Cyber house rules
Exhuming digital pets in the fantastic, deconstructed Cyberpet Graveyard.
Where do Tamagotchi go when they die? Unlike living pets, they’re not so easily disposed of down the toilet, or buried at the end of the garden. No, even when your digital pet conks out, you get the eerie feeling that an imprint of the creature still exists in some data form. Cyberpet Graveyard is a game that explores such digital residue, by having you poke around in a bunch of folders in a big zip file. You’ll recognize its developer Nathalie Lawhead if you’ve played Everything is Going to be OK: a similarly jittery collection of little animation sequences, quizzes, and other interactive ephemera. Its characterful alien creatures looked like they had escaped out of The Trap Door, and that aesthetic carries over to Cyberpet Graveyard, multiplied by a factor of two.
Like Everything is Going to be OK, Cyberpet is bitty, spread over multiple applications, but also text files, images, and videos. There’s no central hub—save the primary directory holding everything together—but inside you’ll find the titular pet graveyard, along with the constituent parts (short stories, pictures) of a wicked choose-your-own-adventure game. Dig in to discover an assortment of cyberpets, each with their own folder of supplementary materials, and an .exe file that summons them to your screen.
Now to draw attention to the humble game window, which normally sits invisibly at the edges of an interactive world. Here they move of their own accord, as the cheeky, hyperactive, and notably alive cyberpets bound around your desktop, skittering away as you try to close them, and even spawning additional windows to torment you with. Each cyberpet arrives in its own window, maybe 200 pixels tall and wide—the creature performing some adorable function on a subtle loop, and then reacting to your clicks with visible happiness, mischief, pain, or disgust.
Where Her Story is a game about exploring a PC, Cyberpet is a game about exploring your PC, Lawhead making great use of an underutilized patch of gaming real estate: Folder directories. Why do we generally consider the ‘game’ bit to happen when we click on the .exe file? What about the readme or manual, or any other files lurking inside?
Creature Comfort
These fluidly animated monsters would be almost as compelling when selected from an in-game menu. But it’s the presentation that makes it: The blurred boundary between in-game or not that makes the act of clicking through its folders so exciting. These apps, but also these images and tantalizing short story scraps, and even the folder names themselves contain clues to an overall narrative. You can learn a heck of a lot about someone just by snooping around in their computer—and a lot about these weird digital pets by doing the same. What a brilliant way to structure a videogame.
Cyberpet is a bitty game, spread out over multiple applications