One of the very first questions my colleagues asked me when I started The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom ahead of release was whether or not you could pet the dog. Previously you could feed the canines and make friends with them outside stables and villages, but Link was forbidden from laying his hands on any puppers. Walk around in a circle and they might chase their tails and spring forth a few love hearts, but petting remains off the table.
Dogs seem largely unchanged from Breath of the Wild, which some have come to see as a major flaw given how interactive the game world tends to be. Why give us all these dogs when we can’t call them good boys and girls to our heart’s content? Well, the Hero of Time doesn’t talk for a start, and it seems Nintendo isn’t aboard the cynical marketing train that petting the dog has become across video games in recent years. Good on them.
Unless you’ve been living under a rock or simply hate dogs - if so, who hurt you? - you know that for the past several years one of the most common video game trends on social media is whether or not the dogs you encounter can be given a nice pet. First conjured up by The Verge social media manager Tristan Cooper, it began as a deliberately wholesome means of collecting all of our favourite virtual doggos into one place. The only purpose was for us to admire cute clips and screenshots of familiar games, while squealing in delight at new ones which also happened to include interactive animals. For months, it was innocent.
The Twitter account housing this trend has since grown to over 500,000 followers, and that doesn’t even include growth on other platforms like TikTok. It’s become a phenomenon, one that has far outgrown the initial conceit of sharing a small part of gaming we all love. While it is still operated by Cooper with bespoke clips and artwork, with some of the recent posts on Tears of the Kingdom being particularly adorable, the wider industry has since taken such an idea and sullied it for its own means. Having cute dogs isn’t just a positive anymore, it can be seen as a duplicitous marketing gimmick. It was accompanied by the continued proliferation of wholesomeness as not only a quality games could aspire to, but a genre in itself that both indies and mainstream hits latched onto.
Triple-A games are often defined by gore, violence, and drama, so there became a clear desire for alternatives across myriad markets. However, what started as little more than a cutesy experiment has become oversaturated, and it’s blatantly obvious whenever it tries to pull at our heartstrings in ways that aren’t genuine. It’s depressing, since the majority of independent efforts come from a good place, and now find themselves inadvertently caught up in a tailspin of saccharine copycats all hoping for the same big wins.
Petting the dog wasn’t a question anymore, but instead a requirement for marketing teams who wanted to get their games noticed and talked about on a similar level to the big boys. I doubt many of them intended to feed into an eventual corporate tactic, but it becomes hard to interpret it in any other way when looking back on the past few years. You would struggle to think of a triple-A blockbuster or mainstream indie darling that didn’t lean into it. Hades, Ghost of Tsushima, The Last of Us Part 2, Star Wars Jedi: Survivor, Hogwarts Legacy, and Final Fantasy 16 are only a few of the big hitters to not only lean into the trend, but actively implement such instances into the experience in order to bolster viral marketing.
Cooper said himself that he was provided review codes to cover whether petting animals can appear in certain games, which establishes a professional relationship and knowledge from the developer side that they know such features have marketing potential, no longer existing purely for the wholesome vibes they were originally intended for. When a trend reaches this level of popularity it is always going to become about corporate gain, or amassing profit with new partnerships or promotions that can’t help but leave the original intention behind. There is no bad blood here for the account itself, since it grew of its own accord and continues as a source of joy for thousands. But to have countless developers and publishers piggyback on it for their own gain ruins the perception for me, like I’m now forced to accept what is and isn’t cute in the video games I play just because they’ve implemented a dog begging to be pet.
Can You Pet The Dog should be a cute gimmick account doubling as an archive of historical significance, and it still is, although it’s unfortunately become impossible to detach that from everyone wanting a slice of the animal-laden pie, either to go viral with the slim chance that more sales will land at their feet or putting a needlessly creative twist on what was only ever meant to be a bit of innocent fun. Tears of the Kingdom doesn’t let you pet the dog, and we have been conditioned into viewing that as an actual flaw instead of the social media trend that blew out of proportion and began to bitterly influence the media we consume.