in 2024 I took a course during my masters degree in digital culture @ UiB that was about archives and speculative design.
The courses main objective was to pick a digital archive, and give it a speculative design intervention. We had free creative reigns, and were also all relatively confused about what that would even look like. But naturally I gravitated towards doing something with the video game Dogz 5, which has basically been a life long obsession for me. It’s a simple pet simulator game, and growing up I’d spend hours scouring the internet for modded content to add to the game. Modified items, levels, skins. Custom made dog breeds that ranged from actual real life kinds of dogs and stuff like horses, centipedes and frogs. I always had a few main sites I’d frequently visit, one of them being Pine Cone Cattery.

It’s one of the few websites that’s still up and running, over 20 years of hosting original Dogz 5 content. I decided to do my speculative design intervention on this website in particular because of the nostalgia and fond memories I have from my childhood, and also the fear I had about it one day disappearing.

2022 was the last update. It was now 2024. I knew I couldn’t do an intervention on the whole website as it had a lot of content so I decided to focus on one thing instead: Adoptables. In Dogz 5 you can breed dogs and they’ll have litters of puppies that grow up to be adult dogs. They’ve all got their own unique codes and personalities. They have birth dates, and they can never die, and Pine Cone Cattery had pages and pages of these dogs files on their website, just suspended in this kind of frozen state. I felt a responsibility to save them in case the website ever did shut down. The thought of them ceasing to exist when some of the dogs were as old as people I know just felt so eerie to me.

So I made sure to download all of the custom breeds that were needed for these dogs files to run in my game, and grabbed all 42 of them, reanimating them inside of my computer.

The years of birth for these dogs ranged from 2006 to 2012. And one of the oldest ones is a dog named Torque, who even shares my birth date, the 29th of September. He’s obviously my favorite lol.

The speculative design part of this assignment was basically me making up a fictive adoption service for these dogs. I wanted a physical component to this assignment as a way of making these dogs feel more “real” to people. I mean they are real, virtually, but they can not exist outside of the screen. So my idea was that I’d send whoever was interested in adopting one of the dogs a letter in the mail containing instructions on how to download the game, how to put the dog into the game, and how to care for the dog in the game, using QR codes that would give access to the files needed. Included would also be a sheet of paper containing the dogs “code” printed on it and instructions on how to create an origami dog out of the sheet of paper, as a way to represent the dog physically. Here’s some photos of the drafting process.

And this is what I ended up with.

And just for myself, I made 42 origami dogs to represent all of the dogs I downloaded from Pine Cone Cattery. Just because it would be a bit funny to me.

The immortality of virtual pets has always fascinated and pained me. If you stop playing the game and come back, they’ll be depressed and scared. Some of them will even run away (to a run away folder on your computer, so again, they continue to exist just outside of the actual game). It always crushed me when I’d revisit the game if I knew it had been a while. I dreaded it. It was the same with nintendogs. You’d open the game and find your puppies starving, parched and flea ridden. It got to a point where I didn’t dare play nintendogs ever again without wiping the game completely first and starting over. And even then I’d feel guilty about deleting the abandoned dogs just because I couldn’t bare being confronted with the way I just left them in this virtual limbo. Was it cold and dark in there? Do they sleep? Do they know they can’t die and if I never open the game again they’d be living in the dark forever? Was it actually an act of mercy to wipe the games clean when I wasn’t playing? After doing this project I started to question whether or not it was a good idea to “save” the dogs from disappearing forever online. Is keeping them alive, suspended, inside of my game better than if they just stayed frozen in Pine Cone Cattery? And if the website shuts down and took them all with it, wouldn’t it be peaceful for them in a way? To have their files disappear? To have them die? Shockingly, a few months after I did this project, the website went down and it never came up again. A website I’d been visiting since 2003 suddenly disappeared, it felt so surreal. And now I’ve just got all of these dogs in my computer.