Video games together with animals

(This post originally appeared in May 2012 but was lost when the server was hacked in 2015. This is a recovered version.)

About two months ago, some FB colleague posted a link to the wonderful Playing with Pigs project. This morning, another FB link took me to iPad games for cats. These are genuinely interactive efforts, designed to invite the animals (or plants?) to play. That makes them different from, say, RSPB webcams that let people see birds, or garduino/growduino projects that automate small going areas and allow humans better understanding of plant environments. One of my long-term interests is in discovering moments of collusion across species, and these projects, because they mediate the encounter through hardware, expose and modify that collusion.

From these two links, I am struck by three questions.

First: how many projects are there out there that use personal digital devices of one sort or another to mediate or generate play between humans and non-humans in new ways?  If anyone reading knows of more such projects please let me know in the comments or by email. I’ll 

Second: There’s a distinct seriousness of purpose here.

The Playing with Pigs site is a wonderful effort to connect us emotionally to a food species. I expect the pork marketing boards of the world will be desperate to sabotage the project, but to me at least this is the level of attentiveness that is morally required of anyone who is going to eat meat. Small-scale hunters and farmers are much more aware of the moods, worries and joys of their chosen food species than folks who buy a pork chop from the supermarket.

At first I took the cats article to be much less serious; but the review of the cat piano app shows that the author watched a cat carefully while testing it, and the instructions for cat-proofing the iPad show that the author is not writing flippantly, but with long-term cat-human-iPad wellbeing in mind.

Third: clearly, Donna Haraway already wrote about the possibilities here, and in some ways there have been laboratory-scale engagements mediated through technology ever since Pasteur or Pavlov. What’s different about these? Is it the political scale, the accessibility, the ludic aspect? Or is this just one of those moments when something that has quietly become ordinary suddenly stand out, but actually nothing’s new?