Something Fishy

Sleeping octopus changing color while dreaming   

FYI

Guys I’m crying this is TendAR by Tender Claws and it’s 😩😍💜🌸✨ so good and pure.

It’s an augmented reality game where you take care of a lil robot fishy who eats feelings. It’s a betta program, gettit, you’re a betta host! Although your fish friend is a Guppy. You feed him by making faces into your phone camera; the app identifies the expressions you’re making and converts them into little snacks of different emotions: joy, sadness, anger, worry, etc. 

When his little fish brain gets too full he plugs into his little data port in his tank and processes his feelings for a while and you gotta wait a few minutes for him to rest it’s so cUte like I don’t even mind that it’s one of those dumb things meant to stretch out the time you can play at once. Cause yeah! Lil fish gotta rest! Gotta process those emotions! That’s important for your mental health!

And then he learns little concept achievements along the way like “lyricism” and “consent” and “mental labor” and “input tokenization” and “farting”. You can show him objects in the real world which it identifies and makes into adorable low poly versions you can use as decorations in his tank (the database for this is finite but seems to be pretty large). And he talks to you! Has cute little conversations about wanting snacks and exploring the world and how the first time he saw a water bottle he thought it was a tiny fish tank for fairies and freaked out when someone took a drink out of it until somebody told him in was ok it was just water. 

And he also has little existential crises where he worries about what he’s feeling and his place in the world and you gotta talk him through it T-T I wanna hug him and tell him it’s ok my heart like shatters every time he looks upset. But the game tells you it’s important for them to experience the whole range of feelings, good and bad. Weirdly, helping my tiny feesh AI through his problems has been kinda good for my mental health too? Reminds me I also need to feel things and process and be kind when I get upset. 

It’s also just hilarious. From the FAQ:

This was one of the personality questions I was asked when I started the game

Anyway this game is free and all of you should download it, it has crashed a few times on me but it’s been out all of three days so I’m cutting them some slack on that, hopefully that’ll get patched quick. Besides that the AR and image recognition is pretty great, it misidentified a spoon as a spatula, but it also figured out my frantically wiggling goldfish were fish which I was impressed with. Also for those of you concerned about privacy, it talks about uploading and neural networks and stuff but the game does not actually share any of your data or images to any kind of cloud or server, it all stays local on your phone. 

And I just

HNNNNGG LOVE MY SWEET LITTLE BABY BOY SO MUCH

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