My love-hate relationship with Pet Society & post analysis of this evil game

There are so many things on Facebook that could've gotten me hooked. I completely bypassed the whole Superpoking craze. I got a whole bunch of gifts, hatching eggs, plants that I don't even bother to look at. I was mildly amused at being a vampire and chomping on friends, or having the ability of cryokinesis and throwing snow punches at friends. I was temporarily entertained by the speed typing application. So I was pretty proud of myself all this time for not being one of those silly folks who are just addicted to one thing or another on Facebook for God knows what reason.

Nothing... and I mean... NOTHING... could have prepared me for...

PET SOCIETY!!!!

I hate this game. I've joined Neopets, another virtual pet website, which has things to do that are much more fun than this game. Yet I can't stop playing it. Love. Hate. Hate. Love. Yeeaaargh!!!! So what is it about this game that has me like this?? For that, I'd have to start from the top...

Basically, Pet Society is another one of silly applications people can add on Facebook for you to play with and waste your precious time. And as the name suggests, it involves you creating and taking care of a virtual pet. So you go in, get to design your pet by choosing from different eyes, ear, nose, colour, etc. And you also get to name your pet. And once you've done all that nitty gritty, your newly created pet ends up in a house with one empty room that looks kinda like this:

Your pet also starts out stark naked, but as you can see, my pet has become a bit more refined. That's my pet and her name is Chocobunny. Chocobunny had an interesting start coz' at first I made her a boy. Then I decided dressing up a girl was more fun, so Chocobunny had a sex change. More on how I did that in a moment.

Now the three colourful bars on the right indicate three things: Chocobunny's level of health, level of happiness, and level of cleaniness. These, of course, go down over time. You can increase your pet's health by giving it food. There are many ways to increase happiness, such as petting your pet (ie. running the mouse back and forth over it), playing games, visiting friends, etc. And cleaniness is maintained with a bar of soap, which is in your chest (note the small little chest-like icon at the bottom left of the screen. That's what you click to see your stuff... which I conveniently forgot to include in this screenshot and too lazy to redo it). If you don't keep your pet clean, it gets unhappy and unhealthy pretty quick, and it starts leaving poop lying around.

The top middle bar shows my paw points. The more stuff I do in the game, the more paw points I get, and once the paw points reach a certain amount, my pet progresses to the next level. As you can see, my pet now is at level 19. Woo hoo.

The top left icon shows my pet's amount of coins. If you thought coins were used for buying stuff, you are CORRECT. No points for you, Einstein. So anyway, what CAN you buy on Pet Society? Well, there are a number of shops you visit, including the clothes store, food store, furniture store, luxury store (for more pricey goods), mystery store and the stylist.

Here's an example of stuff you can find in the clothes store.

As you can see, it's quite a bit of stuff, and almost every shop is like that. The next pic shows the stylist shop, where you can choose to revamp your pet's look and also get a sex change, like what I did for Chocobunny:


Fortunately for Chocobunny's self esteem, my obsession with red does not carry so far.

Each store also has a storekeeper that you can kinda talk to, but far as I can tell, each of them only has one line:

Obviously, some are not very sociable.

So over time, after accumulating a number of coins, you buy whatever you want, and your house ends up looking less bare, like so:

As you can see, I have quite a trophy collection. Trophies are earned doing various things in the game as well, such as buying stuff and doing many other things that I will go into in a moment. Your trophy goes from bronze to silver to gold if you do enough of the same thing. However, far as I'm concerned, getting gold trophies for everything is just not worth the effort. All shall be revealed.

As mentioned earlier, once you earn enough paw points, your pet increases a level, and at certain levels, your pet earns a new room. So right now I have four rooms at my house, and my second room looks like this:

Ah yes, if I could have this in real life I would either be very happy... OR... my eyes would melt off after some time from red overload.

Anyhow, now the more interesting question would be... how do you earn coins in this game? Ah, this is where the annoying bit starts...

Coins are earned through a variety of ways. If you have Facebook friends who play Pet Society, your pet can visit their pet and earn 20 coins for it. When your pet visits a pet, you can choose to kiss, hug, dance, fight, watch tv, do the Macarena...ok, everything except that last bit. Here's Chocobunny getting a smooch from one of her friends, Kitteh.

Aww, soooo sweeeeeet. Visiting friends usually takes all of 5 seconds, and is the fastest way to earn coins.

Your pet can also run hurdles races against two other pets. In each race, you have to leap over hurdles, splash through puddles and avoid banana skins to get to the finish line. If you trip and fall, you end up slower, lose to the other pets and get nothing for your effort. If you don't screw up and win, your pet gets 30 coins. Unfortunately, each race takes at about slightly over a minute to finish, and the process is just too slow to be worth it, unless for some reason you really enjoy playing the races. Even if you do enjoy it, you only get 10 races a day, win or lose.


Your pet can also find coins by walking around outdoors and bumping into trees. Some trees will decide to pop out coins, like so:


This process, however, is an even slower way of earning money coz' one tree only produces one miserable coin, and some don't even produce anything. But sometimes you may get other cool things popping out of trees... such as Easter Eggs!

And you can use these to decorate your house. Another way to earn coins is through playing with your pet. As you play, your pet will obtain three main play items, which are a ball, a frisbee and a skipping rope. Each time your pet advances a level, the quality of the play items increase as well. Play with either of these and you will earn coins. This is Chocobunny playing with her upgraded golden ball. Wee!

Playing is yet another slow and tedious way of earning coins. On average, you have to click on the ball, frisbee or skipping rope about 7 times to earn ONE miserable coin. Not. worth. the. effort.

Another much slooower way and indirect way of earning coins is by giving stuff away, like so:


And pets are very happy to receive gifts:

"Huh? What?" I hear you ask. But why would you want to give your hard-earned stuff away?? Well, sometimes it's strategic to give stuff away, coz' when you give stuff to friends, you earn paw points. And when you reach enough paw points to advance to the next level, you get 100 coins. And if you arrange to have your friend give your stuff back, then you don't lose anything, and you can continue swapping back and forth to earn more and more paw points. Of course, you also earn paw points doing anything else in the game, but swapping back and forth some pricey stuff is the fastest way to up your paw points.

Another interesting way of earning coins is keeping your pet reaaaally dirty, so that when it poops, you can click on the poop to clean it and you get a coin for each poop you clean. But you can also earn coins from cleaning your pet, so the only reason why people would wanna keep their pets dirty and pooping is coz' occasionally a dirty pet will produce golden poop. Yes, that's right people. Poop made of gold. And since this is very rare, most owners will display it somewhere. I've also heard of even rarer Rainbow Poop. Like what will the game makers think of next? Diamond poop?

Buuuuut the fact remains that most methods of earning coins produce little return. Which is why I hate this game. And if this is the case, how on earth do people earn enough to buy cool stuff without going insane? Well, one way is to go to the Pet Society bank, which isn't even a bank but a place for the Pet Society makers to fleece you of your money. As in your REAL LIFE, hard-earned dollars, ringgit and cents, in exchange for fake Pet Society coins:

This makes me hate this game even more. Seriously, which nut is going to do this? Well, apparently some nuts DO spend their real life money on fake Pet Society coins. God knows why. But if you don't have a great deal of real money to throw away on buying silly virtual stuff, then the only other option is to GET MORE FRIENDS.... coz' that's the quickest way to earn coins.

The ultimate aim of this game is therefore very straightforward: Earn coins, buy stuff, make your house and your pet look pretty. That's IT. It is a purely materialistic evil game which I suspect it of the devil. Everything you do in this game is for the sole purpose of making money...I mean, the only reason I'd bother visiting friends is to get money. I can't imagine what kids playing this game will learn from it.

The even more evil thing about this game is that is can NEVER end. With most other games, as you play it, you advance stages to a level where you win the game, and that's the end of that. If I'm hooked to a game like that, I will temporarily go nuts and play for hours on end until I win... and then I never touch the game again coz' I know I've won it, so there is no more challenge. But for Pet Society, there is no win or lose. Even if your pet reaches the highest level, it doesn't end. You can continue buying stuff and prettifying your house. And the developers are always introducing new items to the shops, to keep gamers coming back to see what's new.

Amazingly, some people are just so hooked onto this game, they somehow managed to earn 100,000's of paw points and their houses are just jam packed with all sorts of stuff! I still have no idea HOW they managed to get to that level, and I can only surmise that these people have no day jobs and once they are done visiting all their pet friends, they spend their entire day bumping trees for coins and playing skipping rope, ball AND frisbees. So much time wasted... for what? And what I can hardly understand is why I continue to play this idiotic time-consuming game myself when there are so many other better things I could be doing with my time? If I was a shopaholic and I wanted to live out my shopaholic tendancies through the game instead of real life, then it would make some sense... but I'm so not a shopaholic, and I'm guessing most people hooked to the game aren't either. And I know other virtual pet sites that have more fun things to do but I'm not so hooked to those. So what gives?

My suspicion is that Pet Society lives off most people's basic desire to show off what they've got. Not just stuff they buy, but also their creativity and imagination in arranging the stuff in each room to make it look cool. Some people like making their pet's house look like a very nice and normal house, with a designed room as a bathroom, one as a bedroom, one a kitchen, etc... but other like myself, like to have interesting themes for each room, such as my red room, where everything including the red kitchen sink can go in there. I've heard of people with rooms filled with nothing but poop, and another fella used a lot of of cheese, some apples and miscellaneous thing from the food shop to make a gigantic Spongebob Squarepants.

My hats off to this dude. He has inspired me to come up with an interesting room for my house... which is still in the works (ie. I'm slowly earning coins to buy the stuff I need for it!).

People just like having friends coming to visit, seeing their cool stuff and cooing "Ooooh, that's cool!" or something along those lines. I mean, even in real life, kids love to run up to their parents or friends to show off any new toy or anthing else that they find. And when kids grow up to adults, that energy goes into buying fancy smancy gadgets, cars and houses for friends to ogle at. But for those that can't afford that kind of lifestyle, or would just rather hoard the real life money for more important things (such as yours truly), there's Pet Society! An important factor of this game is that your friends can visit your pet's house to see what you did to it. If it was a non-interactive game and no one could see what you did to your house, I bet you, the game would become an instant flop... coz' players no longer get to flaunt.

Yes anyway, that's just my brief post-analysis on the evil but addictive Pet Society. I just saw a new red jukebox in the shops today which I MUST have for my red room, so off I go!

My love-hate relationship with Pet Society & post analysis of this evil game