Thursday, Jul 24, 2008
I tried to love my aquatic virtual pet, but all I could think was that I needed to get a life and maybe clean my goldfish bowl.
Aug 16, 2000 | There are moments in every gamer's existence when you must face the creeping suspicion that what you are doing is more than a little bit moronic. Perhaps it's that moment when you realize that your thumbs are sore and raw from spending four straight hours trying to master the toe kick combo in Virtua Fighter. Maybe it's after a week of somnambulism brought on by too many midnight sessions of Everquest, where you regale strangers with Olde English imitations. Or the nights that you wake up gasping in fear from nightmares featuring splattering alien guts, à la Quake.
Me, I had one of those moments just the other morning, when I dragged myself out of my bed (warm, cozy) to plant myself in front of my Dreamcast console (cold, plastic) and play Seaman. I should have been sleeping -- but no, I had awakened at an obscenely early hour in a fright, recalling that I had forgotten to turn up the heat in my virtual pet's tank the night before. I sat, shivering in my robe, staring blearily at the television screen, afraid that my seaman would have died from the cold and that I'd have to start the game over.
I am a loser, I thought to myself, as I attempted to make small talk with the simulated fish lurking on my screen. Brain cells are dying. Must ... get ... a ... life.
American shores have been awaiting the game Seaman for almost a year now. Seaman was released first in Japan, where it has already become the bestselling Japanese Dreamcast release of all time. In America, publicists were expecting it to sell out in its first weekend. It's a bona fide phenomenon.
But what is Seaman? Basically, it's a virtual pet -- a creature that you must nurture, coddle, feed and clean in order to keep its spirits up. Unlike other virtual pets, however, Seaman actually talks back to you: The game boasts the first voice recognition software to appear in a console title and an artificial intelligence engine that helps your pet "learn" about its new owner. It's a demanding half-man, half-fish creature with a vaguely British accent, a droll sense of humor and a penchant for eating bug larvae.
Seaman comes with its very own microphone, and that is the genesis of both the ingenuity and the mundanity of this game. Although it comes from the same tradition as popular God games like The Sims, where an omniscient view lets you control the happiness of a variety of creatures, Seaman also learns about you and talks back. It is less a matter of you controlling the game than the game controlling you, something that will surely prove popular with masochists and indulgent pet fanatics. Unfortunately, I'm not either.
The conceit of this game is that Seaman is a rare omniscient creature from ancient Egyptian times, a hybrid fish-man who can imbue vast knowledge to his human brethren. A fake scientific journal online documents his "discovery" by scientist Jean Paul Gassi (apparently no relation to Be Inc. founder Jean-Louis Gassie). Seaman looks like your garden variety fish -- a kind of shimmering translucent salmon -- but with a face like a sour Russian guard. By turning your television set into a digital terrarium, you too can incubate, raise and communicate with a seaman of your very own. The catch: You must commit to spending at least 10 minutes a day with this game for 30 days, with no exceptions, for your seaman to become a fully grown adult.
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