So, I’ve been wondering. Not enough to try to gather formal data but enough to muse out loud. Is there a correlation between interest in IF and liking/having cats? Because it seems like some people in the IF community have mentioned they have cats, or like cats, so I wondered if there was a pattern. A personality thing, maybe. I’ve read articles in the past about personality differences between cat owners and dog owners and thought it was an interesting concept.
I do too. There are a lot of people who mention them. Mine certainly help me calm down during an odd Inform error.
I’d guess that since cats aren’t as super-social, and our games are less social, that correlates. This may be playing to stereotypes, but the cat vs dog ratio seems higher than in the general population.
The only dog in-game I can think of is from Beet the Devil. But I can think of lots of examples of cats in games.
Huh. What an interesting connection to make.
I’ve always had at least two cats at any one time - mostly three. Five cats total for most of my life, and companionship with two more.
IFers are cat people. Whoda thought.
(Sorry, having some trouble with replying here.)
Huh. I wasn’t even thinking in terms of how often cats and dogs appear in games. Judging by the “cat” and “dog” tags on IFDB, though, dogs appear to be (slightly) winning in that respect. Time to make some more cat games?
I grew up with both cats and dogs. The pet I most want now is a dog.
Overlap: fans of IF who like cats and who are also fans of Terry Pratchett, and I suspect there’ll be more than a few, will enjoy Pratchett’s book “The Unadulterated Cat”.
This just reminded me of a funny and weird review of a game called ”Walk the Dog”, over at the intfiction.org forum. I believe this is a review of a game that never existed and it was all a Borges-style invention of the late Conrad Cook. Regardless, it’s about dogs.
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Someone could actually write that game.
It’d be a weird game, sure, but that’s the fun part.
Might not be actually fun to play. The “dog sim” parts put me off.
Even more tangential: a few years ago someone recommended to me a book of silly poems about cats, Old Possum’s Book of Practical Cats by T. S. Eliot. I hadn’t realized T. S. Eliot even wrote those sorts of poems; I’d thought of him as very highbrow. I suppose authors can’t always be put in boxes so easily. He probably never thought they’d be made into a musical someday.
Cats like sedate people who read or write. More lap time. The appreciation is reciprocated.
Dogs need to be walked which is outdoor physical activity.