Virtual Pets

Sometimes I think I’m a little too attached to the idea of pets, not just my pets themselves (though obviously I’m very attached to them), but to the simple idea of having a pet.

I’m a geek. I’ve been a geek for a very long time. I started playing role playing games (Dungeons & Dragons) in third grade. I met C while we were pretending to be vampires. And one of the things we still do together is play Word of WarCraft. Within WoW and games like it, there are characters archetypes referred to as “Pet Classes”. These are characters where some of their power comes from the fact that they have a companion to help them.

C and I both really like playing pet classes, especially the Hunter in WoW where one of the first things you do is go out and tame a “wild beast” to have has your companion. You are capable of taming more beasts throughout the game.

It used to be that as you got to higher levels, you would want to go get some special pets, wild beasts that appeared only rarely. Some of them had special powers; others simply had a different look than anything else in the game. But while your original pet did level with you, one of the ways to grow the power of the character was to tame new pets and learn their skills. (WoW has changed this recently, so that all pets are the same until you train them differently.)

On my own, I would have utterly failed at that part. C would always have to remind me that I needed to go tame X creature to learn a new level of Y power, even if I didn’t keep that creature as a pet.

The reason this was hard for me? I didn’t ever want to give up my first pet. I was too attached, especially on my first hunter. Her pet from the beginning was a boar, but the programming on the boars in the game gives them moves that are somewhat dog like- a butt wiggle, an almost play bow, etc.

This is what my “new” boar looks like, except that mine has red where this has blue

I did eventually trade my first boar for a second boar that looked a little cooler, but in my mind, I had to create a story first, a story where I wasn’t actually switching boars but where the experience of going through this cavern changed my boar.

You may think I’m joking, but sadly, I’m really not. I had to create the story in my mind of my boar changing, and I even said it out loud to C, before I could bring myself to switch out pets. I made that switch maybe around level 25. My character is now level 72, and that boar is still with me.

WoW has made changes in the last year or so so that not only do you get to differentiate your pet by choosing their powers, but also now you are allowed an unlimited number of pets. You used to be limited by level and money. In the early days (before I started playing, but not before C did), you could have only one pet. Then they expanded it to three at the highest levels. Now, it’s unlimited.

Silly as it seems, that makes me feel much better. It means that if I see an animal I love the look of, I can tame it and have it as a companion without ever having to abandon the pets I’ve had with me for levels and levels. And I’ll bet one of the reasons the programmers at WoW made that decision is that I’m not the only one who got attached to some pixels on a screen, wiggling their butts.