The promise of Pet Society

I’ve been a big fan of Playfish’s Pet Society game. Like a lot of game developers, I began playing the game in order to scope it out. Eventually I spent $80 on objects for this little creature and its tiny house. By the time I stopped playing, I was a Level 24 Pet. I wasn’t spending enough time in the game to feel that my money had bought me any kind of different experience.

In truth, my money had NOT bought me any kind of different experience – merely stuff. I love stuff, don’t get me wrong, but my significant investment in the game wasn’t allowing me to level up any faster. There was no added interactivity or further engagement to be had. As far as I’ve been able to tell as a player, when Pet Society gets a new feature it is released to everyone regardless of level.

Since the time that I began playing, in the spring of 2009, Playfish has added a hand-holding first-five-minutes experience that the game originally lacked. Pet Society actually forced all players to go through the new FFM experience when it launched. As a player I was annoyed that I had to tick their boxes (and rip up one of my precious fruit trees to plant a flower!) but as a developer/researcher I was actually interested to see the new experience. Essentially you just navigate around the various menus and perform a few tasks. Icons glow, messages pop up, etc. I smell a questing system!

This belies the promise of Pet Society. It took me a long time to figure out what was fun for me in Pet Society. I didn’t enjoy the minigames you play with your pet which are part very simple watch-and-click games/part Nintendogs grooming. I discovered that the fastest way to level up was to visit my friends who were playing the game and feed them one piece of food. This became very monotonous. So, my fun was shopping; really, the collection of stuff.

Eventually I became so bored that I stopped playing. I can’t help but think how much more fun the game would be if they wed the collecting-stuff behavior to a light questing system. I’d have some reason to stay in the game and continue spending money. But perhaps questing is a subscription model behavior. Pet Society did already get me for $80 after all.