Surprisingly, there is actually a market for the likes of iPad apps for our feline friends. There’s not a big demand for it, but assuming the developers know what they’re doing, cats will play games on tablets. The idea of video games for cats even has a story behind it.
See, a small two-man team called Hiccup has a little bit of a failure of a game, something by the same of Jacobs Shapes, a game aimed at children that apparently isn’t as child-friendly as they’d hoped. So in search of one last small project before getting back on with what they’ve only described as “real” work. Now we’ve all seen those cute little YouTube videos of cats playing human games on iPads, and would you have guessed? The pair decided to make a simple game aimed at cats.
The point of the three week project was to create a simple app with some realistic movement. So, the result? A laser pointer or a mouse, or even a butterfly, darts around the screen in a realistic manner, enticing the cat to play. The kitty then get’s to jump all over the place trying to tap the object. If the object is touched, the cat is rewarded with a sound. Simple enough right?
Due to the fact that we don’t fully understand how cats see, the guys at Hiccup have made sure the levels are high contrast, just to be safe. So the laser level features a bright red dot on a dark background, and the lives of the mouse level offers a dark mouse on a bight background.
Now, even more surprising than everything up until this point is that apparently, cat’s are suckers for DLC. In the Games for Cats app, it seems some mischievous kitties have been buying the in-app purchase of the mouse without the approval of their owners. It seems that the originally released version of the game made getting the DLC a little too easy. In most cases this is good, but when a cat starts spending your money.. maybe not so much. Hiccup have stated that they got in a fair bit of trouble with pet owners “People were accusing us of tricking cats into making purchases. We got a ton of comments on our iTunes page, people accusing us of trying to rip of them off.” The solution? A simple human test. The app gets the owner to place their hand on the screen, and the app tracks the four contact points and whether or not they move. Any cat would have a hard time copying a palm/finger reader… right?
Considering the simplicity of it all, I’m surprised someone else hasn’t tried this sooner. I just find it a smidgen weird, cats actually using an iPad. Is the start of cats with square eyes sat in front of their own computers?
