Blog - Virtual Pets
Friday, March 21, 2008In an earlier entry I talked about the conflict between having a game be suitably casual to attract a casual audience, yet have characters you could invest in.
I'm wondering right now about virtual pet software (again, I also have a big interest in Artificial Life thanks to the Creatures A-Life virtual pet series...)
A virtual pet seems like an interesting way to bridge this gap between powerful characters within casual gaming.
It may, in fact, have lead me to answer my question from earlier about how the Sims soars as a success despite asking the user to watch people brush their teeth and clean the dishes and other dull activities.
Your sims, after all, are basically virtual pets, just repackaged as living doll house dolls. Make no mistake, however: we keep them and play with them as pets.
In any case, back to the point of how virtual pets can bridge the gap between character depth and casual play. The entire "play" of virtual pet software is in getting invested in a character: the pet. And yet, most virtual pet programs seem pretty casual to me: you just load them up every now and then when you're bored to feed them, play with them a bit, etc.
Most are far more "casual" than owning a real pet. The norns from Creatures are frozen in suspended animation until I choose to acknowledge them by opening up the game. The same is true with my dog in Dogz.
If I don't feel like feeding them that day, I don't have to, as I can just chose not to open up the program. But if I have some time to kill while, say, waiting for the bus, I can load up my dog in Dogz on my mobile phone and have something to interact with for a bit.
Of course, my dog in Dogz isn't particularly that deep of a character, as its world is so static. It only interacts with me. I don't even get the sense that I can alter the dog's virtual 'soul' that much through my actions.
The norns of Creatures are a deeper than that, by a considerable degree, as is evidenced by the outcry against my friend who ran the website devoted to torturing them physically and emotionally.
That however, begs the question again of memory that I discussed in my above entry on characters in casual gaming.
Creatures has much more "history" in its virtual worlds.
Generations of virtual life pass through the user's fingertips, as the norns interact realistically with each other and their world.
This makes it almost like a little soap opera virtual world that the user can try to influence.
That, however, means it begs the user to remember all that has occurred, and who begat who.
Even so, I don't get the sense that necessarily the user is required to remember any of that information.
Life goes on in the virtual worlds of the Creatures just as it does in the real world, regardless of what the user does or doesn't do.
So, the game can still effectively function as a casual game experience: log in when you like to feed them, bounce the ball around with them for a bit, and maybe teach them something new...
...with the option of following the drama in their life if you so choose.
The Sims takes a very similar approach, and to its phenomenal success (despite my criticisms from earlier, which, mind you, also apply to the Creatures series.)
Casual, with the option of more depth and investment, seems like a powerful paradigm to shoot for. posted by Brian Shurtleff @ 11:47 PM
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