Games like Stray and Endling are creating more realistic animals

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Four cats take shelter from the rain as a blood moon hangs in the sky. Stray is a game where you play as one of the animals. A push of the left analog stick causes your cat to ease into a lilting trot; holding the righttrigger makes them accelerate into a bound; and finally, at certain moments, you press a button to interact with your feline friends. You play fight, nose rub, and Curl up to them, each action beautifully animated, soundtracked with delightful cats and trills.

Stray was released on the same day as Endling: Extinction Isforever, a game that casts you as a virtual animal in a world ravaged by environmental disaster. Stray is a cyber- adventure and is similar to Endling. These games allow us to ask questions of our virtual friends while also asking questions of ourselves. Stray has a cat's very form that feeds into the game's subtext. The blurry line between artificial and natural intelligence is explored by developer BlueTwelve. It is a credit to the game's artists, animators, and sound designers that the parts of the animal coalesce into a convincing whole. We are far away from the low poly animals of the past.

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Stray review

The Last Guardian review

There are a lot of videos of cats watching their owners play Stray on social media. Their eyes look at the on-screen four-legged body as it is directed about the streets of Walled City 99. These videos look a lot like Blade Runner. The cats are interacting with their digital doppelgangers. There is a fragile sense of kinship.

Image: HandyGames

Endling isn't concerned with anything that's abstract. The game begins with a devastating forest fire that you, a pregnant fox mother, need to escape from. As you venture out each night with your newborncubs, searching for yourcub caught by a furrier, and looking for food, it's easy to see why events are so easy. The majority of its story is told through environmental stories. You will pass graffiti that says your grandson is already dead, as the landscape changes with each passing lunar cycle, towering trees become chainsawed, and you slink beneath hulking machines.

The game is part of a new wave of titles that address environmental issues in hopes of inspiring their players to act. Endling goes for the jugular with environmental dread when it comes to Beyond Blue and ABZ.

Endling works best when it intersects with the environment. You are running out of space just like real-world animals when you find yourself frantically searching for food in a habitat being intruded on from every angle. George Lucas once said thatEmotionally involving the audience is easy. It's possible to do it blindfolded, get a little kitten and have someone wring its neck. The apotheosis of Endling's approach was maudlin, overwrought, and lackluster.

Endling seems to be driven by a desire to connect with the more-than-human world. The intimacy that can be fostered between a player and virtual animal is something the two games want to explore. At the end of each night in Endling, you'll get a shot of yourcubs sleeping in the den. It is achieved through the small interactions of drinking from puddles and clawing at fabrics in Stray. We don't experience the world in non-human terms but they help us imagine it.

These virtual beasts are still our playthings. We control them and use the controller to direct their on-screen bodies as if they are an extension of us. I would suggest that it is a weird one when it comes to animals. One way of approaching virtual beings is through the idea of letting go, which is that there will always be a gap between how we see the world and that of another being. According to Haraway, not knowing is a quasi-Buddhist value. In a serious relationship, the appreciation of not knowing is something that can be learned.

This is what I have come to realize with my two cats, Win, a ginger, and Greta, a tabby. As and when they please, they wander around the garden. They return for meals occasionally, but they could just as easily move on to another apartment filled with food. One of my favorite things about our relationship is the fact that they act according to their own feline thoughts and decisions. I will never be able to fully understand what is happening inside their brains.

Image: Lewis Gordon

Human and non-human relationships are rarely explored in video games. The Last Guardian is a game that tells the story of a young boy and a giant dog-bird hybrid. You have to work with Trico to solve environmental puzzles, guiding her to nearby ledges, across gaping chasms, and through winding tunnels. Sometimes, Trico doesn't follow obediently. There is lag, delay, and confusion between you and her. You have to earn the feathery creature's trust with positive reinforcement and gentle pats and consoling strokes. The key to the game's success is that it is hidden from the public. Convenient trust and hunger meters are not included in the HUD. Trico is a mystery.

The 2001 god simulation Black & White gave us a virtual creature with seemingly intelligent artificial intelligence. It's close to the beginning that you can choose which of the three animals will help deliver your rule. Black & White gives you more information than The Last Guardian because there are bars that go up and down depending on whether you stroke or slap, but in the game's moment-to- moment action, your creature is often delightfully unpredictable. One moment they are gathering wood, the next they are snacking on a villager.

Black & White and The Last Guardian explore the question of what separates artificial and natural intelligence through the material form of their characters. The player can't directly control these creatures but they can influence them. They react impulsively and thoughtfully to player input while roaming virtual landscapes.

They are talking with larger ideas about intelligence. Thanks to the work of scientists and writers such as Frans de Waal and Ed Yong, we are beginning to understand that non-humans are smarter than we thought. While looking to animals as a guide to the way intelligence is tethered to the body, computer scientists are developing increasingly powerful artificial intelligence. When confronted with problem-solving tasks, researchers are allowing strange, digital creatures to loose in virtual sandboxes to see how they evolve

James Bridle wrote in Ways of Being, "We have always tended to think of intelligence as being what humans do and also what happens inside our heads." He believes that artificial intelligence can be used to come to terms with all the other intelligences on the planet. All intelligence is referred to as "ecological," entwined and "linked with the world." This sounds a lot like Trico in The Last Guardian, a creature game designer Fumito Ueda described in terms of its independence, ability to make decisions within an environment, and the extent to which we believe she is a real, living being.

Could virtual animals one day be considered real animals? I am not sure if I will commit to this yet. Virtual beings are driven by computer-programmed intuition while actual beings are driven by biological processes and organic matter. Stray, The Last Guardian, and other games that foreground non-humans promise are new, hitherto unexplored bonds between the human and the virtual. Stray is a glimpse of an increasingly entangled future as it is strewn across the internet.