The Psychology of Petting The Dog
In a world with so many wonderful games to play, it’s only natural to get some help with what to play next. Maybe someone with similar tastes to you is playing something new. Maybe your favourite streamer is going through a game that looks impressive. But for nearly half a million gamers, one social media account puts new games on their radar with very simple criteria:
Does it have a dog, and can you pet it?
Since March 2019, CanYouPetTheDog has kept gamers up to date with the cutest, most pettable dogs in video games. This account not only receives review copies of games featuring dogs to showcase to their audience, but developers will update their game to allow players to pet in-game dogs for an additional feature on the page.
As a lover of dogs and a lover of video games, I’m not free from the sin of being interested in a game because it has an adorable dog in it. But I also have a backlog of critically-acclaimed, genre-defining games to play, so why is the dog taking priority all of a sudden?
Determined to get to the bottom of this, I set out to research why we love video games dogs so much. Why do we get so excited at the prospect of petting a virtual dog? What is it about these little creatures that can tug at both our heartstrings and our pursestrings? After months of research and writing, I am delighted to share my aptly-named Dog-Nose Model of why we love video game dogs.
As usual, there will be a summary at the end if you don’t wish to read everything. I also want to disclose that I have no affiliation to or association with the CanYouPetTheDog account, I just thought this was a neat premise for an article. Now, let’s begin!
Contents
-
- The Dog-Nose Model
- Companionship and Loyalty
2.1. Dogs as Fluffy Functions
2.2. Dogs as Forever Friends
2.3. The Hachiko Effect - Joy and Comfort
3.1. Your Brain on Dog Pictures
3.2. Prosocial Power Fantasy
3.3. You’re the Dog Now, Man - Nurturing and Training
4.1. Can We Keep Him?!
4.2. Bringing It All Together - Summary
- Credits
- References
The Dog-Nose Model
Creating this article was a months-long process with dogs as the natural starting point. I catalogued as many beloved video game dogs as I could think of, their in-game mechanics and the reasons why people love them. This list was my basis for falling down many interesting research rabbit holes, which I believe I can sum up in three main categories. I could be boring and make an upwards-facing triangle diagram of these categories, or I could flip the diagram so that it looks like a dog nose!
It is my pleasure to share with you all my Dog-Nose Model for why we love video game dogs so much, breaking it down into three main reasons: companionship and loyalty; joy and comfort; and nurturing and training. Let’s go exploring these three reasons.
Companionship and Loyalty
The first part of this article is dedicated to the idea of dogs as loyal companions. These dogs help us defeat enemies, progress through the game, and are either connected to or directly progress the narrative of the game.
For this section, I want you to primarily think of dogs like Dogmeat from Fallout and D-Dog from Metal Gear Solid V: The Phantom Pain, with some other fun little examples of beloved gaming dogs thrown in throughout.
Dogs as Fluffy Functions
When I write my articles, there’s a versatile psychological theory that I like to sneak in that can help explain a range of questions, from “Why do I like video games?” to more niche questions like why we enjoy seeing and playing alongside furry companions in video games.
This theory is called Self Determination Theory [1] and is commonly used to explain what motivates us to get involved in hobbies, get things done, and to find enjoyment in the things that we do. Self Determination Theory argues that we derive motivation from three core elements: feeling personally connected to something, feeling in control of the outcome (like beating a boss), and feeling a sense of accomplishment from the outcome.
Let’s use these three core elements to explain why we enjoy playing games with our dog companions. As this article will explore, many of us have deep feelings for and connections to our furry friends, so it makes sense to choose a companion that we’re personally connected to when we love dogs so much.
For the next two elements, I want to use the example of D-Dog from Metal Gear Solid V: The Phantom Pain. D-Dog is a companion who fights by your side to keep you safe, attacking foes while also alerting you to other enemies and dangers like land mines. Compare this to a companion like Quiet with much wider enemy marking abilities who can take out enemies from a great distance. She’ll always have your back, but you’ll physically be in there alone.
Do you want to go in there alone, or would you much prefer a loyal dog by your side? When you make the decision to face an enemy base with your loyal D-Dog and the mission is successful, you get the satisfaction of knowing that the playstyle that you were in control of actively paid off, leading to a greater sense of accomplishment for the successful mission.
While it’s a theory I enjoy teaching people, it’s one I traditionally include at the start of an article as I find it doesn’t quite paint the full picture. For example, let’s say you’re playing Fallout and you’re personally connected to a range of potential companions, whether it be dogs (Dogmeat) or your love of the wild west (Cass). What’s to say that the dog option will win every time?
For the rest of the article, I’ll be exploring a wider range of research and theories to explore why we love dogs in games so much. For now, let’s stick with the idea of dogs as fluffy gameplay functions.
Dogs as Forever Friends
Please note that this subsection and the next will discuss pet loss and grief. If you are not in the right headspace to read this content, please proceed to the next section.
While companions like D-Dog and Dogmeat are incredibly helpful and lovable, I want to talk about another type of helpful companion – the blank slate companion dog. These are dog characters that don’t have a pre-defined personality or even appearance, it is entirely up to the user to define these traits for their own gameplay experience. I think the perfect example of a blank slate companion dog is the Palamute companion from Monster Hunter Rise.
Monster Hunter Rise released in March 2021, about a month after losing my childhood Border Collie Maggie. When it came to making my Palamute, I knew I had to hunt with my smart, silly, beautiful girl.
And I’m definitely not alone in doing this. A simple keyword search of ‘Palamute childhood dog’ brings up testimonials talking about modelling their Palamute on their childhood dog, including two touching Reddit posts that I want to quote directly:
These quotes are as fascinating as they are beautiful. They talk about being together with their dog again, the dog as their best friend, and the dog protecting them. While the next subsection will dive a bit deeper into the loving ways we talk about dogs, I want to mention that this is a very healthy way to express grief.
When we talk about grief, we might find ourselves referencing Kübler-Ross’s Five Stages of Grief [2]. These five stages have engrained themselves in pop culture as characters will be depicted going through denial, anger, bargaining, depression, and finally settling on acceptance. I’ve always found ‘acceptance’ to be quite a vague description of what is supposed to be the final step of a traumatic event. To combat this, I like to also bring up Worden’s Four Tasks of Mourning [3].
The Four Tasks of Mourning invites mourners through four stages: accepting that the loss has occurred, actively working through the grief and pain, adjusting to life without the one we lost, and finally, finding a connection to our lost loved one while moving forward. This final step is exactly what myself and other gamers are doing when we’re recreating our lost pets in video games. By playing side by side with them again, we are honouring their memory and remembering the good times we had together, warming our hearts and bringing a smile to our face before turning the game off and returning to the outside world.
And who knows, maybe even to our new dog!
The Hachiko Effect
This is once again a reminder that this section will reference pet loss, please proceed to the next section if you would like to avoid this.
When preparing for this article, I read lots of research in two key areas: the human-dog connection (including training dogs and its wellbeing benefits), and fictional portrayals of dogs. It was when reading this latter area of research that I had the epiphany that shaped this subsection. For brevity, I will be calling this epiphany ‘The Hachiko Effect’.
For those who are unfamiliar, Hachiko is a dog who would meet his owner at the train station after work to walk home together. But when Hachiko’s owner sadly passed away at work, he would spend almost the next ten years waiting daily at the station in the hope of walking together one more time. If you’ve seen the Jurassic Bark episode of Futurama, you know Hachiko.
Even video games have featured Hachiko-like characters, some of which I have to tiptoe around for spoilers. But perhaps the most recognisable of these characters would be the Great Grey Wolf Sif from Dark Souls. Sif loyally protects the grave of her master Artorias and fights the player with Artorias’s sword in her mouth. This is a deeply emotional fight for players, including Sif limping at low health as she desperately tries to protect her master’s resting place.
All of this leads me to what I’ve called The Hachiko Effect. Fictional stories of dogs being loving and loyal are so effective to us because they’re so rooted in reality. If it’s not first-hand experience of having a dog you call your best friend, it’s the mental image of Hachiko waiting at the train station for his owner. The Hachiko Effect is the idea that we love and cherish these fictional narratives because we’re so aware of the love and loyalty that dogs are capable of.
Research even suggests that encountering loyal dogs like Sif can make us love dogs even more. When we watch emotional narratives unfold, our brain releases the hormone oxytocin as we empathise with the character and feel connected to their struggle [4]. While this original study was conducted using human footage, I was able to find multiple studies with similar empathetic responses using animal footage [5-7]. In fact, emotional animal narratives can even be as effective at getting us to care about animals as real-life encounters with the animals [8-10]. So if you really want to convince someone that you should get a dog, try getting them to play Dark Souls!
I also want to use the example of the Hachiko Effect to talk about a phenomenon I’ve been seeing more in the gaming industry – developers shouting out and even featuring their dogs. Along with featuring production babies in the credits, I’ve seen games like Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 featuring production dogs. Along with celebrating the joy of a growing family, fans are also invited to celebrate the joy of a new fluffy companion in the household.
An absolutely comical example of an outpouring of love for a developer’s dog comes from Cossette’s dog in Ace Combat 7, affectionately referred to as ‘JPEG Dog’. The internet was mesmerised by a static dog that appeared in a cutscene, and the hunt was on to find out who JPEG Dog was. After the developers were questioned about fans’ beloved JPEG Dog, it turns out that the dog actually belongs to a member of the development team, and is apparently very well-behaved! This boosted fans’ love of JPEG Dog even further knowing that it wasn’t just a stock image, it was a polite fluffy friend that a developer could cuddle when they went home.
To switch to a more poignant example, I really want to pay tribute to a real-life dog in the video game industry that embodies The Hachiko Effect.
Shu Takumi is a prolific game creator who is most known for the Phoenix Wright: Ace Attorney series. As much as I adore Phoenix Wright, one of Takumi’s masterpieces has a monumental hold on me – Ghost Trick: Phantom Detective.
The first Phoenix Wright game and Ghost Trick actually have something in common: they both feature Takumi’s real-life Pomeranian Missile. Phoenix Wright’s incarnation of Missile is more of a brief Easter Egg, with Missile being changed to a Shiba Inu who briefly helps with a police investigation. In Ghost Trick, Missile shines as his little Pomeranian self who is fiercely loyal to his beloved Miss Kamila. Missile is firmly in protagonist territory, where Takumi’s assessment of his dog as being deeply loving and loyal is on full display.
The love Ghost Trick fans have for Missile can’t be understated, but unfortunately our hearts were broken on November 10th, 2018:
I’m not ashamed to admit I sobbed when I read this. Shu Takumi, a creator who immortalised the loyalty of his dog in his creations, reckons his dog held out long enough just to see him one last time before departing this world. There’s such a beautiful cruelty to this.
Fans all over the world mourned the loss of Missile, sending lots of support and comfort to Takumi during this time. His love for Missile crept into his games, and this love made the world fall in love with Missile too. The re-release of Ghost Trick: Phantom Detective means that even more people can fall in love with Missile even after his dear departure, and I will admit that my adoration for Missile gets me very excited when I see a Pomeranian in public.
I love Missile, I love how much Shu Takumi loved Missile, and I love how much Missile loved Shu Takumi. I may have never met either before, but I get to celebrate this love and the life of a wonderful little Pomeranian because a creator loved his dog so much that he wanted to feature him in his game.
Joy and Comfort
While the first section explored video game dogs as loyal gameplay functions, I want to use this section to dive deeper into the psychology (and even biology) of why we love dogs so much. This section will be helpful for explaining why dogs can be such compelling marketing tools, while also detailing some unique experiences that video games let dog lovers like myself enjoy.
For this section, you can imagine pretty much any adorable, highly-pettable dog that would appear on pages like CanYouPettheDog. However, I will also be using two specific examples in this section: the titular Neva, and Amaterasu from Okami.
Your Brain on Dog Pictures
So far in this article, we’ve taken for granted that many of us love dogs and that they’re a source of comfort and joy for us. Let’s take a look at some research on how dogs can improve our lives.
Dogs are often wonderful companions for forging social bonds and fighting off loneliness, subsequently reducing stress [11]. The relaxation and wellbeing benefits of dogs are showcased beautifully in research on those with heart conditions. In a meta-analysis of nearly four million participants, the survival rates of patients with heart conditions were over 30% higher for dog owners even 10+ years after their initial diagnosis [12].
In modern times, we’re familiar with the idea of using dogs for wellbeing benefits through practices such as puppy playrooms and emotional support dogs. But did you know this practice started as an accident? Back in 1975, a patient at Lima State Hospital in Ohio began taking care of an injured sparrow, and not only did the caretaker’s behaviour immediately improve, but the simple presence of the sparrow led to ward-wide improvements in behaviour [13]. After trialling the use of support animals in the hospital for a year, patients required 50% less medication and there was a reduction in suicidal ideation compared to other wards [14]. The benefits that dogs can bring to others is described beautifully by a prison inmate involved in a dog training programme – more on this research soon:
“I see the dogs affect a lot of people, I go through a lot of [cellmates]…And I’ve had some pretty violent and angry [bunkmates], and this dog changes their life. I have guys say “I don’t want to leave this cell,” because of the dog.”
[13]
Despite cellmates not being part of the training programme, simply having a dog near them can do the world of good for their wellbeing and behaviour. It’s a beautiful testament to the benefits of dog ownership, but it’s at this point where I have to raise a glaring contradiction.
As much as we would love them to be, our video game companions are not real. While real-life dogs can benefit us in many ways, what about digital dogs? Can they affect us in specific ways?
For the benefits of digital dogs, I want to talk about the psychology of cute – what happens in our brain when we see a cute dog being pet on CanYouPetTheDog?
When we look at cute things, the main area of our brain that activates is a region called the orbitofrontal cortex [15]. Rolls et al. [16] describe the orbitofrontal cortex as being “involved in emotion, reward value and reward-related decision-making”. To summarise, it makes us feel things, and quite interestingly, it makes us want to do things.
What it makes us feel is the warm fuzzy ‘aww!’ sensation you get from looking at something you find adorable. This fuzzy feeling is thanks to the release of the neurotransmitter dopamine [17] which naturally relaxes us and can even soothe our pain [18].
In terms of what we want to do, this links back to the reason why cute things elicit this reaction in the first place. When we find something cute, we want to nurture and protect it [15]. During the school holidays, it can be a challenge walking my dog because kids keep wanting to pet him. I have had kids literally climb over the wall to my house to pet my dog, that’s how strong the urge is to act when you see something cute!
In video game terms, this can translate to anything from wanting to deliver in-game pets, buying the game after seeing a cute dog/the ability to pet a cute dog, or to nurture and protect a dog when the game gives you the opportunity. It is this final part that leads nicely into my next section.
Prosocial Power Fantasy
The term ‘power fantasy’ is thrown around a lot in both games media and games research. When we hear the term, we’re tempted to think of Conan the Barbarian-esque physiques ripping and tearing through hundreds of enemies.
In my previous articles, I’ve invited readers to take a more nuanced perspective on what a ‘power fantasy’ can actually be. In my article on The Psychology of MMORPGs, I talked about how MMOs help me to live out my fantasies of protecting my friends through big shields and tankbusters. More recently, this has led to my love of the highly-unpopular Guardian in Elden Ring: Nightreign, but my loved ones are fine with this as they know how much it makes my brain tingle.
In this section, I want to use some rough calculations to demonstrate that gamers don’t just want violent power fantasies, they want prosocial power fantasies too. For this, let’s talk about Neva.
In Neva, you play as Alba as she navigates a twisted world with her wolf companion Neva. Your journey with Neva begins when she’s just a pup, and you’re her rock as she grows older and learns more about the world. I knew I would be writing this article when I played this game, and something happened relatively early in the game that I knew I wanted to explore further.
To tiptoe around spoiling anything, there is a chapter in the game where Neva is maturing and starts to, for lack of a better description, act out. The behaviour she displays seems to be out of frustration and agitation, and if you soothe Neva when you find her doing this, she stops. I soothed Neva every time I found her doing this, and up popped an achievement. I knew immediately that I wanted to explore the numbers behind this.
According to Steam statistics, 64% of players have finished the chapter where these incidents happen. 41% of players in total unlocked the achievement by soothing an agitated Neva four times in this chapter. This means that despite having no gameplay advantage, approximately two thirds of players took the time to soothe and correct Neva’s behaviour on four different occasions. But why? I want to use three bodies of research to explore this.
The first is what we call ‘cognitive empathy’ [19]. People are most familiar with emotional empathy where we can understand the emotions that others are feeling. However, cognitive empathy is when we can understand the thought processes that lead to certain emotions. If you’re wondering what the distinction between the two is, being a pet owner and/or an animal lover is a great way to understand cognitive empathy. It’s tempting to get annoyed when your dog barks at the mailman, but then we take one step back and think ‘They’re stressed because they think an intruder is at our home and they want to protect us’.
Instead of looking at Neva’s actions and thinking “Bad dog, bad!”, players are able to put themselves in Neva’s shoes and recognise that this is a lonely wolf going through adolescence who just needs some guidance in the right direction. So after realising this, what prompts players to act?
The second is what’s known as ‘empathic concern’, a driving force that encourages people to do things for others when they feel they are distressed [20-21]. If you think that dogs can’t elicit empathic concern, let alone fictional dogs, then I have some interesting research for you. In one study, participants were shown photos of dogs who were notably sad or distressed during a brain scan. These scans found that when looking at these photos, neural networks associated with emotional empathy were lighting up [22]. To add to the evidence, Levin et al. [23] found that participants felt more compassion and tenderness to puppies in distress compared to adults in distress! So when players recognise that Neva is acting out due to frustration, many of us want to help this frustration by soothing her.
The final point I want to add is the nature of the dog-human relationship. It’s no secret that many of us form strong bonds with dogs, with this relationship even feeling similar to a parent-child relationship in terms of reciprocal love [24-25]. The relationship between Alba and Neva is an interesting one: while Neva helps you in combat sections, you are her rock and her emotional support. With this dynamic on full display in the game, I can imagine players taking an almost parental role with Neva, soothing her while simultaneously trying to correct her bad behaviour. I’m glad that the wonderful Neva has so many players looking out for her!
You’re The Dog Now, Man
Have you ever looked at a furry friend, all curled up with no bills to pay, and thought “Boy, you sure do have the life of it”? But what if that could be your life, at least for a little while?
So far in this article, I’ve mainly talked about dogs as reliable companions and fluffy sidekicks. But of course, the beautiful thing about video games is that you don’t just have to play as a human with a dog, you can play as the dog!
I personally think the golden age of ‘being a dog’ video games was the Playstation 2 era, giving us such games as A Dog’s Life, The Dog Island, and of course, Okami. To jump species for a second, I also want to give credit to Stray, allowing you to play as an adorable little cat.
These games let you experience the joy and whimsy of being a dog, whether this is running around with a dedicated bark button (among…well, other buttons), playing with other dogs, or understanding how the human world interacts with you. When I played Stray, there were several times when I laughed out loud at the game being designed around cat logic. I remember there was a point during the game where I had to knock something off a counter, because of course a cat would be knocking things off a counter!
One of the reasons why this is so enjoyable to us is that it appeals to some of our earliest instincts – hypothesis testing. While you might think that the word ‘hypothesis’ is reserved only for people in lab coats, developmental psychologists argue that we become young hypothesis testers from around two years old [26]. A funny example of this is a study where infants were shown adults putting food to their forehead instead of their mouth. The infants reacted with shock as it violated their hypothesis that food goes in the mouth, they didn’t know what to do with this brand new data [27].
When we play as an animal in a video game, this is a brand new interactive laboratory to us. We get to see what happens when we knock something down, bark at people, make other animal friends, a host of new experiences that we otherwise wouldn’t get outside of video games.
While exploring the world with a dedicated bark button sure is fun, I also want to pay tribute to what I feel is the quintessential ‘being a dog’ video game – the absolutely stellar Okami.
In Okami, you play as the white wolf Amaterasu (affectionately called Ammy for short) who is the goddess of the sun. As you would expect from a game where you’re a god, your role in the story is to save the world from calamity.
But that’s not all. Along the way, you feed hungry animals, make other animal friends, restore beauty to nature and interact with lots of humans. The beauty of these interactions is that while Ammy has gorgeous celestial markings, only a select few (mainly children) can see these markings. To many adults, you’re just another mangy mutt. This leads to a range of reactions in the game, whether it’s characters fawning over you and calling you “Snowy” to shooing you away. And if they just so happen to be rude to you, the game gives you the tools to bite them in the behind!
I really want to tiptoe around spoilers in Okami, but in a game where you do a lot for humans, animals and nature, good storytelling would dictate that there’s a time where you will need a little help in return. This moment is so beautiful that I’ve had many a friend tear up at this scene at the outpouring of love for our little white wolf.
I wanted to specifically highlight Okami for two reasons. While I just talked about the prosocial power fantasy of comforting dogs in video games, games like Okami act as another type of prosocial power fantasy. Dogs can bring us many mental and physical health benefits, and games like Okami allow us to act out bringing these benefits to others. Secondly, it’s a brilliant example of the reciprocal relationship between dogs and humans: Amaterasu spends her time bringing comfort and support to others, but sometimes she needs a little support from humans too.
It is this reciprocal relationship between dogs and humans that leads us nicely into the final section of this article.
Nurturing and Training
In this final section, I want to explore the idea of video games allowing us to nurture and train little digital dogs. The best example you can use to visualise this would be the Nintendogs boom on the Nintendo DS, but we’ll be using the wonderful Hewie from Haunting Ground to tie everything up at the end.
Can We Keep Him?!
A few weeks ago, I was playing an icebreaker game with a group of kids. One of the prompts was to name some things you’re excited about, and sharing was encouraged if they felt comfortable. While the kids shared festive holidays like Christmas and upcoming sports events, one answer in particular got the group’s attention:
“I might be getting a dog.”
Cue a sea of questions. What type of dog? How old’s the dog? Is this your first dog? When will you know if you’re getting it? And for once, not all of these dog-related questions came from me.
Looking back on it now, one word stood out to me – might. While I’ve known kids to grow up in a menagerie of pets, for others there’s a sense of cautious optimism about the day they’ll get a pet. Will their parents finally say yes? Are they able to dedicate time and resources to a little furry friend in the family? It’s an amazing day for a kid if they get this green light, but sadly some never get this experience, whether it’s due to the family lifestyle, finances, allergies, any host of reasons.
Some kids grow up never knowing the joy of a dog, the grip of the parental gatekeepers too strong. When these dog lovers grow up, they can find themselves met with a brand new gatekeeper – landlords.
For example, research from the UK suggests that half of millennials will be renting “well into their forties”, while up to a third believe they have no hope of ever owning their own home. I know so many dog lovers who would leap at the opportunity to adopt a dog, but as they’re renters rather than home owners, they have to prioritise their landlord’s demands and getting their security deposit back.
While it’s easy to visualise the Nintendogs boom and kids adoring their virtual dogs, I think it’s important to point out two things: it’s not just Nintendogs, and it’s not just kids who want to nurture a virtual dog. There are Sims expansions where you can nurture pets, the Dogz series of games, Little Friends: Dogs and Cats, Puppy Luv, Animal Shelter, To The Rescue, the list goes on. We want to spend our time grooming, feeding and training dogs who don’t exist, but why?
To explore this, I fell down one of the most interesting research rabbit holes I’ve ever encountered in my work. But before I share some of these findings, I want to explain a little bit about the process of training a dog.
Dog training relies on what we call operant conditioning [28], where we deliberately try to pair a behaviour with an outcome. For example, when I tell a dog to ‘sit’, the dog might remember times where it sat down and was rewarded with some tasty treats. So a dog thinks “Oh, the last time I put my bottom on the floor, I got some ham. Let me do that again!”.
While this process looks simple on the surface, it can have several exhausting steps: the dog has to know how to sit, the dog has to pair the ‘sit’ command with the ‘sit’ action, and the dog has to pair the ‘sit’ command and the ‘sit’ action with getting a yummy treat. But when the dog finally nails it, you feel incredible that you taught them something new and they’re listening to you, strengthening the bond between you both. However, some dog trainers have unfortunately encouraged negative conditioning to build a harmful association between an action and an outcome, primarily through the use of choke chains – more on this soon.
As I alluded to in an earlier section, the research rabbit hole I fell down involved the wellbeing and behavioural benefits of dog training programmes in prisons. These were the main studies I found on the benefits of dog training for the trainers, and these benefits even had me tearing up as I read them.
The typical format of dog training programmes in prisons involves assigning a dog to an inmate for an extended period, typically around six months. Depending on the prison facilities, the dog would both be trained by the inmate and live with the inmate, hence the earlier quote about inmates wanting to share a cell with a dog due to its calming effect.
In some of the studies I read, negative conditioning and the use of choke chains was sanctioned, but inmates rebelled. In a medium-security prison, inmates refused to use the choke chain on their dog, calling it “abuse” [13]. In this same study, inmates were instructed not to treat their dog like family pets and to adopt a more clinical view of training their dog. Not only did the trainers not follow this advice and give their dogs lots of pets, but other inmates were caught smuggling food to give to the dogs! It’s incredible that people who may be seen as cruel and hardened criminals can’t bring themselves to hurt a dog, and even reduce their already limited food supply to be able to treat a dog that’s not even theirs.
From exploring the research, there seems to be three main benefits of taking part in dog-training programmes for inmates: behavioural, relational and wellbeing. Let’s take a look at these.
Inmates are encouraged to take part in these programmes as the act of training a dog can be used to practice key job and life skills they can use inside and outside of the prison environment, such as patience, providing clear instructions and persistence [13; 29-30]. As one inmate put it, “[This programme] changed me…I was a selfish person, and now I do things for others” [13].
As well as preparing for life outside of prison, dog training programmes have incredible benefits inside the prison, such as reducing infractions and violent incidents along with helping to improve relationships with fellow inmates [29; 31-33]. To use another quote from an inmate to demonstrate this:
“[The program] helped me a whole lot. I was constantly in trouble, and I’ve been six months D[isciplinary] R[eport] free.”
[13]
Yes, you read that correctly: someone who constantly found themselves in trouble remained trouble-free for half a year while they had a dog to be responsible for.
The mental health benefits of dog training programmes in prisons have been supported in other studies, finding improved inmate self-esteem, higher self-confidence, and a heightened sense of responsibility from training a dog [25; 33]. When widening my search to benefits outside of the prison setting, I found that dog training programmes could have a positive impact on those with diagnoses of depression, dementia, schizophrenia, and those on the autistic spectrum [34]. When digging deeper into why dog training can have these benefits, they were often linked to improvements in their self-image, being able to think and speak more clearly (often attributed to giving the dogs instructions), and the presence of the dog generally improving their quality of life.
It seems that having a dog to train and nurture can boost our mood and self-image, improve our cognitive abilities, and provide a sense of comfort being with our furry friends. When bringing this back to the world of dog nurturing games, I can’t help but think about Self-Determination Theory from the beginning of the article. When we don’t have a fluffy friend to call our own, playing games where you nurture a dog or even run a dog shelter can provide a sense of connection to the life goals that we may be gatekept from. When you’re currently unable to feel the excitement of your dog sitting on command for the first time, we can emulate this excitement when we say ‘Sit!’ into our Nintendo DS microphone and pray for the moment our little friend listens to us.
Bringing It All Together
For each part of the Dog-Nose Model, I wanted to include examples of video game dogs as reference points. While there was one dog I thought worked best in ‘Nurturing and Training’, I couldn’t help but realise that it was a perfect example of the Dog-Nose Model working in tandem. So let’s use this furry friend to wrap up this article.
If you hear about a dog called Hewie in a Capcom game, you may be tempted to think of the lovely Hewie in Resident Evil 4. But this Hewie is actually a reference to another Capcom dog — Hewie from Haunting Ground. In Haunting Ground, you play as Fiona Belli as she tries to escape the castle she has found herself trapped within.
Let’s start with comfort and joy. Haunting Ground is a disturbing and grotesque game, with ogre-like creatures stalking the hallways to do unspeakable things to Fiona. This means that if you see something moving in the game, it’s probably disgusting and it’s probably out to get you. After playing the beginning portion of the game with this mindset, finally encountering a cute and friendly face in Hewie is a psychological sigh of relief. This sigh of relief is part of what’s called Excitation Transfer Theory [35], where the fear and tension of playing a horror game is transferred to the relief of seeing something safe that won’t harm us.
I also want to point out that while the player is happy to see Hewie, narratively Hewie is delighted to see the player. Fiona is trying to escape the clutches of a mad scientist before he can enact his twisted plans, but sadly some twisted plans have already been enacted on Hewie. Hewie wants to get out of here just as much as Fiona does, so their journey together brings them mutual comfort in the way Alba and Neva bring each other mutual comfort and love.
Meeting Hewie then brings us to companionship and loyalty. Hewie is a German Shepherd, a dog breed notorious for its absolute loyalty to its owners. I wouldn’t be surprised if this were a deliberate choice by the developers to have such an outward display of loyalty when navigating such a gruesome landscape. Games like Resident Evil have helped define horror gameplay, with the idea of a pistol and a knife firmly in your (often limited) inventory. While I appreciate that this is anecdotal evidence, I’ve often heard Haunting Ground being referred to as “the horror game with the dog”. Self-Determination Theory [1] kicks in here as dog-loving gamers are tempted to pick up a game where the dog is at the forefront of the description, navigating this horrific journey with your new best friend.
Finally, I want to talk about why my instinct was to put Hewie in the ‘Nurturing and Training’ category. Unlocking Hewie in Haunting Ground doesn’t mean you suddenly have an overpowered dog to lunge at your foes, that wouldn’t be very much of a horror game. The same survival aspect and careful exploring is still very much present with Hewie at your side, and in fact Hewie can even make it harder! To avoid things like getting spotted by gruesome foes, you need to train Hewie throughout the game to listen to various commands such as ‘sit’ and ‘stay’. This is fulfilled very much through operant conditioning as outlined above, where you praise Hewie for following advice and scold him for not listening to you.
I absolutely love this premise and I think it’s so creative. It’s basically Nintendogs but with a life-or-death twist as the stakes for Hewie listening to you are incredibly high. I mentioned before how satisfying it is when our fluffy companions listen to us, so imagine how satisfying it is as a player when your training efforts kept you alive and saved you from a game over. And I think this once again links nicely into Self-Determination Theory as dog lovers get the satisfaction of overcoming a gameplay section because they have trained their dog companion so well.
Summary
- Working on this article has led to the creation of the Dog-Nose Model, my model for explaining why we love video game dogs so much. This model covers three categories: companionship and loyalty; joy and comfort; and nurturing and training.
- Self-Determination Theory argues that we enjoy hobbies we are personally connected to, can control the outcomes of, and feel a sense of achievement from succeeding in. Dog lovers who incorporate dogs into their playstyle feel an additional sense of achievement when overcoming gameplay obstacles as their preferred approach paid off.
- When given the choice to customise a dog’s appearance, gamers may find themselves recreating their childhood dog. This is a healthy form of grief as according to Worden’s Four Tasks of Mourning, they are paying tribute to their lost loved one while continuing to move forward in life.
- Narratives of dogs being loyal and loving are endearing to us as they’re often rooted in reality, such as the real-life tale of the loyal dog Hachiko. The love dogs can have for us leads to a cycle where we can instinctively love dogs, including developers’ dogs such as JPEG Dog in Ace Combat 7 and Shu Takumi’s wonderful Pomeranian Missile.
- Seeing cute dogs in video games can activate a region of the brain called the orbitofrontal cortex. This area not only releases dopamine which can calm and soothe us, but encourages us to nurture what we find cute. This can lead to us wanting to pet the dog, and indeed even buying games that allow us to pet said dogs.
- Games aren’t only a medium for delivering violent power fantasies, they can deliver prosocial power fantasies too. Through rough calculations, I found that almost two thirds of players soothed the young wolf Neva at four separate points in a chapter despite offering no gameplay advantage. Players understood and empathised with Neva’s frustration and it drove us to want to do something to help, fulfilling the fantasy of having the power to soothe and support.
- Games allow us to play directly as dogs, providing a digital laboratory for us to explore what it’s like to be a dog, make animal friends, observe how humans react to us and more. In games like Okami, we have the additional benefit of seeing the opposite end of the human-dog relationship and actively bringing joy to others that many dogs do.
- An increasing number of us are being gatekept from dog ownership through factors such as landlords. However, dog training and nurturing games such as Nintendogs can help us live out our desires. Real-life dog training can come with mental health benefits such as improved self-esteem and improved speaking skills. Games allow us to emulate aspects of dog training like giving our dogs commands when we are unable to have our own dog.
- The Dog-Nose Model is represented well by the dog Hewie from Haunting Ground. Haunting Ground is full of grotesque monsters, but the adorable Hewie brings a sense of joy and comfort when the player is with him. Hewie is your loyal companion in your quest to escape the castle, and players are even responsible for training Hewie to fulfil different tasks. When your loyal companion listens to you and your training pays off, it feels incredibly satisfying to the player.
Credits
A big thank you to DECosmic for designing my header image and to LoopyGc for drawing the header art.
This hard work would not be possible without the support of my wonderful Patrons. I would particularly like to thank my Platinum Patrons: Albert S Calderon, redKheld, Austin Enright, Shaemus, DarrenIndeed, Thomas Meszaros, Tobias Svensson, Pot, Hulor and A471. Thank you!
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