For this week’s critical play, I played Wobble Dogs, a whimsical game about breeding unique cartoon dogs. The game, made by Animal Uprising and published by Secret Mode, targets a general audience and is available on Steam and Nintendo Switch.
Wobble Dogs is a perfect example of emergent narrative. Being a sandbox game, there is no predetermined plot, story, or goal, and the main things that the player is expected to do is to take good care of their dogs and create unique breeds utilizing the gene and gut flora system. The gene and gut flora system are the central mechanics of the game and are what players need to leverage to change the appearance of dogs and their offsprings. In the game, the players have various kinds of food to feed to the dogs, and each kind of food contains different gut bacteria that affect the growth and mutation of a dog in different ways. For example, bacteria from French fries tend to make a dog’s body longer as it grows up, while those from baby teeth would make the dogs whiter and shinier. Players can also breed new puppies from adult dogs, during which the genes and traits of the parents will be mixed and mutated. Specifically, every round of crossbreeding gives the player a litter of puppies, and the player can either choose one as the final puppy or crossbreed them further, giving player the ability to choose and reinforce certain traits. Social behaviors of the parents, such as laziness and friendliness, are also passed down to the puppy.
What I really love about the game is how the interaction between players and dogs as well as those between dogs themselves are implemented, as they help build a relationship between the player and the game. In the game, you can praise or scold dogs, which can help encourage or discourage certain behaviors. You also get to pet your wobble dogs, which not only let them do a cute belly flop, but also encourage mutations in certain cases. Dogs also interact with each other depending on their social traits, some may be more solitary while others may be snatching toys from each other all the time. The social traits shown directly in the bottom UI panel may count as a form of direct characterization, while the interactions between dogs and players serves as a more important form of indirect characterization that makes the wobble dogs feel more alive and draws the player to the game world.
Moreover, your dogs do not live forever, and the game will remind you to when a dog is close to passing away and giving you the option to focus your camera on the old dog before it passes. When a dog dies, it would collapse and do one last howl with the entire dog pack, then leave behind disintegrated body parts. Players can obtain a dog core from its body, which can either be used to build a grave for the dog or cracked open and fed to another dog to increase the latter’s lifespan. In the beginning of the game, the game does not explicitly inform your that dogs will die at some point, so it really made me quite sad when my first dog in the game eventually passed away as I gave it one last pet. In a way, the death of dogs is the main narrative conflict and one of the procedures and rules in the game that players have to contend with, and it makes the player care more about the wellbeing of their dogs knowing that at some point they will pass on. The ability to build a grave for dogs also help memorize the history of the player as a dog breeder and preserve the emergent narrative of the game by recording down the various dogs that the players bred and cared for. All these mechanisms come together to create a world that, despite its cartoonish and whimsical appearance, draws the attention and care of the players.
Ethics Discussion
In Wobble Dogs, one of the achievements called “Negative Reinforcement” requires the player to scold the dog upon a behavior such that the action bar for that behavior hits the lowest value (-4), and as someone who really love dogs, I really don’t have the heart to scold these cute dogs no matter what they are doing. This can be generalized to achievement/unique contents in games that are locked behind actions that certain players may deem unacceptable or unmoral, such as the genocide route in Undertale and the snowgrave route in Deltarune, where the players have to go out of their way in an almost antisocial fashion to access content unique to these routes. For some players, especially completionists, this could present a conflict where they are forced to do things they don’t want to access certain content and lore of the game, and it could be better especially for more narrative-heavy games, to make core lore available to the players no matter their narrative choices. In some cases, this can also be used for meta-commentary of the game that prompts players to reflect on whether the achievement system or a completionist mindset manipulated them to do things they otherwise wouldn’t have done, such as Chara’s final conversation with the player in the genocide route of Undertale.
