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Maxwell Grantly · (This post was last modified: 03-10-2014 06:59 AM by Maxwell Grantly.)

I’ve love an animation series of tricks in each kitten’s menu. There could be six or eight short animation routines, such as “stand on one leg”, “take a bow”, “do a dance” and so on. All six animations could be greyed out at start and only activated after four, eight, twelve hours of holding, in sequence. Therefore, the longer you held a kitten, the more tricks would appear in the menu. Perhaps, when they finally do appear, there could be a probability of having the animation play, that is proportional to the number of times that the animation has been used. For additional fun, there could be one “standard” animation of a refusal, that plays when the software determines that the probability of kitten compliance is too low for a trick to be performed.

This would mean that all newly birthed kittens would be incapable of performing tricks and would a lot of attention (holding and then training) before they even became able to perform a set animation routine. When the "trick" appeared, it would only ever be obeyed in a small number of cases at first and so need constant use before the kitten could be (confidently) drilled into performing the trick on command. Even then, there would be no guarantee of the kitten ever obeying the command to perform the trick when the menu was used because the software could be set for compliance to range from zero percent up to about eighty-ninty percent (but never one hundred percent.)

Can you imagine the fun that us residents would have in organising “obedience competitions” inworld? Obviously we could increase the chance of a kitten winning by “training” it up over a series of weeks. Even still, there would always be the slight chance that an established “old-timer” could be beaten by a new arrival. This would stop competitions being dominated by one resident who had a kitten that had been held and trained for hundreds of hours.

What is more, it would even increase the value of older kittens on the market. Not only would customers look for traits, they would also wonder how well the kitten has been trained and what tricks it could perform (with any degree of success) before they made their final purchase.