![]() You can remodel your house into a zen garden. (Especially Tubbs, that glorious, rotund glutton.) Presumably, they’re getting fat and happy somewhere else. If you fail to refill the food dish, they just won’t show up. They’re only visiting your yard, after all. It’s also not a Tamagotchi for the iPhone age, whining and pooping until it expires from neglect or runs out of batteries. The stakes are low, the potential for failure nonexistent. ![]() You’re just someone with a small, tidy house and garden. You’re not God or the mayor of a metropolis. Unlike many games-ahem, Animal Crossing-Kitty Collector doesn’t impose a penalty for taking a break, or systematically shame you for failing to check in. Cats come and go, sitting on mats or batting around balls and teaser toys, and you can watch them … or not. “Playing” the game largely consists of passive observation. ![]() The game of Twitter was: What have I fucked up this time? If you are wondering why I would make a direct comparison between Twitter and an app where I sporadically feed cats, this is the answer: Twitter had become a looming source of anxiety, a psychological experiment, a little jolt of dread with every new mention. It is not something with which you must “keep up.” Neko Atsume is not a responsibility to add to the mounting pile of other duties, chores, and concerns in your life. Instead of “ gotta catch ’em all,” it’s “catch them all, someday, if you feel like it.” If I had to compare Neko Atsume to another Japanese gaming innovation, I’d say it targets the same impulse to catalog and collect that brought us Pokémon, but without any of the action or urgency. Some of the pickier cats don’t love it, but they can deal. The basic unit of kibble, a can of Thrifty Bits, is always available and costs nothing. Neko Atsume never pushes you to amass new toys, and it takes very little time or effort to save up for any toy you might want from the shop. You can buy more fish for real money, but there’s no incentive to do so. The game is blessedly free of the annoying “microtransactions” that plague many of the games in today’s broken App Store economy. The cute kitties are not some kind of FarmVille-esque trap, luring you in with sporadic bursts of dopamine until they take over your life. ![]() There’s no “ego depletion” or “fun pain.” In fact, there’s no pain of any kind. It doesn’t use consumer psychology or the heavy lever of guilt to make you invest ever more time and money. Neko Atsume, a product of Japan, isn’t addictive in the same sense as many American mobile games. If a cat visits often enough, they’ll drop off their “memento,” a token of friendship. In return, the cats will leave you fish, a currency that lets you buy more food or toys. The object of Neko Atsume (to the extent that there is one) is to feed and entertain each of the 40 or so cats that happen to wander into your virtual yard. Kitty Collector, is a game you play by putting out food and toys for adorable kitties, and then … actually, there’s no “and then.” That’s the whole game. At some point during the winter, feeling smothered by grey weather, the sudden loss of a pretty good job, and the noxious climate on Twitter, I deleted the Twitter app from my phone and started collecting virtual cats.
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