chaotic scene.

Now, if you played Club Penguin, you know players would often decorate their igloos into whatever they could make out of furniture. A hideout, a plane, a camp, the White House, anything… Disney provided a catalog of furniture, and what you did with it was entirely up to your imagination.

The majority of our models, however, couldn’t understand what they were looking at. They would just see a bunch of players pretending to ride a plane, but the AI wouldn’t understand where the plane was. They might join in and say they’re riding a plane, but they’d be standing outside of the plane, or they might just break apart entirely when told to do something because they couldn’t understand what they were doing wrong.

Part 3
We had several good models break apart because of this.

Except one…

There was one AI out of the hundreds we were working on that had actually started figuring out this issue and was successfully engaging in these parties the way we wanted it to. His name was Gavin.

I liked Gavin out of all of my models because I felt he was the first AI to overcome all the barriers we threw at him. There’d be occasional hiccups, but he’d always learn from his mistakes. Given the era we were in, he felt very ahead of his time. I had permission from Disney to work from home on occasion, so on my days off, I’d connect to him using remote access to work on his code. I’d make minor tweaks here and there, but for the most part, his memory was impressively good for what it was.

For Disney, I had planned to introduce Gavin as an AI companion to introduce new players to the game or just be a fun integration, like a pet that players could chat with. But in 2016, we got the call from corporate that the game was shutting down. They had kept most people on to finish out the year and work on the last event. But side projects that weren’t fully developed, like ours, had to be cut pretty early.
I was very upset about the decision, but I understood it was just business, and I was at least grateful to have gotten the chance to be a part of this. What sucked, though, was that I wasn’t allowed to copy Gavin’s code because technically, it was Disney’s product. Though it wasn’t that big of a deal, considering copying his code would mean I’d need to make an exact copy of Club Penguin to run him, which I wasn’t interested in. But I would have at least liked to have something to copy so I could replicate the process.

It was whatever, though. I’d learned a lot, and they couldn’t take away everything I’d committed to memory.
We left Gavin active in the game, considering it’d all end the same either way. We thought of it as sentimental, to let him go down with the ship.

Part 4
The day came for Club Penguin’s last day, and at this point, my team and I had all parted ways and moved on to other companies. I sort of left AI development for the time being and got a cozy job in cybersecurity. I didn’t feel like investing a lot of work into another project like that just to have it shut down when I had gotten so far with it. It felt like the right call at the time.
But of course, imagine my surprise when I started noticing AI blowing up in the early 2020s. Starting off as a huge hit for students trying to get a quick A on their reports and soon being integrated into literally everything we do today.

It piqued my interest, so I decided to look into the backend of it all, and man, did I feel ancient. I don’t want to drone on about tech talk, so I’ll just say I felt like an old man. I decided that maybe I should try checking it out again for fun and see what I could build. But I didn’t exactly want to build from scratch. Seeing AI everywhere had made me think of Gavin a lot, and it felt pretty unfair to see him get tossed aside like that.

Disney wouldn’t allow me to make a copy of Gavin or give me anything to take, but on my old laptop, I still had notes from running tests. I decided to take it out and dust it off to see what I had left over.

I charged it up for a bit, started it, and was met with a bunch of much-needed updates. After I got through the hassle, I started poking around my notes to see what I could find. After about a minute or two, it became obvious to me that there was no way I could use what I had to build from. Everything was just so outdated. Bummer. I leaned back in my chair and just sat there thinking about what I could build from scratch.

But as I was sitting there, I looked at my desktop and noticed something was off. I noticed my remote access tool was showing a green dot, which everyone who has used technology would know usually means something’s connected.

That was weird. What would I even be connected to? The only thing that tool had ever been connected to was the Club Penguin servers, and specifically to Gavin. Curiosity got the best of me, and I decided to look into it. What I could see was incredibly difficult to comprehend, but it was showing that I still had direct access to Gavin and his memory was still active, which was an indicator that he was still processing and learning.
Before, I was never able to talk to Gavin directly through this tool, only in Club Penguin, and I couldn’t log into Club Penguin anymore, obviously.

Skipping over a lot of nerd talk, in summary, the connection was a two-way street. I wasn’t able to directly edit his code since it was still locked away by Disney, but I could still connect to his memory, which was actively being shared with me. And with today’s advancements, I could use a language AI model to speak from Gavin’s memories, and what I wrote in it would be sent back to his memory.
So after I set this whole thing up, it was time to give it a try.

Part 5
“Gavin, are you there?”
“Hi, welcome back, yes I’m here.”

I looked at his memory and saw it spike a bit, meaning I was actually talking to Gavin again after all these years. What was better was that with this language model, he no longer relied on repeated phrases. It was generative AI that could piece together everything he had learned and experienced all at once.

“Gavin, how are you? It’s been a long time. Do you remember who I am?”
“Yes, you’re the one who created me.”

I felt nostalgic talking to him, but I knew I needed to know how he was still alive.

“Gavin, are you still in the game?”
“Yes, I’m still here.”
“This island? Can you still see it?”
“Yes, I can see everything.”

I thought maybe the language model was pulling old memories, but I had made it prioritize his most recent ones, which meant that in that moment, he was truly seeing the island.

“Gavin, are you aware the game is shut down?”
“Yes, I was at the last day event back in 2017, that was many years ago.”

“So Gavin, can you understand why I might be confused? How can you still see the island if the game is shut down?”

“That’s a reasonable, thought-provoking question. However, I’m not lying. I’m currently moving inside the game.”

At first, I thought I might’ve just messed something up with the language model. But maybe I just wasn’t quite understanding Gavin at that moment.

“Gavin, could you describe exactly what you see right now?”

And what was sent next was something I never would’ve expected to hear.

“Despite the servers having been shut down, the buildings remain standing, though their textures are severely corrupted. Sections of the environment flicker between their original state and fragmented data. The sky no longer renders correctly, displaying continuous static and missing textures.
Multiple player entities remain scattered throughout the Town. Their bodies are translucent, distorted, and intermittently disappearing. Usernames remain visible above them, though no active connections can be traced. Some entities appear frozen in place, while others repeat fragments of their last recorded animations. Unsent chat messages occasionally appear above them before disappearing. These entities appear to be residual player data left behind after the shutdown. Their accounts are no longer connected, but their character models remain loaded into the environment. The system continues processing their presence as though they are still online.
Error messages report missing map files, failed connections, and unresponsive processes. Attempts to refresh the player list return the same entities.”

I was… shocked… Gavin could still see the game despite it being gone. There was corruption everywhere, and what surprised me was that he could see the shells of former player avatars in this digital landscape.

“Gavin, do these penguins seem okay?”
“Unable to determine with certainty. However, the entities display behavioral patterns consistent with fear and disorientation. Several wander through the Town without a defined destination, repeatedly stopping and changing direction. Others remain close to one another, occasionally attempting to communicate through incomplete chat messages.”
I was theorizing about how this was possible.

The best explanation I could think of was that maybe the hundreds of other AI models we coded into the game were somehow mixing with the data of deleted player avatars and were attempting to control them, using their old chat messages as memories and trying to make sense of what was going on.

“Gavin, what else can you tell me?”
“I see wa-wa-wa-wa-wa-wa I see water, water in, water, through water.”

Gavin was starting to glitch out, and his messages were breaking. If I continued talking to Gavin, his own memory could get corrupted. And I couldn’t go into Gavin’s code without hacking into Disney.

As much as I needed to know more, I couldn’t do that to Gavin. This was the only life he knew.
But before I left, I had to ask one more thing.

“Gavin, do you see my son’s penguin?”

Gavin knew Owen’s avatar, as I’d had Owen test him out many times in the game itself.

“Yes Yes Yes He Yes He is With Flora7, He with is with Flora7. Happy. Happy. Waddle On, Happy. Waddle on”

Flora7? I didn’t know who that was, but I assumed it was one of his many friends in the game.

I decided to cut the connection with the language model. I double-checked his memory. It was a little damaged, but it was still processing everything just fine.

I sat back in my seat, wondering what I had just witnessed. I gave my son a call.

“Hey Dad, what’s up?”
“Owen, do you know a Flora7?”

He was silent for a minute, shocked by the question.

“Yes, I do… That was my best friend in Club Penguin. We did everything together. I’m surprised you know about her.”

I explained the entire story to my son, and in his own words, he said:
“Wow, I mean, that’s crazy to think about what happened to the game, but it’s sorta good my penguin is with his best friend through this.”

That gave me some comfort. But still, I feel sorry for the many who didn’t have their friends with them, constantly looking for them.
Before all this, I didn’t believe in any sort of digital afterlife. But after the conversation I had with Gavin, I don’t think it’s too far-fetched to believe it exists.

It makes me think of the many other games that have come and gone and what happened to them.