Much of the appeal of video games for me lays in being afforded the access to do things I normally would not be able to do and go places I wouldn’t be able to go. For example, I’ve been playing a lot of Super Mario 64 lately, a game with no shortage of activities to engage in that have no direct analogue to ‘real-life’; successively higher jumps, long jumps, butt stomps, giant dog things chained to wooden posts, dropping baby penguins off a ledge into an infinite abyss, changing the flow of time in a space based on when I walk through a painting, etc. As well, as you get older, this sort of indulgence in fantasy scenarios in games can extend into being afforded access to scenarios which have real-world analogs but which for one usually unfortunate societal or cultural reason or another, the player may never get to experience for themselves: such as being a poor person and playing a game where you have a lot of money to spend while still being able to make your rent on time, or being black and not being discriminated against by police while driving a car or walking down the street, or shopping out in public as a trans person and being treated by other customers and the employee base as an individual worthy of dignity and respect, or even just the ability to walk on Mars for a day. The list goes on.
While I would never say fantasy is the only reason I would play a video game, twenty years on after my first experience with a video game—Crash Bandicoot 2: Cortex Strikes Back—I can’t say indulging in fantastical scenarios has lost its luster. Meanwhile, in the last ten years or so, there’s been more and more of an outcry by a subset of video game players to see games which allow them to engage in more mundane, everyday tasks which are far more universal (at least to those privileged enough to have a roof over their heads), like brushing your teeth, starting up a car, grabbing a beer from the fridge, taking a walk…
Or petting the dog.
The Twitter account ‘Can You Pet the Dog?’ dates back to last year, 2019, when a person who was upset that you couldn’t pet a dog in Ubisoft’s The Division 2 decided to make a Twitter account documenting whether or not, if a game has a dog, you, the player, were allowed to pet the dog. The account’s anonymous owner soon spread the account’s reach to beyond dogs, cataloging many instances of an animal appearing in a game and whether or not you can press a button to walk up to the dog and pet it.
This isn’t a scientific observation, but I feel like just based off of my memory alone it was always sort of touch-and-go whether or not you would be able to pet dogs in games which came out before the time of ‘Can You Pet the Dog?’. In other words, games absolutely had dogs and cats and pigs and what-have-you before ‘Can You Pet the Dog?’, but it wasn’t often the case that you could interact with them. They might follow you around and bark or meow here and there, but as game development is incredibly expensive and adding a feature as simple as petting a dog requires the collaboration of modelers, riggers, animators, programmers, and quality assurance testers and analysts, and as games get more and more expensive to make due to HD development and larger and larger team sizes, time and resources which could be allocated to ultimately trivial actions like petting dogs were often instead dedicated to more critical tasks necessary to ship a game on time.
As an independent game developer myself, I want creators to have the freedom to do what they want to do. As a critic, I want to be able to freely judge and analyze the work artists release on their own terms on my own terms. And it’s sort of impossible to do that now in a world where ‘Can You Pet the Dog?’ can quickly throw together a 280 characters-or-less tweet with a relevant gif about a game which doesn’t let you pet the dog to the account’s 450K followers to instantly write off for not fitting into their preconceived mold of what games should let the players do.
To engage with art is to come to grips with a series of choices made by the artist. In an ideal scenario, the context that art is experienced in is also the one which the artist intended for it, though of course in reality this usually isn’t the case (Doom on a refrigerator, a David Lynch film on a smartphone, etc.). But to play Doom on a refrigerator is still to play some version of Doom as it was originally intended.
Conversely, developer ZeniMax Online Studios did not originally intend to allow you to pet the dog in The Elder Scrolls Online. As of April 18, 2019, you couldn’t. About a month after ‘Can You Pet the Dog?’ released a tweet confirming that the dog in The Elder Scrolls Online was not petable, The Elder Scrolls Online Twitter account replied to that tweet to confirm that you now, in fact, could pet the dog.
There have been numerous instances of the ‘Can You Pet the Dog?’ account releasing a tweet stating that an animal in a game was not petable, the account’s followers becoming visibly disappointed or even incensed that a developer would dare to put an animal in a game which isn’t petable, and then the account releases a follow-up tweet confirming that you now can pet the animal after the developer/publisher of the game the account was totally not criticizing noticed the tweet and decided they needed to pivot to petable animals through a patch because ‘Can You Pet the Dog?’ has a lot of Twitter followers.
And y’all, I fucking hate this shit so much. Like I’ve said in this piece already, I value artists being able to do what they want to do on their own terms. The Dog Problem as I’ll coin it here is a troubling trend to me because it essentially means that game developers—a medium which is already inherently extremely online through the intersection of tech and art in games—may very well have to bend to the whims of wannabe backseat designers armed with a keyboard and monitor who want everything to look exactly like everything else. Games have always had this problem; think back to the days of games being reviewed far more like products, for their adherence to the industry’s current standards of the cutting edge of visual fidelity, smooth controls, high-quality audio, etc. One of the most encouraging trends in games over the last ten years or so which it seems to me has allowed a wider variety of games to shine in the limelight has been a new generation of writers often equipped with influences beyond the pillars of nerd culture like Star Wars and Indiana Jones.
Being able to pet the dog may seem like a fairly innocuous realization of the art-for-online world we live in, but I see it as a stepping stone toward other, potentially more insidious trends, chief among these the uniformity of all things. I don’t want to live in a world where everything looks just like some version of everything else, already a major problem in today’s Apple-core minimalist design hellscape planet. Mainstream gaming has this problem a lot of the time already, where every game has an open-world populated with empty calories junk to be consumed and subsequently forgotten, or every game has a battle royale mode, or every game needs to have extra things to purchase to supplement the costs of development, etc. Worst yet, it means that artists will have to perform labor that they very may well not be interested in order to placate insufferable audiences who approach art with a series of preconceived notions of what art fundamentally should be. It’s a perverse, weird sort of gentrification; the death of art, and thereby the death of culture itself.
And I’ve already got cats in real life! Petting the virtual animal will never hold a candle to the real thing. Petting dogs in video games feels like nothing to me. I don’t get it. All this extra work and budget spent on essentially the player-character bending down, petting a dog for two seconds, and returning to their previous animation state. Why do people want this so much? It’s utterly bizarre to me. Y’all do you, I guess, but think about what you’re asking for when you hit follow on ‘Can You Pet the Dog?’.
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