on virtual pets
hope those little guys are still okay
content warning: death and mourning
As a child I loved virtual pets. I had real pets also: gerbils, finches, rabbits, rats, goldfish, and guinea pigs, but never anything bigger or likely to live longer than three years. My father, who never got over the loss of his family dog growing up, refused anything that we might get “too attached to”. Yet, despite this litany of real-life furry creatures I had begged for, I was still obsessed with my virtual pets. Alongside ‘real’ toy pets like Furbies and robot dogs, there was a real boom for virtual pets in the late 90s and early 00s which handily coincided with when my family got their first home computer. And while I missed out on NeoPets and the popular Petz series I had plenty to keep me busy.
pc pup and splat the cat (PC, Neechez Innovation, 1997)
It’s hard to recall if we only had demos of these two games bundled into one under the 3D Pets moniker: PC Pup and Splat the Cat — or if the games themselves were so inconsequential that they felt like demos. There really wasn’t much to do. You could throw the ball to the dog or set off a wind-up mouse for the cat. You fed them and bathed them in an approximation of a bland American home — your presence rendered only by your white hand that floated in space, ready to pet your pup or pick your cat up by their scruff.
Despite being nothing much really to do and no real progression I spent hours with this game. Replaying the same few actions over and over, flicking through the same few sparse suburban rooms as my pets wandered from place to place. The attachment to them felt almost mechanical. I would start up a ‘new’ game with a ‘new’ pet with little thought. Of all the virtual pet games I played, this one feels most like a fever dream.
creatures (PC, Creature Labs, 1996)
In Creatures you are put in charge of a growing collection of the titular alien-humanoid ‘creatures’— they are not dissimilar to the Eloi from H G Well’s The Time Machine: docile, trusting and ready to be influenced by their environment or indeed the player. Their real name are Norns according to Wikipedia. They were created to be a lifelike simulation, akin to rats or ants in intelligence, with their own distinct personalities and traits which they could pass down to their children. Before the player could instruct them to do their bidding the Norns first had to be taught a series a words from a computer. Whether the creatures listened to you after that was up to them.
Just like in The Time Machine or The Gremlins, the Norns also have their darker more savage inverse in the form of Grendels. Green-skinned, red-eyed and monstrous as their name implies, they could spread disease to the Norns and steal their food. I didn’t like the Grendels as a kid playing Creatures — they couldn’t be controlled and so imposed on the peaceful life of the Norns. I just wanted to watch my weird little big-eyed alien babies grow into adults who lived in a rural forgotten idyll. I wanted to let them stroll about their strange rustic cottages and continue my casual genetic splicing experiments to make the cutest creatures I could.
Looking back at it now Creatures was a surprisingly advanced virtual pet — if you can even call it that. There was far more depth and sophistication (and lore) to be found in its deceptively cutesy graphics. The evolution system was an early precursor to the kind found in life sims like Spore or indie pet sims like Wobbledogs. It predates games like Black & White and The Last Guardian in giving you companions with their own autonomy and sense of community. Far more than you might expect. Rather than being an owner of a single pet, like in 3D Pets or with a Tamagotchi, you felt much more akin to a nature observer, trying to ensure their welfare while granting them their freedom.
Yet there remains an undercurrent of something more sinister too and not just with the Grendels (which in their most unforgiving reading seem to echo coloninal ideas of an inferior class and race). Creatures was an early attempt at creating believable AI animal behaviour — and indeed much of the game feels like an odd kind of science experiment. Your ability to genetically splice creatures and selectively breed certain traits over generations to my modern eyes has a whiff of both eugenics and Dr Moreau’s fiendish experimentations. It calls into question this notion of autonomy when it is ultimately the player who decides their fate and decides who gets to live on through their offspring.
the sims 2: pets (PC, EA 2006 )
The Sims holds a special place in my heart as I’m sure it does for many. Once we had a PC capable of playing it it became a staple in our house. The Sims 2 however truly grabbed me (and my time), especially once the Pets expansion was released. While critics considered it to be one of the least impressive additions to the series, I unsurprisingly adored it. The pack added not just cats and dogs but birds, fish and something called womrats which were like guinea pigs. The Sims 2: Pets skipped the whole eugenics breeding thing and let you just design your perfect pet from scratch if you so wished. After that, it was the player’s job to keep their pets alive and happy. Much like the sims themselves, the pets came with ‘need meters’ that needed to be carefully monitored to manage their moods. But unlike sims and like all the other virtual pets we’ve seen so far you couldn’t control the pets directly, only surround them with the correct environment for their every need and comfort. I spent hours playing The Sims 2 and every family had a full menagerie of pets.
nintendogs (Nintendo DS, Nintendo, 2005)
Nintendogs was the pinnacle of the virtual pet genre for its time. Closer to a more sophisticated Tamagotchi than something like the life sims of Creatures and The Sims, it put the player in charge of up to three different breeds of dogs (different editions of the game had different breeds to choose from). You mostly played with your dog inside a bare single room that you could fill with toys and treats. Importantly you could dress up your dogs or take them for walks using your stylus on the touch screen to mark out your route. They could also enter agility competitions to earn trophies. In true Nintendo fashion you could also use the DS’s built-in microphone to call your puppy to you or teach it tricks.
Day to day there was little that changed in Nintendogs, aside from your puppy developing a closer bond to you. Nintendogs didn’t die or get sick. They never even grew up out of their puppydom. It was, truth be told, a little bit boring. Yet it was infinitely playable — its innovative use of the DS’s touchscreen and microphone made you feel closer than ever to a real pet. Nintendogs cuts to the very core of virtual pet-dom. Sanitised and simplified. A year after its release it had sold 6 million copies worldwide.
even virtual pets die one day
I’ve skirted the issue so far, but death is a common feature in virtual pets. Even if they can’t actually die in-game, death can come for them in different forms. But none die quicker than the Tamagotchi as I quickly discovered as a child. That special hybrid of physical and virtual toy pet. In Nick Murray’s brilliant talk, Virtual Elsewheres as part of the Between Worlds exhibition, they discuss how people remember their digital pets long after they have ‘passed’, both through virtual memorials and IRL graveyards. In their talk, they explore this use of ritual in contemporary culture and how we mourn our non-human connections. Murray has also created ‘TAMAGOTCHI SEANCE #2’, an artwork that embodies this idea: “Part glitch poetic, part occult reading, ‘Tamagotchi Seance #2’ offers a gentle glance across the veil, at how loss and grief take shape in the digital age.” Their work invites us to question how we find connection and hold memory in digital spaces.
Nick’s talk made me think of my own digital pets — the ones I’d long since abandoned. While my Tamagotchi undoubtedly died years ago, both virtually and physically (no way its 90s battery made it into the 2020s) — what of the ones still “living”, caged in a save file buried somewhere on a hard drive or floppy disk? A line of code frozen in perpetuity. Do my Creatures and 3D Pets and Sims 2 pets live on somewhere in stasis, waiting to be resurrected or, worse, thinking I have abandoned them? I could boot up my old Nintendog’s file on my DS and check in but the PC games would be much harder to reanimate since I no longer had compatible hardware to run them. And even if I could, would it be fair to bring them back to life for only a few hours until I lost interest again? Surely that’s no way to treat an animal? Even a virtual one. In all sense of the word perhaps it’s best to think of them as dead.
Saying that my virtual pets are dead is much easier than accepting it for myself. Last year I downloaded on my phone the app Bird Alone in which you meet a sassy talking parrot who each day you hang out with, drawing a picture or writing some poetry together. He’s there every day for a friendly chat, which sometimes teeters into something like existential familiar Millennial dread. But like in a fun way. I was having a really good time with Bird Alone, checking in on my new pal each morning to see what new thing he had to tell me. But I never finished the game, because at some point things subtly shifted and I could sense where things were going and I didn’t want to get there. The app is still on my phone, I’m too scared to delete it but I’ll never open it again. Because if I don’t open it he will live forever.
rethinking the human-animal connection
What much of these games showcase in the end, is not so much pets but companions. The ‘pets’ are designed to be autonomous and most resist direct control from the player. Now that I have a real-life dog I’m often struck by his independence; I wonder what’s going on in that brain of his. I marvel at his strong sense of personality. He is not a person, but he is an individual — certainly unique in his way of seeing the world. He is my pet, but I do not feel like his master.
I’m currently playing a new game called Animal Well — in it you are a little blob guy of unknown origin exploring a mysterious underground cave system to solve obscure puzzles and traverse the landscape. The cave is also full of animals, some are small like you, birds that scatter as you walk across the floor or tiny fireflies that dart about. Yet others are huge, almost touching the ceiling and looming over you with their gigantic proportions. Their motives, like all animals, are unclear. Some will leave you alone unless provoked while others throw stones or try to swallow you whole. A few even help you, mindlessly following you about to provide a handy platform or hit switches. Yet always, they remain impassive, unpredictable creatures.
I am reminded too of The Animals of That Country by Laura Jean McKay an Australian sci-fi novel wherein a virus infects the country that allows humans to understand animal “speech”. Not in a cutesy Disney way, however, no these are animals full of carnal rage and confusion: intelligent and autonomous. Unimpressed by their human captors they seek their freedom. Cults form around certain species and those that start to hear the thoughts of every ant and insect are slowly driven mad. Here the human-animal bond is not one to be cherished but feared. The novel demonstrates in no uncertain terms that no matter how much we may anthropomorphise animals they remain unknowable to us.
I am still drawn to virtual pets. I currently have Usagi Shima on my phone, a game in which you care for rabbit visitors and make them adorable little houses to live in. I still crave the sense of satisfaction of having done a good job, of being a responsible pet owner. Yet reflecting on my time with them all I can see how little influence I really had. Virtual pets can teach us to care for something other than ourselves but they also act as an important reminder that our control as humans should only extend so far.
Finally, an apology — this newsletter has been on an unofficial hiatus. The reason for this is hopefully a forgivable one: I’ve been writing a book and now it’s finished! It’s about Lesbian phone helplines in the 90s and my own discovery of lesbian history. It was announced the other week and is being published by the good people at Dialogue Books. You can read a bit about it over on The Bookseller. It’ll be out next Feb so expect to hear me talking about it much more then!
Loved this! I'd forgotten all about Creatures. Congrats on the book, splendid news.