Why Game? 1 - TextFiles.com

ack down on the ground. I picked back up the
DS and once again went through the motions
of having my dog sit. When I reached the end
I said, “sit” and found that both the onscreen
dog and my real dog were sitting down. “Good
girl,” I told the pair of dogs. And I patted Popper
on the head with my left hand while petting
Pooper on the head with my stylus. I still hadn’t
received confirmation that my virtual dog had
learned how to sit, so I led her through the mo-
tions again and said, “sit” when the time came.
Popper started barking and jumping up trying to
grab the DS. I had to find something for her to
do while I played. I realized that I hadn’t fed her
yet, so I set the DS down on the end table and
put some food and water into her dog dishes.
When I came back to my system, a confirmation
was on the screen telling me that she had finally
learned how to sit. I looked up at Popper and
she was busy eating, so I quietly told Pooper to
“sit.” She sat down right away, so I rubbed her
on the head until some sparks appeared indicat-
ing that she was happy with me. Luckily, Popper
was eating her food and didn’t budge.
I decided that I would have to wait until
later to try the rest of the voice commands, so
I tried out the rest of what the game had to
offer by buying and feeding food and water to
my virtual dog and throwing and retrieving a
Tennis Ball. One advantage to the virtual dog is
that when you throw a virtual tennis ball the dog
actually allows you to take it from her mouth
after she retrieves it. When I play ball with
Popper, she always forces me to play tug of war
every time she brings the ball back to me. The
two games mesh together into something like a
fetch of war.
By now, Popper had finished eating and
was sitting in her doggy bed with her head
hanging lazily from the side. I decided to see
what taking the Nintendog for a walk was like,
so clicked on that icon and drew the path of a
walk to and from the budget pet store, going
through two question mark icons along the
way. As she followed the path that I drew, she
stopped to go to the bathroom at least two
times, stopped to eat trash once, and stopped
once to give me a present containing a picture
of a dog that, according to the caption, “dogs
aren’t very fond of.” When we arrived at our
destination, I bought more food and water,
then left the store and continued on home. On
the way home, my dog stopped to go to the
restroom at least three more times, and I ran
into someone else walking their chihuahua,
who reprimanded me for not taking care of my
dog’s accidents. When we got back to the virtual
room, I fed her some water then tried to take
her out again. A prompt came up telling me to
try again later. I played Frisbee with the dog
for a bit and then ran out of things that I could
do without speaking, so I saved my game and
popped in the Jump Superstars cartridge to play
a few rounds. Popper grabbed her stuffed snail
toy and kept herself entertained by trying to
tear it apart.
A little while later, while I was still playing
Jump Superstars, my girlfriend finally arrived
back at home. I’ve been telling her about Nin-
tendogs for a while, but she hasn’t shown any
interest, saying that she would prefer to play
with a real dog. Now that I had the game home,
I popped it in the DS and asked her to check out
my new puppy. She scoffed and threw the dog
its toy, almost to prove a point. I figured that
with Popper distracted I would be able to play
with Pooper again. I pushed the power button
on the DS only to find that she was hungry and
thirsty. I fed her and gave her water, then called
her over and said, “sit.” Popper immediately quit
playing with Christina and came to sit next to
Real Dog vs. Nintendog (Real Dog Wins) 67