Virtual pets

Virtual pets

The youngest children worked primarily with Catz and Dogz running on Apple Macintosh Powerbooks. They were able to select a cat or dog to be their ‘pet’ and could choose a template which they could then adapt by adjusting colour and other aspects of its appearance. From the outset, the children referred to ‘their’ pets and they were regularly ‘fed’ and ‘played with’. The application provides a variety of pet foods, groom- ing equipment and toys which can be manipulated with the computer mouse, allowing interaction with the virtual pets – the cats, for example, responding to grooming by purring. Even before interviews took place, the children were able to draw parallels between the simulations and real animals of which they had personal experience. They rapidly became familiar with the features of the application and discovered and shared knowledge of undocumented features. In this extract two of the children

(A – 4 years old and B – 5 years old) 4 have discovered that it is possible to catch a mouse that periodically runs across the cat’s living area and are attempting to feed it to the cat; this involves clicking the computer mouse while the cursor is over the mouse on the screen and holding the ‘Shift’ key (no easy task and one not documented in the user guide):

A: Got him. Come on mousie, time to die . . . [drops mouse on to cat’s head. Cat ignores it and mouse runs away. B takes control of computer mouse]

A: Here’s the mouse . . . grab him . . . use shift like for the cat

B: Got him . . . wiggle wiggle. Oh . . . he got away again Those children who had pets of their own, or who had spent time with

DO COMPUTER CATS EVER REALLY DIE?

pet animals of friends or neighbours, were quick to make comparisons between their behaviour and that of the simulations. Here, A describes how Willow (a cat belonging to a neighbour) and the simulation differ in their behaviour – in Hesse’s terms, negative analogies – also identifying how the application constrains her behaviour as a user:

A: I wouldn’t pick Willow up like that. I’d cuddle him. Not by the leg or tail [tries to use cursor to pick up simulation by tail]. Oh . . . oh . . . I can’t. You can’t pick him up ‘cept like this [uses cursor to pick up simulation by neck]

R: Maybe you can’t pick him up so as you’d hurt him.

A: I can pick Jester [the simulation] up like this [uses cursor to pick up

simulation by neck again. Cat rotates slowly on screen and glares] R: Yes, but he doesn’t like it, does he?

A: Look . . . look! He’s really grumpy! Other children who had less experience of playing with or caring for real

animals were characteristically more cautious in making judgements about the extent to which the simulations were realistic and to identify positive and negative analogies. At the same time, faced with neutral analogies, they were more willing than others to experiment in order to establish the behaviour of the simulations, only stopping to reflect on the realism of the simulations when prompted by an adult. Here, C (5 years old) who has little experience of real dogs, begins by spraying a simulated dog with water – the only sanction, other than denial of food, available:

C: [Sprays dog nine times. Dog looks depressed, edges away] He doesn’t like that! [Dog goes to bowl and eats food] Look at him! He likes that! R: Is he like a real dog?

C: Mmm . . . yes. R: If you squirted a real dog, what’d he do?

C: Roar at you . . . Rooaaarrrrr . . . ‘cos he’s so fierce R: Do you think this dog ever gets fierce, or cross?

C: No . . . R: Not ever?

C: [Sprays dog a further four times. Dog yelps and moves away] He just gets sad . . .

Even the youngest children were able to identify negative analogies in the simulations, most relating to the lack of realism in potentially danger- ous and injurious behaviours. In the Catz application, for example, the cats never kill the mouse and they are able to fall from the top of the application window to the bottom without injury. The analogy, initially a neutral one, which most interested the children, however, was the ques- tion of whether the simulations could survive without care and food and there were a number of discussions around the issue of whether they would eventually die if left unattended for a long period. A, who had by

PATRICK CARMICHAEL

this time used the application and maintained her simulated cat ‘Jester’ for several months, describes her experiences and demonstrates an emerging awareness of the analogical limitations of the application.

A: If you don’t feed them they d-i-e [emphasis] R: Have any of your computer cats and dogs ever died?

A: No . . . oh . . . what happens when they die? Do they die like a real cat? Do computer cats ever really die? R: What happens if you don’t use the computer and leave them for a long time? Have you ever done that?

A: I didn’t wake Jester [the simulation] up for ages and ages and when I did

he was really hungry. His bowl was all empty. R: Did he look sick, or thin?

A: No . . . no, he was grumpy and meowed a lot like ‘feed me, feed me’ so

I gave him food and biccies and he ate and ate and ate like ‘snarf snarf’ [laughs] . . . like me!

While the animals were perceived as being ‘really hungry’ (a positive analogy in Hesse’s terms) the issue of whether a simulation could ‘die’ remained unresolved and thus neutral for some time. Despite some of the children leaving their simulations for longer periods (up to six weeks in some cases), no simulations underwent virtual ‘death’ and the consensus was established among groups of children that while the cats and dogs became hungry, they seemed immortal – a negative analogy recognised by all the children. Only one of the older children (E, 7 years old) recognised the hidden hand of the application designers and developers at work in this, however, and suggested that the negative analogy was imposed to prevent ‘upsetting little children if their cat dies’, recalling a ‘real fuss’ a friend had made when another virtual pet had ‘died’.