Last weekend I took my 11-year-old son shopping for some new game cards that just came out, which he knew would be easy to find. As we went store to store to discover each one completely sold out, a familiar look of anguished need appeared on his face. A familiar look of anguished resignation appeared on mine.

We were hunting Neopets, a new collectable card game version of the massively popular Web site. If you've been idly wondering where your children have been for the last eight months or so, they're probably some of the 65 million people registered at Neopets.com. There they can raise, feed, and play with their own animated, appallingly cute critters — something like an online version of the virtual e-pet craze of the late 90's, or the egg 'baby' my high school Home Economics teacher made me carry around for two weeks. Neopets can absorb your attention for hours, even days at a time.

The Powers That Sell have gotten really good at this.

Archeologists excavating through the layers in my kids' rooms would find, along with a million Coke cans and some hamster skeletons, the strata of previous collectible crazes. Beneath a loose topsoil of Yu-Gi-Oh! cards are deep layers of Harry Potter merchandise, pockets of fossilized Pokemon, and a rich vein of Magic the Gathering cards, all heaped on a solid bedrock of compressed Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles and Star Wars figures. But Neopets might just outdo them all.

First, they're friendlier. Neopets don't battle each other. When my kids were collecting Pokemon cards I could tell myself they were practicing their reading and math and learning the valuable skill of day-trading, but secretly I put the practice of training Pokemon to fight each other on behalf of their owners on the same moral level as cockfighting. Neopets just have contests where the winner gets points. Sorry, "NeoPoints."

Neopets don't have an annoying cartoon. At least not yet.

Neopets.com is a frighteningly safe place for your kids to go online. When you sign up you choose your Neopet — you can have up to four — and begin the process of naming and obsessing over it. You feed it and buy things for it with your Neopoints, which you can rack up by playing any of the 140+ games on the site. You can also earn large quantities of points — get ready for this — by clicking on approved sponsor banners or signing up for approved sponsor newsletters. Isn't that cool?

While you're there you can wander around Neopia, attend NeoSchools, buy NeoMerchandise, check your NeoMail, send NeoGreetings to your NeoFriends, or just generally go NeoWild. Every activity includes the possibility of earning more NeoPoints, thus teaching our kids the meaning of the phrase 'working for the company store.'

And now when you buy the packs of cards, if you can find them, they have codes inside to get even more NeoPoints for your Neopets! Wow! We need to buy all of these, Dad! Back up the car!

Take the collectability of Pokemon, add the Tamagotchi's demand for constant attention, combine it with the life-manipulation appeal of The Sims and stick it on a virtual world as self-contained as AOL only dreams it could be, and you get a product that makes nicotine and heroin look like casual hobbies. All they need now is an interactive plush Neopets doll to cause frenzied Christmas shopping. Whoops, what's that on the toy shelves already…

So get ready parents, and have your credit cards and car keys at hand. The hunt is on again!