Passionate About Pet Society

There's a story here, about a unique, beautiful, nonviolent game that can be enjoyed by players no matter what their language.

When the history of online social gaming is written, I hope someone recognizes that Playfish was able to put lightning in a bottle. With simple, nonverbal choices, people of any age from countries around the globe could enjoy an online experience that could have been elevator pitched as "Second Life for Three-Year Olds." Pet Society was a beautiful, relaxing experience that you could share with friends no matter how far away in space or time. No matter what your age, part of you could touch that sweet, direct enjoyment of life that we see in toddlers, and dimly recall within ourselves.

What no one may have banked on is the degree of passion that people came to feel for Pet Society. In the three weeks since Electronic Arts announced that Pet Society would end on June 14, players from around the globe have banded together on Facebook. The largest group, Please Save Pet Society, has nearly 30,000 players from around the world, posting in many languages, with one common message: "EA, don't kill my pet."

What is this lightning in a bottle?  In Pet Society the onscreen arrangement of pixels that constitutes your pet becomes part of your life, like a beloved household pet that greets you every day. Emotionally, shutting down this game is like having animal control come and euthanize your healthy pet in real life.  Through some kind of magic, the pets take on a personality and identity. You can make choices about color and features and gender. The pet seems to have a mind of its own.

Tiny choices in setting up the game ecology created something larger, a love that transcends language.  "Pet Society" in other countries is the equivalent of "Humane Society" in the U.S. The love of pets and desire to help them runs deep in humanity.

Do game companies have any idea who their true market is? Who are their "whales"? (That's apparently the industry term for people like my husband and I, who spend money on games we like, as a vote of confidence.) To announce the closure after a recent promotion offering a discount rate on the "Pet Cash" you use in the game, with no alternative for transferring that money to any other game, left many people feeling burned. This has happened with other games, driving down the number of "whales" who will continue to support the industry.

Do game companies realize that their players are not all teenagers? And that they have memories? How is it profitable to anger and alienate millions of players? Many are vowing to Boycott EA, or simply to never spend money on online gaming again.

How can a company that was worth $300 million be thrown away in less than three years? The brilliant game designers and artists who created this tiny wonderland of Pet Society were given pink slips, when they deserve creative accolades. Work groups around the globe have been laid off. What kind of crazy world is it, where it makes economic sense to chew talent up, then spit them out?

Sadly, last week Electronic Arts refused the request of Pet Society users to keep the game in a grandfathered state. We don't need the quests, the weekly themes, and the constant parade of new swag. We simply want to continue to spend time in this charming and creative place, where you never know quite what is going to happen as you visit your friends. It's been a quiet place to unwind, and to marvel at what your friends' pets have been up to. It's not about the levels, or the "new high score" you achieve.

I hope some other company is able to buy Pet Society. They would rightfully earn the gratitude of over a million active players, and the respect of those players' friends. On pages that monitor stats of active users (appdata.com), Pet Society ranks 121st in all apps on Facebook, including non-games like Pinterest and Yahoo.  Surely there is some value in a loyal following.

The illustrations in this post were done by Pet Society players around the world, and shared on Facebook. Hope to give proper credits later. Please comment if this is your art, and how you would like to be credited. 

The International Appeal of Pet Society

Just found, via LinkedIn, of all places, a Spanish language gaming blog with a post that appears to be about Saving Pet Society. (My Spanish, sad to say, is what one learns growing up in California, where navigating maps and menus is a basic tool for social survival.)

Some great art work transcends language, as the original Playfish game did. This must have been done for one of the theme weeks.

Pet Society players are exhorting their friends to play as long as the game is there, in hope some company will think an established game with a million players a month is worth acquiring. 

And of course the moral:

Spanish readers, please visit this blog and share your thoughts! 

http://www.melocotonyregaliz.com/2013/04/campana-contra-el-cierre-de-pet-society.html

Pet Society transcends borders.

Videos: A Look At Pet Society through YouTube

Some wonderful home-grown videos are surfacing on YouTube, from the international base of Pet Society players.

This one minute video was created by Jamie, an engineer from Singapore. The footage shows the pets visiting each other, a key act in Pet Society. The original game was designed by Playfish to transcend language, and featured theme weeks from many different countries.

"Adios, Pet Society" is another short, loving tribute to the joy of the game. The author is fluent in many languages and may have picked Spanish for the titles because Pet Society has many players who speak it.

A longer but quite charming 5-minute tour-de-force from the French: a Pet Society homage to Disney's Snow White.  The Pet Society scenes were created from bits of art that you can buy within the game and arrange as you wish. Then the auteur must costume the various pets and lure them into posing -- they can be just as difficult as real-life pets or children in that respect! 

So in a few minutes, without having to play the game, you have had a glimpse into the sweet world that is slated to vanish on June 14, 44 days from now. 

PS -- If you are hiring for video games, any graphic artists or game designers who have Playfish or Pet Society on their resume should go to the top of your pile. This is wonderful work.

Uprising: The Pets Fight Back!

It's been only two weeks since Electronic Arts announced that they would shut down their Flash-based games, including Pet Society, a game played by millions around the globe.

EA may not understand that Pet Society more than a game whose players can be moved on to the next shoot-em-up. Playfish -- the company that originated Pet Society, which EA bought for $300M in 2011-- put lightening in a bottle. They created a magical, creative environment where the pixilated pets seemed to take on a life of their own. The nonverbal environment transcended borders, and drew players from every country with internet access.

By corporate standards nowadays, it apparently makes sense to spend $300M one year and shut down the operations completely two years later. To Pet Society players, shutting down this game is like losing a beloved family pet because the animal control officer exterminated them. A business decision is affecting not only the lives of thousands of employees around the globe who are getting pink slips but millions of players who are vowing to never spend money on a game again, or boycott any EA products. (Note: if you are a hiring influence, snap up any artists or game designers who worked for Playfish, particularly on Pet Society because they do brilliant work.)

Pet Society players are banding together. Within hours there was a petition on change.org urging EA to save the game (over 16,000 signatures so far, somewhat hampered by being a US-based, English-speaking site). Several groups formed on Facebook; SavePetSociety has over 27,000 with people posting in many languages. Others are putting up blogs, like this one. People who don't tweet are learning to use Twitter.

Some wonderful videos capture the interactive magic of Pet Society; will be posting links separately.

Today EA may be realizing it has some unhappy customers. But this is not the answer.

Message: We love this game. It transcends language. We appreciate the peaceful haven it provides, a space you can share with your children, a consolation in times of stress and illness, an outreach to friends across the miles who have their own troubles. We marvel at the creativity of the game designers who supply such wonderful items to use within the game. We laugh at the photos we can take as our pets interact with each other and their environment. We remember in our hearts what it was to be a child.

For every nine people who are mad as hell and walking away from spending money on games at all, or boycotting EA, there is one who wants to see Pet Society preserved in some fashion. Some of us are willing to pay for a subscription-based service, if that is what it takes. We don't need new swag or quests; we just want to see our pets and visit their friends around the world. There's enough material in the game as it is to play with for years to come.

I fervently hope some arrangement can be reached before EA scraps the code and scrubs the servers on June 14. This game does not deserve to die.

Hedwig, Kali, and the Petlings

Here's a little memorial I prepared for both Pet Society: Last Call and my blog at Strangegirl.com: 

Hedwig and one of her beloved petlings.

Social gamers already know that Electronic Arts will be shuttering several of its popular Facebook titles on June 14. The decision is controversial for a number of reasons, but my primary issue with the decision is very personal. Quite simply, I love my Pet, Hedwig, and her little kitten and unicorn petlings.

When I heard that the game will be going away, I decided it was time to get some use out of the hundreds of outfits, pieces of furniture, and food items Hedwig's amassed over the last four years. I'm still in the midst of a mad dash to screen cap every inch of her oddly-designed little Sarah Winchester house, a veritable Pet Society Llanada Villa. Heck, I'll probably be screen capping up until the second they shut down the game servers. 

While Flash glitches and real-life work and social obligations have kept me away from the game for long stretches of time, I still cherish the quiet, comfortable neighborhood-world that Pet Society offers me.

My favorite ingame activity was - and is - building rooms and gardens in which my pet - and my friends' pets - could frolic. I loved decorating for the holidays, and while Halloween and Christmas got the most room space in the game, I managed a Thanksgiving kitchen and a Valentine garden, too.

One of our Halloween rooms.

I didn't throw lavish theme parties every month like Danine, and my room designs were always more aesthetic than deeply conceptual, like James' and Christina's rooms. Still, the creative potential presented in every beautiful item and theme was inspiring. In many respects, the home atmosphere presented in Pet Society picks up where the "Classic" Neohomes on Neopets.com left off; it's gentle, it's pretty, and it's a unique platform for sharing quirky ideas with online friends.

At the end of the day, it's been nice knowing that Hedwig and pals would there for me when I needed some quiet time away from my everyday stress. I'm going to miss them when they move on.

Hedwig plays the pipe organ a L'Opera Petulaire.

Pet's Performance

In a post on the Save Pet Society blog the author requests (on behalf of many of us) "If it is infeasible to develop new themes, we would be more than happy for things to stay as they are, so long as we can still visit our pets. The thousands of items (clothing, furniture, decor, etc.) Playfish has already designed for this game are enough to keep us happy for years."

I wholeheartedly agree.  The artists and designers of Pet Society really understood how to create useful (in fact, multi-useful) items and settings that could mix and match in virtually limitless ways.  To prove the point, I went into Pet Society yesterday and created a series of vignettes, depicting the 14 canon shows in the Gilbert and Sullivan repertoire, to show how versatile the existing stock can be.

So, in order of initial production date:

Thespis, or, The Gods Grown Old

Trial by Jury

The Sorcerer

HMS Pinafore, or, The Lass that Loved a Sailor

The Pirates of Penzance, or, The Slave of Duty

Patience, or, Bunthorne's Bride

Iolanthe, or, The Peer and the Peri

Princess Ida, or, Castle Adamant

The Mikado, or, The Town of Titipu

Ruddigore, or, The Witch's Curse

The Yeomen of the Guard, or, The Merryman and his Maid

The Gondoliers, or, The King of Barataria

Utopia, Limited, or, The Flowers of Progress

The Grand Duke, or, The Statutory Duel

And there you have it.  A concrete example of how many different looks I was able to get with my existing inventory and a few free minutes.  Even if the game was not updated, there would still be plenty of play value.  So I urge EA to consider keeping the game alive, or sell the property to a company that would continue to run it, even if they never updated it.  My pet still has stories she wants to tell.

The Long-Awaited Virtual Hang Out

This is a sort of game I dreamed of finding for years. I had long wanted to play a computer game that focused on providing a pleasant place to hang out.  Not thrilling. Not competitive. Not risky and costing multiple virtual lives. But an imaginary place on a computer to spend however long surrounded by a subtly varied environment of sights and sounds and contents that engage the mind gently.

About 30 years ago I recall playing (for a magazine review) a text adventure game that included a scene in a museum-style room. Some of the exhibit cases contained items with clues to solve puzzles on the path to completing and winning the game. But the setting included many other exhibits that I could navigate between to enjoy the fascinating descriptions of the contents. I wished there was a game with no puzzles to solve, no winning goal, but plenty of that style of descriptions of museum exhibits to entertain me at length.

Four years ago I was introduced to Pet Society on Facebook, I was amazed to find this was just the sort of virtual hangout I had dreamed of. Even better, it was a social game that had real people behind the scenes featuring each pet, not just static files on a disc.