Statement of Purpose:
Virtual Pets as a concept have existed since the early ‘90’s, with Tamagotchi, to NintenDogs, to casual phone apps such as Neko Atsume and Pet Shop Story. In my Preparatory Research Analysis, I stated I wanted the interaction between the user and the machine to not feel cold, and that the interaction has to clearly express an idea that is translatable to human emotion or understanding. Similar to my midterm project, I wanted to explore why virtual pets, despite not being truly alive, are so popular — the research I have done looks mainly at the phenomenon of Tamagotchi, more specifically why Tamagotchi and off shoots like it became so successful. VICE News mainly attributes it to how the problems the pets had were similar to our problems, as the Tamagotchi went through childhood, “adolescence,” and adulthood, and felt hunger, sleepiness, and fatigue. Secondly, and what I want to mainly focus on in my project, is how the designs made us feel: they were adorable, and in their design we were able to more “plausibly believe and empathize with the pets at a personal level.”
So for my project, I want to use similar functions to the Tamagotchi — which I felt seamlessly combined software and hardware pretty flawlessly especially for the ‘90s — but I want to explore whether or not if the pet takes on a more monstrous form whether or not this will affect the empathy the user feels toward the digital pet. By having to take care of a pet that society tells we should fundamentally fear or alienate, I want the user to question what features we are taught to think are “cute” and which we think are “ugly,” and whether or not their responsibility towards the pet would change how they view monstrosity.
Project Plan:
The “pet” the user has to take care of has three components: hunger, love, and sleep. On the processing side, I will create and animate “monsters,” and I want to loosely base them off of Lukas Voljir’s open source project “Monsters,” which encourages beginners with Processing to try out new shapes and designs by coding a Black and White monster. I plan on connecting Arduino to Processing by setting up three stages: the initial “baby” monster, which is conventionally cute and adorable, and then once the “baby” hits the second stage “teenager” the baby monster will become more grotesque, until the final form resembles monsters we learn to fear, all rendered through simple pixel art. The pet will progress through the stages by “feeding” it by pressing a button on Arduino a number of times to give it food, using the Potentiometer to make it “close its eyes” a number of times to make it sleep, and lastly using a touch sensor to interact and “pet” the monster. Once you’ve completed these tasks a number of times the monster will progress to the next stage.
I want to do the software first and then the hardware second. I want to program the three stages the monster will go through, how it reacts when it has been fed, sleep, or played with. Then once the Processing side is finished I want to attach the circuits to make the animation respond to Arduino, which I believe will be easier once I can decide how the animation will change in response to the user’s hardware response.
Concept and Significance:
I believe virtual pets are the closest example to my new definition of interaction because not only does the interaction feel personal, but it also expresses an emotion to the user that the user can then reciprocate. The two projects I analyzed in my Preparatory Research Project Sleep Art Machine and Order to Control helped me understand my goal for the project: to make interaction between user and machine to feel personal and expressive. Sleep Art taught me how I didn’t want my interaction to feel: invasive, cold, and separate from the user. However, I really liked Order to Control’s attempts to not test the boundaries between two set binary ideas: legality and morality. They not only tested the user’s understanding of these two strict definitions, but also used the user’s interactions with the art to inform the message — the user’s interaction with the machine then felt meaningful and felt like an extension of them.
For further research into my own project, I looked at VICENews’ article on Tamagotchi’s and their analysis into the toy’s popularity, but then to narrow the scope into interactive art I looked at an installation at USC called What makes a Monster? an installation based on pixel art animation on “monsters” in literature such as Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, the Hunchback of Notre Dame, and Lovecraftian Monsters such as Ghast and Cthulu. The pixel art rendering of these classic “monsters” change based on user interaction with it: how close they get, whether or not they try to touch the installation, and was coded on Unity.
While the scope of my project will be a lot smaller, I hope to also test the boundary between what we socially are told to “fear” and what we are told to “love. That is what I hope to convey using my project “ManaMonsters” — while the project is based off of the functions of the highly popular “Tamagotchi,” it, like Order to Control, tests the boundary between aesthetic “prettiness” and “ugliness,” and how that affects human empathy with mechanical interaction. Like Tamagotchi, my project is intended for young children, because I find that at a young age we are influenced by society to separate things into “ugly” and “cute,” and choose what features we want to alienate. I want to aim my project at young kids because they do not fully understand what they should fear and what they should love yet based on aesthetic features, and also because it is fundamentally a cute pet for them to play with. For practical applications I see the project continually being played with as an extension of the user like the Tamagotchi, and hopefully it can redefine what we see as loveable. For example, like Pokemon, I and a lot of my friends were able to love a lot of Pokemon that might normally be seen as “ugly” or “scary” and I hope to continue that trend with ManaMonsters.