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What’s better: petting the dog, or entering cyberspace?Vote now!
Vote now!
Image credit:Rock Paper Shotgun / Bethesda Softworks
Image credit:Rock Paper Shotgun / Bethesda Softworks
Petting the dog
Once, we ached to flush toilets. If we found a toilet in a video game, we would be sorely disappointed if we couldn’t flush it. Developers who also delighted in the flush would put surprising amounts of time and effort into flashy flush effects and hearty flush noises, which then fed desires for more flushing, which encouraged more devs to… it was a happy time. I still want to flush the toilet today, but what people most want now is to pet the dog.
Approach a friendly dog in a game these days and there is a high chance you be presented with a prompt to pet it. Maybe you’ll be treated to an elaborate first-person view of your wizard kneeling down, shaking a dog’s paw, then tickling it behind the ear. Maybe you’ll simply hear a happy little noise. Either way, you’ll know a dog has been petted. It’s cute.
Petting awareness exploded after Tristan Cooper started the smash-hit Twitter accountCan You Pet The Dog?For years he has documented the games which do—and don’t—let you pet dogs and other beasties, and it turns out lots of people want to see this. Which means lots of developers have put more effort into petting. Which means more people like petting. Which means… these days you can pet dogs and cats and parrots and sheep and cows and dragons and lil robots and all sorts of aliens. I consider all of these to be ‘petting the dog’.
I know some people see petting the dog as a tired joke or a cynical box-ticking feature for marketing, but I still dig it. I’m always here for games adopting new verbs as standard, and especially affectionate verbs. Most of these games already had (or would have) animals, this simply lets us engage with them as we would if we could. The popularity of petting the dog has also let developers justify the cost and effort of putting more art and technology into good-looking animals and cute animations, which is great. If I can’t walk past a cat in the street without trying to pet it, no matter how important my mission is (I have missed so many busses), I don’t know why it should be any different in games.
This one moment of fidelity and affectionate does highlight how unalive and emotionless the rest of a game space might be, and that is strange. But look, if we can flush a toilet and pet a cat, how much more of the human experience remains unsimulated? We’re basically there.
Dog Petting, Time Travel And The Blair Witch Game’s 7 Best And Worst FeaturesEven The Blair Witch Project let you pet the dog, as Astrid showedWatch on YouTube
Dog Petting, Time Travel And The Blair Witch Game’s 7 Best And Worst Features
Entering cyberspace
The future of the infobahn, everyone knows, is a 3D virtual realm filled with colourful roaming cubes and tetrahedrons, low-poly giant leering faces, grid lines, vaguely Christian imagery, untextured avatars in fetishwear, chrome skulls, and fire sprites. I appreciate the games which let us enter a fictional cyberspace while we wait for reality to catch up.
For reasons unknown, the first game I think of iscyberpunk vampire adventure game BloodNet, where you occasionally jack into a cyberspace full of floaty shapes, hovering gems, and crystalline dragons. It looks like animated GIFs bouncing around a Litestep desktop wallpaper circa 2001, which is perfect. Or when the murderbabe AI Shodan tries to merge cyberspace and reality inSystem Shock 2, we enter her realm of clean grid lines with hostile shapes drifting about. That’s especially good coming in contrast to the previous section, set inside the meaty innards of a giant alien organism. More recently,Cyberpunk 2077’s brief deep dives into the Net are nice, with spaces built from glowing point clouds, people appearing as ghostly smeared avatars, wiggly close-up CRT pixel waves, and the mandatory swooshing through a landscape of cubes. Please do tell me about more of your favourite cyberspaces in other games!
Dystopia’s tagline was “Jack in, kick ass” |Image credit:Rock Paper Shotgun / Puny Human
But which is better?
While petting the dog is cute, I’d still rather flush the toilet. I bet cyberspace has entire halls of shimmering toilets to flush, probably as a flashy way to delete files or something. Look, we all knew I would say entering cyberspace. And I don’t even like dogs. But what do you think?
