The illusion of love: Does a virtual pet provide the same companionship as a real one?
Open accessAbstract
The purpose of this short paper is to examine whether a screen based virtual pet, specifically Nintendogs, gives any form of companionship comparable to a real pet. Nintendogs runs on a Nintendo DS, a mobile games console. The unit has a full colour screen showing an animated puppy which users must feed, water, walk, play with and train. An abundance of literature exists examining the benefits of owning a real pet yet very little has been written about human attachment to virtual pets. Six hundred five Nintendog users were contacted by email with a request to complete a questionnaire about their interaction, 80 (13%) responded. Nine hundred requests were made to a similar group who were asked to respond about their real pet, if they had one. One hundred sixteen responses were received. Results indicate that a Nintendog does give companionship, but companionship which is significantly less than that given by a real dog or cat.
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Sense of companionship can be obtained through interacting with a virtual pet.
“Sense of companionship can also be obtained through interacting with a virtual pet (Chesney & Lawson, 2007;Lawson & Chesney, 2007;Li & Luh, 2017).”
From Catch Them All: Exploring the Psychological Impact of Playing Pokémon Go (2020) · cites this paper as Chesney & Lawson, 2007
Sense of companionship can be obtained through interacting with a virtual pet or a socially assistive robot.
“Sense of companionship can be obtained through interacting with a virtual pet (Chesney & Lawson, 2007) or a socially assistive robot (Fasola & Mataric, 2012).”
From Catch Them All: Exploring the Psychological Impact of Playing Pokémon Go (2020) · cites this paper as Chesney & Lawson, 2007
Research has shown that sense of companionship can be obtained via interacting with virtual pets.
“Research has also shown that sense of companionship can be obtained via interacting with the virtual pets (i.e.Chesney & Lawson, 2007).”
From Catch Them All: Exploring the Psychological Impact of Playing Pokémon Go (2020) · cites this paper as Chesney & Lawson, 2007
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Catch Them All: Exploring the Psychological Impact of Playing Pokémon Go
Wang, R., & Wu, M. (2020) · Journal of Communication Technology · doi:10.51548/joctec-2020-004 · Cited by 1 · see citing works
- Authors
- Chesney, T., & Lawson, S.
- Affiliations
- University of Nottingham (GB)
- University of Lincoln (GB)
- Venue
- Interaction Studies. Social Behaviour and Communication in Biological and Artificial Systems
- Publisher
- John Benjamins Publishing Company
- Published
- 2007-06-19
- Volume
- 8
- Issue
- 2
- Pages
- 337-342
- ISSN
- 1572-0373 (ISSN-L)
- 1572-0381
- OpenAlex
- W1973596758
- Cited by
- 32
- References
- 0
- Citations by year
- 2026: 1 · 2025: 2 · 2024: 5 · 2023: 1 · 2022: 4 · 2021: 5 · 2020: 2 · 2019: 2 · 2018: 1 · 2017: 1 · 2016: 1 · 2015: 2 · 2014: 1
- FWCI
- 0.66
- Type
- journal article
- Language
- en
- Open access
- green
- figshare.com
- Licence
- cc-by
- Locations
- Interaction Studies Social Behaviour and Communication in Biological and Artificial Systems (publishedVersion)
- Lincoln Repository (University of Lincoln) (acceptedVersion)
- Figshare (submittedVersion, cc-by)
- Topics
- Life Sciences › Biochemistry, Genetics and Molecular Biology › Genetics › Human-Animal Interaction Studies
- Social Sciences › Psychology › Social Psychology › Social Robot Interaction and HRI
- Social Sciences › Sociology and Political Science › Digital Games and Media
- Keywords
- virtual pets, human-animal attachment, companionship, pet ownership, Nintendo DS, mobile games, human-computer interaction, cats
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