LA Weekly on Nintendogs

By at 4:57 pm Wednesday, Dec 7

My eight-year-old daughter and every one of her girlfriends has a Nintendo DS and the Nintendogs cartridge. She has been playing it daily for a couple of months and she and her friends talk about their virtual puppies all the time.

Joshua Berman at the LA Weekly has nice essay on Nintendogs, about how "virutal pets represent a new development in the man-machine interface."

200512071653 Therein lies Nintendogs inexorable pull: It’s the first game powered by empathy. These things are much more convincing than the Tomogatchis, those rudimentary keychain creatures from the first virtual pet craze a decade ago. Nintendogs go a long way toward satisfying a sort of canine Turing test: If they look and act enough like dogs, then at a simple cognitive level, they’re a pretty good substitute. It’s rewarding when your digital dogs bring you a present, upsetting when they try to eat trash on walks, and they’re so cute that when you find a big green floppy hat you want to make them wear it until you see in their little faces that they know the big green floppy hat is really a form of humiliation and you half-reluctantly take it off.
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Mark Frauenfelder

My latest book, Made by Hand, now in paperback. Follow me on Twitter.

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