Home Pets: What Could the Future Hold?
by Burbie52, HSM team writer
What is it about animals that strikes a chord with most of us? We love our pets and animal friends in real life with a devotion that sometimes borders on the insane.
How many of you have spent hundreds of dollars with a veterinarian, trying to save a beloved pet’s life? They become a part of our hearts, a part of our families, and they give us such joy. To some they are the children they can never have; to others they are partners at work — or in the case of handicapped, they become partners that help them to have a better quality of life. Dogs and cats in particular capture our hearts, but many love horses, birds, even snakes and lizards as well.
One of the first things I noticed a couple of years ago, when I arrived on Home’s fair shores, was the lack of pets.
In real life people dote on their pets; they buy them treats and toys, and they play with them with fair regularity. It just didn’t make sense to me that no one in Home had picked up on this fact yet. If any developers out there believed at first that pets wouldn’t sell in Home at all, boy were the results surprising!
Benji and Nipper, pet pioneers
It is hard to believe that the first pets came out in Home only a little over a year ago. They were Nipper and Benji, the zombie bunny and cat pets from nDreams, that became available in late November 2010. Since then, their numbers have increased by leaps and bounds; there are dozens upon dozens available by now through stores, games or quests. They have even created a SideKicks store in the Mall exclusively because of their popularity.
The wonderful part about virtual pets is that they can be anything; the sky is the limit, and sometimes even that isn’t a limit, as typified by the space and robots pets available. There are pets available for every taste and imagination. We have the usual dogs and cats that have come out in abundance in many varieties and sizes, but there are flying horses, helicopters, unicorns, dragons, robots, penguins, fairies, a tumbleweed of all things, and even a car or two. The developers are now giving us a lot of these as rewards when we complete a game or quest. Just over the Christmas holiday, there were seven new companions to obtain from quests, the Aurora space, and the Lockwood space and gift machine. You then could acquire a flying Chinese dragon for the Chinese New Year right after it. Now the newest one is a really cute groundhog from another quest in the Hub, just in time for Groundhog Day.
The newest additions from Lockwood look like they came right out of My Little Pony, the popular little girls’ toys from back in the seventies and eighties. Of course, there’s a well-documented running joke in HSM about My Little Pony and Home, but we’ll leave that alone for now. We are getting so many choices now that it is hard to decide what to get, though for me dogs will always have a soft place in my heart.
Zombies to Unicorns, Home has everything
With all of these new companions, I thought it would be a good idea bring up something that friends and I have been talking about for a while – what is the next step in the evolution of Home’s virtual pets?
Logically, it seems that the next step — if technologically feasible — is more interactivity with our pets in a private or public setting. For example, thanks to recent events, it’s been shown that public areas can be designed to make our own avatars do things we would never be able to do anywhere else. The Uncharted 3 and Dead Island public games proved that with a vengeance, as has the new Yeti/Hunters game. We are able to duck and dive around while shooting and aiming. This proves to me that a truly interactive space can be built to allow us to do things out of the ordinary. Perhaps a scaled-up version of what Hudson did with the dolphy races?
Considering what’s already available in Home, why not a space for us to interact with pets? They might have to create new special pets to make this possible, but why not consider a pet park setting, where we can walk our dogs on leashes, throw a ball for them, or in the case of a cat, perhaps have a string toy to dangle and play with them. There are many possibilities here for interaction that could take place in a public setting. If all of the other things we do in these games they provide are possible, I don’t see why this is not feasible, outside of the memory it would be required to do so. Yes, each interaction between avatar and companion would have to be programmed, and no, I don’t think we’ll see pets programmed to interact with each other (likely due to ping rates, hit detection and such), but having a bit of interaction between user and pet would be quite fantastic, and a natural outgrowth of what’s already happened.
My real life circumstances don’t allow me to have an animal right now, and having a pet park in Home where I could interact with my virtual dog would be a nice substitute. Certainly, there must be a good number of people in the same situation — wanting an actual pet, but unable to own one — due to either financial or physical limitations. It’s nice to have pets in Home, but it would be even nicer if we could interact with them.
Newest reward
Along a similar vein: an idea I’ve heard floating around is the ability to have a pet that can meet you at the door of your apartment — much like the robot dog, but not a robot. It could have an interactivity where if you sit while in its presence, it could hop up on the sofa with you, and then having the ability for our avatars to pet or stroke them would be very cool. While it would be fantastic to have something like this as a virtual active item (even if merely programmed into a piece of furniture), it’s probably more feasible to program the companion directly into the private estate, much as Markus comes with the Mansion. Granted, not everyone sees Markus in the same spot at the same time, so visitors to your estate might not see your interactions with your pet, but it would be a step in the right direction.
It goes without saying that people love their virtual pets. This has been proven by the test of time and the money already spent on them. I doubt you could find anyone who isn’t brand new that doesn’t have at least one pet. Giving us more interactivity would be the next step in pet evolution.
January 29th, 2012 by Burbie52 | 5 comments
Burbie52 is a 62 year-old published author and founder of the Grey Gamers group within Home. Born and raised in Michigan, she has lived there her entire life, with the exception of a twelve-year residency on the Big Island of Hawaii. She enjoys reading and writing, as well as video games, especially RPG's. She has one son in his twenties.
There are some dog house with dogs in them (active items) available and at least two active cats, one climbs a kitty tree and the other plays with a ball on a carpet.
Perhaps some dev will make a couch with a dogie or kitty on it that is active and will just sit there allowing out avatars to sit next to them.
But what next? Virtual dog food?
I’m starting to feel weird. LOL
One of my greatest hopes and fears is that Home developers will discover the “Tamagotchi” principle — a pet that needs regular attention to thrive. We had that with the Hudson Dolphies, of course, where regular training was necessary to have any chance of winning races. But if you ignored your Dolphies, they didn’t wither away and die, though they did glare at you balefully under a dark cloud of squiggles.
For a long time, I was addicted to a little Nintendo DS game called “Animal Crossing”, which applied the Tamagotchi principle to a whole town. Once you created your town, you needed to visit it daily to keep the weeds down and the inhabitants happy. And this was real time — it checked the system clock to see when you were there last — not at all practical for a person with real-life obligations. In the end I simply walked away from it. I’m sure by now my town is full of weeds, roaches and dust bunnies. I don’t care. It wore me out.
A better model was the one used in the popular Harvest Moon games, where activity was judged, not by real-world time, but by your actual visits. While you were playing the game, the world changed and aged. If you put the game away for a few days, the weeds did not grow and your chickens did not starve. I would hope that any Tamagotchi-style pet in Home would use that convention — if you’re in Home, you need to interact with it, but if you take a break, it goes into stasis until you return.
I would much prefer the “game time” physics and the need to feed and care for your pets could be interesting.
Fish that die if you don’t feed them. Come to your apartment to find your puppy dead on the floor.
IF the tamagotchi concept was adopted I think we would also need pets that evolve as time goes on. Have a sense of loss if you have to start over from square one with a pet.
Personally I would like the option to be able to control my companion, especially since we have remote vehicles now.
Companions SHOULD have their own set of emotes that are selectable by the user. Commands where you can tell your dog to sit, stand, play dead, speak, etc.
As it stands now companions are little more than a wardrobe item. They don’t have a life of their own. They do really need revamping and revolutionizing.
Good topic Burbie, it’s one that needs attention.
I’d kinda like to see the pets interact with one another. So, if I meet up with a Homie and we both have our pet dogs out, the dogs would start playing with each other while the owners chat. Obviously, not every companion would be able to interact with all the others, but some interactivity between companions coming from the same developer would probably be well-received by the community.
Wtf !!! I truly <3 Home but c'mon guys/gals these are not real pets. 0.o