Dogs are cute, warm, soft, and playful. They also tend to poop a lot and lick inappropriate things, but you don’t have to worry about those latter parts in videogames. The real concern when you meet a digital dog – from JPEG dog to the fuzzy units in Wargroove – is whether or not you can pet it. Luckily, a new Twitter account has appeared out of seemingly nowhere to provide extensive answers to those very questions.
Can You Pet the Dog? is an aptly named Twitter account which posts GIFs and images of dogs from various games and tells you whether or not you can pet them. The criteria is quite simple: “A manual button press resulting in visual representation of petting is required for affirmation.”
The account’s first tweet, on March 5, sadly tells us that we “cannot pet the dog in The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild.” Thankfully, we got better news immediately afterward – “you can pet the dog in Far Cry: New Dawn.” So far, the account has continued alternating between ‘cans’ and ‘cannots,’ so we’ve gotta take the good news with the bad.
For me, the current highlight is Final Fantasy VIII. It’s a bit of a technicality, but it’s still a delightful yes.
Followers of the account are already above 30,000 as I write this, and given the rate of growth so far it’s likely to be well beyond that by the time I hit publish.
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In these trying times, it’s good to know that a bit of physical affirmation between species is still such a valued proposition. Here’s to many more years of pettable dogs to come.