Harrin Choi
Nintendogs
Nintendo for Nintendo DS and Switch
The goal of this game is to adopt and take care of 1–3 dogs, while forming an environment suitable for pets and making sure their needs are kept up to date.
Brief Description:
This is a simulation game in which you take on responsibilities as a new dog owner. These responsibilities include: walking, feeding, bathing, brushing, cleaning up after, and so much more. It is a role-playing game that catered to young children back when the Nintendo DS first came out. As you go through the game, you can train your dog, enter in competitions, play with friends, buy fancy toys / clothes, and do basically everything you could do with a dog in real life. This is the perfect game for children who want a dog, since it acts like a trial run that doesn’t have as devastating outcomes as real life (your dog will never die; he/she will just become dirty, starved, or run away if you neglect him/her).
Learning objectives:
- There’s no real prior knowledge you should have before playing this game. It’s intended for children to feel like they own something, therefore should take responsibility for. The platform, Nintendo DS, is super intuitive, since there are two screens (one being touch). As long as the child has knowledge of how to physically use a DS (or Switch), the rest of the game is catered to by instructional prompts. Most humans have that innate urge to take care of or nurture young, even at a really young age, so I guess that’s the only real skill you should have.
- However, this is a highly realistic game and the player has a large responsibility. It will prompt you to feed your dog, go on walks, pick up dog poop, and wash your dog when he/she is dirty. It also uses interactions with other NPCs to gauge whether or not you’re taking proper care of your dog. If you don’t play responsibly, the game will call you out or show you the consequences.
- For ex.) If you don’t pick up your dog poop during walks, you will get yelled at by a neighbor.
- Ex.) If you don’t feed your dog, it may run away.
- Ex.) If you mistreat it (pet it meanly or tease it), the dog can hate you for a small period of time.
So what does the player learn?
Proper Pet Care
- This is a pet simulation game that mimics real life with you as the owner. You navigate this world through the touch screen, which is also how you communicate with your dog. For someone who may not have the ability to take care of a dog, or never grew up around one, this is a really harmless, but useful way of teaching dog-parenting responsibility. It’s super accurately simulated, too, except with lower risks than real life.
Animal Hygiene
- You learn that a dog will get dirty after extended time outside, and when dogs get dirty, you should wash them. It goes through washing simulations, in which you learn how long to wash your dog for (until the color turns white) and how to properly groom him/her. If you’re harsh with your handling, your dog might dislike you and listen to you less.
- If you aren’t diligent with your dog’s hygiene, you will get points docked during competitions.
Economics
- There’s a store where you can buy special treats, uniforms, different shampoos, brushes, and items. There’s an economy to this game; getting a dog costs an adoption fee and the ways you can earn money are: going on walks and finding presents on the street (which you can then sell at the store) or placing in competitions. Either way, the player needs to be constantly working in order to better the environment for the dog. You can have multiple dogs, but that requires double the effort, since you need the money to take care of all of them as well as the time to take them on walks individually.
Training
- Another learning objective is how to train dogs. There’s a vocal feature in this game, in which you can record yourself saying different commands and teaching the dog his/her name. If you train your dog well, you can go out and compete in obedience trials, in which you and your dog have to perform in front of judges. If your voice is strange or pitchy, the dog may misunderstand the command. If you overtrain, your dog may exhibit signs of frustration or annoyance.
Knowing Limits
- This is an important skill to learn. As a child, it’s easy to go overboard, but there are features in this game that limit the player from overworking the dog. It’s important to know that dogs have limits and sometimes would like to be alone. The game also prevents you from overfeeding your dog, which is crucial to teach children.
- There are walking limits, competition limits, and limits to how many dogs you can keep at once.
Picking Up After Yourself
- There are a few features in this game that really get players into the habit of picking up after themselves. When you walk your dog, you have to pick up your dog’s poop. There’ll be a prompt, but if you ignore it, you’ll have to face your neighbors, who will berate you for not being clean.
- When you feed your dog or give water, you have to make sure to put the plate away (there’s a box you can click to get rid of it).
What are some transferable skills? (or takeaways from this game):
- It teaches dog-parenting etiquette. In real life, and even in this game, dogs require a certain level of socialization that comes in the form of walking, going to parks, and connecting with other friends’ dogs.
- You have to basically care for your dog every day or else it’ll get dirty, hungry, and/or run away. This is a real consequence. Nintendo doesn’t let their Nintendogs die, since the audience base is mostly children and Nintendo doesn’t really do deaths, but if you neglect your dog for a few days, there’ll be noticeable consequences.
- Hopefully, it raises the question of how hard it actually is to take care of a dog. If a child can’t play this game for more than a few weeks, or just completely neglects the dog in game, then you know that he/she isn’t ready for a real dog. If even adults can’t do this, then you know that they probably aren’t ready for a real dog.
- Routines → setting routines, even routes for walking, is a great way of forming routines for growing youth. Even logging in to feed their dogs shows responsibility and care. Yes, this isn’t a real game. Consequences aren’t real, but it’s a simulation. It’s practice for real life. If that’s not doable, then you shouldn’t do those actions in real life (in my opinion).
Mechanics, Dynamics, and Aesthetics
Mechanics: There are two screens on the Nintendo DS. The top screen is a normal screen that shows you everything that’s happening. The bottom screen is a touch screen, which you use to make decisions and interact with your dog. There will always be a Home button, which can be used to sometimes cancel your actions. There’s a save button, which you can use to save logs of your play to return to next time. There’s also a Shopping button, which you will be able to buy mostly everything you need. As your experience (gameplay duration) increases, the types of things you can buy at the store increase.
The rules of the game are simple: you are to keep and take care of a dog through 4 main systems: shopping, walking, competing, and staying at home (these are the main buttons the players will see).
You can check the dog’s status.
- Coat → will tell you whether or not your dog is dirty and what type of hair it has.
- Hunger + Thirst → it will tell you how hungry / thirsty your dog is
- Things Eaten → it will tell you the last thing your dog ate
Walking
- This is a large part of this game. Your house (or where you are most of the time) is in the center and based on your dog’s endurance, you can plan a walk around the neighborhood (like you draw lines around the roads, which you will follow on your walk).
- There are many things you can do, as your dog’s endurance builds.
- There’s the agility center, where you can practice different agility skills
- There are parks, where you can play fetch and socialize with other dogs
- There’s another store, that sells different items than the standard store
- And there are question marks, which means either:
— Bumping into a neighbor with a dog (NPC)
— Passing trash (which your dog may try to eat)
— Passing a gift (which your dog may or may not notice)
There are limits to your actions as a player.
- You cannot abuse your dog and it cannot die.
- You can only keep three dogs max at a time.
- You can keep some dogs at the kennel or if you really want, you can give your dog up for adoption (but be ready for the ultimate look of betrayal).
- The distance your dog can walk starts small and only increases in intervals if you walk him/her more.
- You’re physically limited to either your house, walks, the kennel, or competitions for the whole duration of the game. So mostly, you’ll be in your house.
- If you are rough with the touch screen, it will portray in-game. So if you’re brushing your dog and decide to tap the screen roughly at the dog, the dog will “feel” that and yelp. So touch screen sensitivity is a mechanic, but also teaches the player to be gentle.
- You can only use voice commands while training or at home.
- If your dog is tired, you need to let it rest before you’re allowed to do another activity.
- If you overwork or continuously bother your dog, he/she may become disobedient and snappy.
- There’s a night and day in this game, according to your device’s time.
- There’s a daily limit to how many times you can take your dog to a competition.
- Your dog will run away if you mistreat it. You can’t go outside to look for it; you just have to deal with a missing dog until it decides to come back.
Dynamics:
- Based on those rules, players can choose which activities they spend their dog’s energy on.
- Some people like to train their dogs in obedience or agility trials in order to earn prize money to buy specialty items.
- Some people like to take all their dogs on multiple walks in order to find presents or socialize with NPCs. Then they can sell these presents for money.
- Some people will dress their dogs up and focus most of their energy on collecting rare items of clothing.
- Some people just do nothing and pet their dogs and walk them. These people view this game more ritualistically, or like an actual responsibility.
- You can have up to 3 dogs, but that is 3x the work and food you need to give. So the more dogs you own, the more invested you’ll probably be in the game.
- The player chooses how dirty or clean, how well fed or starved, and how happy the dog is within the environment you’ve created.
- If the player mistreats the dog, he/she will probably not get that far in the game, since you need to build trust and experience (through gameplay) with the dog in order to actually reach more exciting places in the game.
- The beauty of this game is that it’s really what you make of it. You can have a bunch of untrained dogs, but it’s okay because you spend your time petting them and giving them love. That’s a perfectly fine way to play this game. There’s no person overseeing or judging how you spend your time, so you can really do whatever you want.
An example of dynamic:
- When you plan your walks, you can go to a variety of different places. A player might see this as a way to collect all the question mark boxes (potential gifts), or they may use this as a way to visit a training center or park.
- When you bump into a neighbor with a dog, you can either move closer to the other dog, pull your dog away and not socialize, or let your dogs meet. With every encounter, there’s the chance that your dogs might not get along. In those situations, you have the ability to move along to prevent negative consequences. If the dogs do get along, then you have the ability to stay and let your dog socialize, which will put it in a great mood.
- If you pass by a gift, you can either keep going or stop your dog and make him/her pick up the gift and bring it to you. If you miss stopping your dog from walking, then you can’t go back and the gift disappears.
- If you pass by garbage, your dog will stop to sniff or even potentially eat. You have to prevent your dog from eating trash by pulling away from it.
Having a touch screen gives many options to the user, especially during walks. It gives a sense of freedom, since how you interact with the DS will dictate your gameplay.
Aesthetics: This game is a role-playing game. There’s a sense of fulfillment when you can train your dog really well and win competitions, which also adds to the notion of challenge. It’s not really easy to place in these competitions, even though you’re competing against NPCs. It’s actually quite hard to train, which is why it’s rewarding when you win. Some people choose this as a form of submission, though, playing it as a pastime game and not really choosing to compete. There’s also a sense of discovery, since as you get closer to your dogs, you can explore more places on your walks and meet new people and dogs. Also, there’s always the potential of adopting a completely new dog, with a completely different personality and stamina, which adds to the feeling of discovery. I believe that dressing your dogs up with the items you collect is also a form of expression, though I think it’s highly uncomfortable for dogs in real life.
Instructional Principles
Spacing → Because this game locks you out of walks or competitions if you overdo it, it teaches you to space out the activities you want to do with your dog. It also teaches you that there’s a limit to learning, as if you try to teach your dog too many tricks at once (or even more than one), your dog will act out more or not be as obedient as if you were to just teach one trick per day. You have to learn, as the player, what your dog’s limits are and space out training accordingly.
Feedback → During walks, you get feedback on your dog’s appearance or pet care by neighbors. If you haven’t washed your dog in a while, the neighbor NPCs may suggest you do so or make a comment about your dog. During competitions, you get immediate feedback and a score by judges (also NPCs). Also, there are prompts that pop up sometimes (text boxes on screen) that give you feedback on what you’re doing.
Metacognition → There’s a “Dog’s Status” page, in which you can see stats for each dog you own. If your dog needs anything, if it’s hungry, thirsty, or dirty, there’ll be visual evidence, but this page will also give you a summary of its health / knowledge. Based on this, players can make sure their dog’s health is kept up to date, and fix anything that looks incorrect. This page is available at any time.
Synthesis + Critique
I personally think this game does an amazing job with its learning objectives, its MDA is solid and works well with each other within the confines of the game, and its non-intrusive instructional principles. This is a simulation game, so what you’re supposed to take from it is straightforward. It does a good job showing the responsibilities and limitations of taking care of a dog, as well as shows proper consequences (for children) for not taking enough care. The objective of this game is to take care of a dog, and there are many methods whereby you can take care of it. The Nintendog’s needs are highly realistic and the way it interacts with the player is, too. Each dog you take care of will have a different personality, and there are different things you can do with it. The more dogs you choose to take care of, the more responsibility you’ll feel, but with a greater sense of fulfillment. This game has great mechanics, though it gets boring for me as an adult (it’s meant for children, which makes sense), so I wish it was more dynamic (though my critique is on the ORIGINAL Nintendogs. There have been upgrades to 3DS and the Switch, which are probably more dynamic). I wish there were also more conspicuous instructional principles, since the game’s instructions are mostly open ended and what you take away from it probably varies greatly from person to person.
I also wish I had more to say about the learning objectives, but since it’s a simulation game, what you’re really just learning is how to take care of a dog. The whole game revolves around your dog, and I wish I could say this game teaches you good responsibility, but it really just teaches you all the steps to taking care of a dog, making sure it’s alive and well, then gives you options to do the same stuff over and over again (walking, competitions, etc). I guess getting through the mundaneness also helps for when you actually get a dog in real life and realize you have to do everything you did in Nintendogs, in reality.
This game has highly specific educational potential. Instead of strategy, it teaches you how to make the most out of what could seem really repetitive. It’s perfect for those who’ve never owned a dog before, who want to get a slight, digital glimpse of what it’s like (though Nintendogs is so much easier than real life, since you don’t actually have to move) because the game’s mechanics are really relatable to real life. Just in real life, you’re not limited to “dog-only” activities. There’s no reward for this game nor is there game completion, but it’s ultimately super satisfying to see the environment you’ve made for these fake dogs who will slowly take over your heart. It teaches nurturing, empathy, and care→ things that aren’t traditionally taught, which is why this is a really good simulation game.
(PS. I took pictures from google, since I couldn’t take a good screenshots on my janky DS without an emulator)
