Growing up with Tamagotchi and Pokemon, virtual pets were always something special to me. Even now, the notion of establishing a connection with a program, the interface some sprite, seems not only natural to me, it's alluring. There are attributes of virtual pets that make them an entirely different delight than other relationships.
As a kid, they emulated actual pets, something that you felt responsible for, and perhaps loved by.
As an adult and tinkerer, I have the unholy ability to manifest them from scratch. And it is that theorethical ability, and practical inability, that has fueled much wondering in me.
This won't be a story of my own creations, for they are at best in progress, and I should detail that journey when there is more to detail. Rather, I'd like to share some of the observations I've made or persisted while crawling different literature on the subject.
An interesting use of virtual pets is as helpers that encourage good behaviour, say, healthy eating. There's even research demonstrating this effect, and I think there is an underutilized tool here in assisting folks with sticking to the things that they decide matter to them.
One such idea that I'm working on is a pet that crawls my obsidian vault, it's mood improving with my note taking and writing.
An interesting further development of that could be an education virtual pet that follows along and tracks your homeworks assignments, helps you rehearse, etc.
I think this is the most obvious use case, but it doesn't have to end there.
One potential boon is our emotional growth and sense of responsibility, aspects that are inherent to the act of care-taking. Judith Donath said:
Artificial pets also demonstrate how metaphorical thinking influences our sense of ethics. If we think of them as games, the time spent playing with them is entertainment and somewhat self-indulgent; if we think of them as animals, time spent playing with them is care-taking, an act of responsibility and altruism.
It's certainly not universal, but tamagotchi being the prototypical virtual pet, their lifecycle is interesting.
Tamagotchis die if you neglect them - eventually, you will.
A researched but ultimately quite personal telling of the emotional significance of Tamagotchi death on youngsters pointed out that the inevitability of death plays a role in our attachment. And that it's a potentially important lesson for kids, the culpability in the death of their virtual pets.
A peculiar thing is the devices that virtual pets have mostly remained on since tamagotchi launched in 1996. Todays game frameworks and rich websites should have made it easy to far outdo any pretense of personality or behaviour tamagotchis ever had, but the medium did never move on much. People form attachments to neopets, pokemon and such, but never in a way where the creatures were designed to be truly cared for, and with no (known) explicit ambition to improve anything, physical or mental.
I guess an omni-present smarphone/browser/desktop enabled pet nowadays would be eerie at best, and awfully creepy at worst.
But something in me wants one. Maybe pandemic has isolated me a bit too much.