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 from robot pets and other entertainment robots 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.
Characteristics of commercially available digital pets
Commercially available digital pets usually aim at maintaining a relationship with its owner. [1] This is achieved in the following ways:
Autonomous
Digital pets are not designed for a specific task, which distinguishes it from other electronic devices. We expect a tool to perform a specific task, but we do not attribute life to it when it does so.
Digital pets show autonomy in many ways. For example, it may act as driven by its own goals and motivations, and disobey the order of its owner. Similar to many may personify an electronic device such as a disobedient computer, this feature makes interacting with digital pets interesting.
Responsibility
This is the counterpart to the “autonomous” feature; if the pet is free from its owner, why would its owner interact with it? Most commercially available pets make the owner feel responsible for it.
For example Tamagotchi requires the user to take care of it or it will die. Some digital pets relate the maturation (or growth) of the pet with the way the owner takes care of it, this method has an advantage because many users don’t want their pets to die .
Genuses of digital pets
Gadget based
Some virtual pets, like Tamagotchi, 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.
Webpage based
Virtual pet websites, such as Neopets, Marapets and Zetapets, 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 and the world of Marada in Marapets. In these worlds, you can play games to earn virtual money; which is usually spent on items and food for your pets. Marapets has several in game currencies, and money is earned from battling, restocking and playing games.
Some sites adopt out pets to put on your webpage and use for roleplaying in chatrooms. One example is The Silver Unicorn. They often require the adoptee to have a page ready for their pet. Sometimes they have a setup for breeding your 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. An example can be found at The Nexus, a forum that centers around breeding dragons. 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.
In some games you have to breed your pet for combat. In Woshu Moshu for exemple, you have to take care of a spirit and teach him kung fu and magics to prepare him for battle.
Game or application based
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.
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 “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”).
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).
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.
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. For example if a Tamagotchi left alone long enough it will ‘die.’
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 responce 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).
Example of common features
Responds to calling
Responds to touching
Training the pet
Supplies or toys for the pet
Dressing up the pet
Competition or trial amongst pets.
Meeting other pets.
Ethical Concerns
Humane treatment
There are some ethical concerns about digital pets. As the digital pets are more realistic, they simulate different kinds of emotion and self-awareness. They may require the same animal rights, according to some fields of philosophy.
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.
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.
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 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.
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.
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