Digital pet

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Tamagotchi was a popular digital pet in the late 1990s.
Tamagotchi was a popular digital pet in the late 1990s.

A digital pet, also known as a virtual pet, is a type of artificial human companion. They are usually kept for companionship or enjoyment. People may keep a digital pet in lieu of a real pet.

Digital pets are distinct in that they have no concrete physical form other than the hardware they run on. Interaction with virtual pets may or may not be goal oriented. If it is, then the user must keep it alive as long as possible and often help it to grow into higher forms. Keeping the pet alive and growing often requires 'feeding', grooming and playing with the pet. If the interaction is not goal oriented, the user can explore the character of the pet and enjoy the feeling of building a relationship with it. Often these games use realistic visual effects or interaction to make the pet appear alive and give a sense of reality to users.

Contents

[edit] Genera of digital pets

[edit] Gadget-based digital pets

Some virtual pets, like Tamagotchi and Gigapet, are sold on a self-contained, hand-sized computer. In the case of the Tamagotchi, a small screen has an image of the pet, while buttons on the case let the user perform different tasks, such as feeding, playing with, or washing the pet. Dissatisfied pets can emit beeps and sometimes "die".

Digimon was originally sold on a gadget similar to Tamagotchi's, but able to connect to other Digimon gadgets in order for the pets to fight.

Sonic Adventure 2 for the Sega Dreamcast had virtual pets, called Chao, which could be either used in game or transferred to the Visual Memory Unit, which enabled a transformation from game-based to gadget-based.

[edit] Webpage-based digital pets

Virtual petsites such as Neopets or Fishland are usually free to play and accessible to all who sign up. They can be accessed through web browsers and often include a virtual community, such as the planet Neopia in Neopets. In these worlds, you can play games to earn virtual money; which is usually spent on items and food for your pets. Another virtual pet website is Webkinz, created by Ganz. The user has to buy a plush Webkinz and earn it money by playing games and playing "Quizzy's" to feed it and give it a home.

Some sites adopt out pets to put on your webpage and use for roleplaying in chat rooms. They often require the adoptee to have a page ready for their pet. Sometimes they have a setup for breeding one's pets and then adopting them out.

Other sites that adopt out pets to put on a webpage are centered around writing for and breeding said pets to create newer, often 'showier' creatures. Members are often encouraged to create their own species of draconic creatures, to adopt from other members, and to breed the various species together. Unlike with some adoption agencies for webpage based cyberpets, where the owner of the species is the only one that can breed said species, the Nexus encourages all of its members to share and interbreed their species together, and the resulting offspring are usually adopted out to story-based or stats page-based web-pages.

Some games also allow users to breed a pet for combat against other players.

[edit] Game- or application- based digital pets

See also: life simulation game

Other virtual pets come in software run on PCs or video game consoles. Since the computing power is more powerful than with webpage or gadget based digital pets, these are usually able to achieve a higher level of visual effects and interactivity. Games like Nintendogs render realistic figures of dogs.

Example game or application based digital pets: the creatures in Black and White, Nintendogs, Petz, Catz, Dogz (in Gameboy Advance and DS), and Pets in Sims 2: Pets.

[edit] History

Digital pets were a massive fad in Japan, where they originated, and to a lesser extent in the United States during the late 1990s. There have been significant improvements of digital pets since Tamagotchi's success. From dot-images (such as Tamagotchi) to rendered and animated 3D games (such as Nintendogs). Today, there are also "Digital Pets" which have physical robotic bodies, known as Ludobots or Entertainment robots.

The idea of an animal companion composed of technology rather than flesh has also inspired a lot of fiction, such as the anime Digimon (itself a contraction of "Digital Monster").

[edit] Common features of digital pets

There are many common features between different digital pets, some of them are used to give a sense of reality to the user (such as pet's responds to "touch"), and some for enhancing playability (such as training).

[edit] Communicating with digital pets

With advanced video-gaming technology, most modern digital pets do not show a message box or icon to display the pet's internal variable, health state or emotion like earlier generations (Such as Tamagotchi). Instead, users can only understand the pet by interpreting their actions, body language, facial expressions, etc. This helps keep a pet's behavior seem natural, rather than calculated, and fosters a feeling of a relationship between user and digital pet.

[edit] Sense of reality

To give a sense of reality to users, most digital pets have certain level of autonomy and unpredictability. The user can interact with the pet and this process of personalizing can make the pet more unique. Personalizing increases the feeling of responsibility for the pet to the user. [1] [2] For example, if a Tamagotchi is unattended for long enough, it will "die".

[edit] Interactivity

To increase user's personal attachment to the pet, the pet interacts with the user. Interactivity can be classified into two categories: Short-term and long-term.

Short-term interactivity includes direct interaction or action to reaction from the pet. Example: "touch" a pet with mouse cursor and the pet will give a direct response to the "touching".

Long-term interactivity includes action that affect pet's growth, behavior or life span. Example like training the pet may have good effect on pet's health. Long-term interactivity is quite important for a sense of reality as the user would think that he has some lasting influence on the pet.

Two kinds of interactivity are often combined. Such as playing with a pet (short-term interactivity) may make the pet more optimistic (long-term interactivity).

[edit] Example of common features

  1. Responds to calling
  2. Responds to touching
  3. Training the pet
  4. Supplies or toys for the pet
  5. Dressing up the pet
  6. Competition or trial amongst pets.
  7. Meeting other pets.

[edit] Ethical Concerns

[edit] Digital pets and children

While users can do whatever they want with their digital pets nowadays, it may encourage young users to form bad habits. It is arguable that a relationship with a digital pet cannot compare with a real relationship with an animal, because a real relationship teaches children that their desires can't always come first.

[edit] Digital pets over real pets

Some people suggest that digital pets are preferable for a number of reasons. Having a digital pet in place of a real pet ensures real pets don't have to suffer, and it is arguably training before adopting a real pet. PETA has suggested that robotic animals can help people recognize that they are not up to the commitment of caring for a real animal.[3]

[edit] Impact of virtual reality on digital pet

Some people suggest that the simulated experience of digital pet lacks the constraints of the real world [4] that allows us to apply substantive ethics. The virtual environment failed to simulate real social consequences.

Another problem about digital pet is the "virtual slavery". A robotic pet could be made in the shape of a human, a problem raised by the fiction Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? by Philip K. Dick.

[edit] Relationship with digital pet

There is research concerning the relationship between digital pets and their owners, and their impact on the emotions of people. For example, Furby affects the way people think about their identity, and many children think that Furby is alive in a "Furby kind of way" in Sherry Turkle's research. [5]

[edit] References

  1. ^ Frédéric Kaplan Free creatures : The role of uselessness in the design of artificial pets, 2000
  2. ^ Frank, A.; Stern, A.; and Resner, B. 1997. Socially intelligent virtual petz. In Socially Intelligent Agents.
  3. ^ G. Jeffrey, "If you kick a robotic dog, is it wrong?" in The Christian Science Monitor, Feb of 2004
  4. ^ Critical Thoughts About Tamagotchi, 1997
  5. ^ Katie Hafner, What Do You Mean, `It's Just Like a Real Dog'? , 2000

[edit] See also

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