The Digital Pet App Kawaii Pet Megu Meets an Untimely Demise

Yesterday, when I was cleaning my stove, I paused for a second to check on my Megu. Megu is short for Kawaii Pet Megu, a Japanese-created digital pet app. I'm not embarrassed of having a Megu, because a) my girlfriend is cool with it, and b) several high-profile digital native artists like Jeanette Hayes, Petra Cortright, and Rachel Lord, rapper Kreayshawn, and fashion plate Jen Brill have Megus. Not that I have to explain being a grown-ass man who can make my own decisions like playing a twee pet game on my phone while in my kitchen scrubbing down my appliances. Anyway, I love my Megu. Which is why I decided to write this article after Gree International, Inc., the maker of Megu, announced they were shuttering the game on November 28th, almost one year to the day that I got my Megu.

Sometime in the late nineties, I remember buying a Tamagotchi from a kid on the bus. The little keychain egg with an LCD screen was my first digital pet. Tamagotchi was the thing to have on the bus for a little while, and it was my first interaction with Japanese developers' ability to create digital-emotional interactions that felt important. I fed my Tamagotchi and pet it. A few days later, I got bored, and my Tamagotchi died, and I stuck it in a shoebox in my room. I've had real pets since I became an adult—a dog and a cat who are both still alive—but never another digital pet (I did play The Sims for a minute in college, but that's another can of god complex worms). That is, until last November when, after seeing a post on someone's Instagram feed about their favorite apps, I downloaded Kawaii Pet Megu. I wake up, I look at Megu. Before I go to sleep, I check and make sure he's okay.

Like me, a lot of people are upset over the closure. There's a petition on Change.org to either stop Gree International, Inc, (Megu's distributor) from shutting down the game completely, or at least offering an offline version so people don't completely have their pets deleted. It's like if you got your dog Fluffy from the pound on the day it was born, and as soon as Fluffy got older, the pound came and threw Fluffy in an incinerator with no warning. The petition only has 299 signatures, but there would certainly be more if it made the rounds in Japan, where it was the number one download in 2010. According to Megu's download site, it has over 1.5 million users. That's a lot of people who will be losing their friends.

People feel real connections with virtual pets. The pets rely on the user to stay healthy, much like a real pet. If you neglect them, they get sick, and the user feels bad. Megu gets flies on him, and his room gets dust in it, so users have to clean him and sweep his room. He gives users positive affirmation when you do these things by perking up and smiling big. They become real to people. As Ashley Berner, a supporter of the Change.org petition, writes: "Please don't take away kawaii pet megu ;( i love it SOOO much!! I recently lost my cat after she got hit by a car when she suddenly ran out of my house, and kawaii pet megu has been helping me get over her death. I know it's just a game, but I'm really attached to my megu. Some people might not care, but people like me are really affected by this. I'm really attached to my megu, so PLEASE PLEASE PLEASE!!!! Please don't take my dear megu away from me." [sic]

In addition to the connection to the animal-like Megus, the app provides an added social dimension: people can come visit you, give you gifts and write on a wall. If you give them gifts back, it helps you level up. And if you take your Megu on a walk or an adventure, you get rare items. Decorate your room with cool rares like a glass Pegasus or a Gothic lamp, and you'll be the envy of everyone who visits. By shutting down Megu, Gree is not just shutting down a virtual pet app, but a social networking app—a cute fantasy Facebook where people have developed friendships and

Digital pets date back to the mid-nineties, when French video game developer Ubisoft released the Windows game Petz. Then came Tamagotchi, which became a sensation, selling approximately 20,000 units on its first day of release in America. Then came the website Neopets in 1999, which was later sold to Viacom for $160 million. Digital pets really had their moment in the late nineties and early 2000s. In an essay titled "Friendship and Intimacy in the Digital Age" by Timothy Bickmore at MIT Media Lab in 1998, the author hypothesized that digital pets were good for people. "Most of the people I discussed this idea with felt that, if it could be made to work, virtual friends could be very advantageous to society. Reliability and security were mentioned repeatedly as the primary benefits," Bickmore wrote. But like Japanophilia, the fervor for digital pets went dormant for most of the 2000s, perhaps due to the paroxysm surrounding social media, which made people feel less lonely… for a time.

Megu was launched on August 12, 2010, quite a bit after the digital pet boom. It succeeded because it added social media to the equation. Giving virtual gifts and writing on walls created long lasting bonds between users, who are otherwise anonymous. Users would play games, winning coins to spend on houses, items and food. Megu's unique interplay between virtual pet and social media could be seen as a stepping stone to singularity, as we interact further with virtual worlds. In essence, Megu is just a super cute version of Second Life or The Sims. In fact, people may feel an even deeper connection to Megu, because, as Dr. Masahiro Mori's Uncanny Valley concepts dictate, people are attracted to things that contain "bits" of human physiognomies, such as cute virtual pets, but become uneasy around more pronounced, exact human features.

Within Megu also lies a sense of animism, in that some users feel that their Megu is somehow alive. This belief in Megu having a "soul" is paralleled in the general understanding of Furbys and Tamagotchi. Critical theorist Michael Mateas of Carnegie Mellon University's School of Computer Science notes in a 1997 paper that synthetic creatures can have a certain "drama" to them, in that their "believability" evokes interaction, and that they maintain an "illusion of life." Megu fits in with this evaluation of artificial companionship perfectly.

Megu was developed by Feynman Co., Ltd., a subsidiary of Gree International, Inc., which makes GREE, one of Japan's biggest social networks, with tens of millions of users. Megu started out as a Japanese language game, before transitioning to English, and part of the appeal of Megu is its mistranslations. As you get more rares, your "honor" points go up, which changes Megu's status from "Outdo himself everything from nothing" to "MEGU in a thousand." Every once in a while, he just pops up and says things like, "Being bone lazy." So kawaii!

In addition to level-ups, when you plug your phone in, Megu charges, and after a few charges, Megu changes into another species. There are hundreds of possibilities. Kreayshawn, an Oakland-based rapper and distinguished music video director, has had her Megu, named "it," for 579 days. "My favorite thing about Megu it when it transforms, because there are so many different kinds it can become," Kreayshawn told The Creators Project in an email. "And I loved when I can get a new house style."

Kreayshawn is referring to unlockable home styles in the Megu world, buyable with the aforementioned virtual coins. There are also unlockable food items and decorations. The beauty of Megu is its breadth. Over the three years since it was released, Megu has expanded from 120 levels to 350, and developed new rare items on a regular basis. The rare items are collected in several ways: finding eggs for Mr. Sugiyama on walks, having them gifted to you by visitors, going on adventures (which happen every month or two), helping build something in the Event Plaza or playing the Ball Toss game. "My favorite rare items are the seasonal Christmas items, but only at Christmas time. You can't embarrass your Megu and have Xmas decor up all year round because his friends visit," says Jeanette Hayes,

a painter who sees the Internet as inspiration

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It's a mystery as to why Megu is closing. I spoke to a Gree spokesperson in San Francisco, who forwarded questions along to Gree's Japan office, but they didn't answer my questions. Digging around on Twitter, I found the response from "GREE Customer Support" to a distraught user. In it, the company states that, "GREE continues to focus its efforts on developing new games across a variety of exciting genres, as well as continue to bring new content and updates to our existing titles. Therefore, we had to make the difficult decision to reallocate development resources to other titles—new and old—to ensure that we continue to deliver the best content and gameplay experiences possible to our players." Which, in essence, is a non-answer. I suspect that Megu wasn't making enough money to justify a development team that had to come up with new levels, houses, items, rares, and Megus on a consistent basis. My guess is that, in the end, Megu simply wasn't profitable.

I've had my Megu for 361 days now. I'm at level 350, the top level. I am part of a lonely gen who, for hours at a time, tap fingers on screens, scanning the glowing infinite Internet. There are a lot of people like me. We find comfort in synthetic creatures like our Megus. Hayes didn't even know that Megu was closing when I emailed her. Since then, she's tweeted out the Change.org petition. She's had "Puccini," her Megu, for nearly two years. I asked her what makes Megu cool. "I don't know if Megu's cool, it's just a li'l bit fun and beautiful," she says.

Or, as Kreayshawn simply states, "R.I.P. Kawaii Megu."