Virtual Pet Research Virtual Pet Technologies, Uses & Benefits and Market Case Studies An Annotated Bibliography

Virtual Pet Design & Consulting Services

These papers are often used by people writing technical papers, thesis and disertations on virtual pets. We try to specifically encourage research in the history, use and benefits of "Virtual Pets." If you are aware of any virtual pet research papers not listed below, or working on a major paper in this area, please contact us.

If cite some of the references you find here in a technical paper, please cite this page as well.

If you are interested in the patent literature covering Virtual Pets, please visit our Virtual Pet Patents Page.

OUTLINE

• Specific Pets or Technologies
  • Keychain Pets
  • Computer Pets
  • Wireless Virtual Pets for Mobile Phones
  • Robotic Pets
  • Plush Pets
  • Virtual Pets as Interactive Agents
  • Blumberg Articles (an MIT researcher)
  • Miscellaneous Articles
• Behaviorial / Society Issues Surrounding Virtual Pets
• Modeling / Simulating Existing Virtual Pets
• History of Virtual Pets
• Marketing Business Plan Presentations - Marketing Methods - Marketing Case Studies
  • Neopets Case Studies
• Game Based Learning / Training / Teaching (using virtual pets to train / educate users)
• Additional Resources

We tried to categorize the articles by their main focus, but many overlap two or more categories. We suggest you browse the entire listing.

KEYCHAIN PETS
• "Critical Thoughts About Tamagotchi" Great research work specifically on the Tamagotchi. The article was written by a gentleman at UC Berkeley as a class project. We originally listed this reference 23 June 1997. When the original post was no longer available on the net, we re-posted it 15 November 1997.

• Don't Bother Buying a Tamagotchi. Chris Rae. 1997. This review criticizes several aspects of the tamagotchi pet and provides suggestions for future designs. It also includes comments from dozens of childen and other users.

• Tama-Hackers Play God, Catch Hell. Michael Stutz. Wired News. 10 August 1997. Discusses cultural perceptions surrounding the use of tamagotchi cheats and codes.

• Keychain Game FAQ. Galen T. Kamatsu, Robert A. Worne and Clinton R. Dyer. January 1998. Brief descriptions of dozens of pets and some other keychain games. It also briefly describes the logic system of several of the pets.

• In the Fall of 1997, an MIT class reviewed several keychain pets of that era. Reviews focused on interfaces, their ability to represent life and a list of what they thought was good and bad about the various designs. Brief reviews of several keychain pets including Tamagotchi, Electronic Virtual Turtle by Novatoy, Dinky Dino, Hitorikko, Tako Seijin Space Creature, RakuRaku, Hitorikko, and others

• Romance Goes Digital. Keyword (a Japanese online publication in English). Robert Juhl. 06/08/1998. Talks about the Lovegety keychain pet which is used by teens to find real dates. When they detect a member of the opposite sex nearby they beep. The owners then signal back their level of interest in each other.

  COMPUTER PETS

• A 1997 MIT class reviewed several keychain pets and also posted two reviews on the Creatures computer pet game.
  • Creatures by one student

  • Creatures by another student

• Petz (a computer pet)
  • Virtual Babyz: Believable Agents with Narrative Intelligence by Andrew Stern talks about the methods used to develop the Babyz software and some history of the virtual efforts at Petz. It is a great paper.

  • Socially Intelligent Virtual Petz. Adam Frank, Andrew Stern and Ben Resner. in Socially Intelligent Agents. Pgs. 43-45. AAAI Press Technical Report FS97-02. 1997.

  • Virtual Petz: A Hybrid Approach to Creating Autonomous, Lifelike Dogz and Catz. Frank, Stern and Resner. Proceedings of the Second International Conference on Anutonomous Agents. New York, NY: The Association for Computing Machinery. 1998.

  • "These Dogs are Virtual Best Friends; Forget the Mouse -- the Mutt Is the Top Electronic Beast." by Peter Finn. The Washington Post. 4 August 1996. Page B1. This article focuses on the Petz product line, but also includes discussions of the use and benefits of virtual pets.

• Evolving Virtual Creatures. Karl Sims. Computer Graphics. Annual Conference Series. (Siggraph '94 Proceedings), July 1994. Pgs.15-22. This is an early article by the father of the Sim"s games.

• The Virtual Hippocampus: Spatial Common Sense for Synthetic Creatures. Damian Alberto Isla. Masters of Engineering Thesis. MIT. Dept. of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science. August 2001. This paper covers a lot of the spatial issues involved in computer based virtual pets. [PDF].

• "What is Artificial Life." from the Fujitsu-Interactive website. This article is a series of questions and answers with Dr. Joseph Bates of Carnegie Mellon University about artificial life and especially about Fujitsu's applications of the technology.

  WIRELESS VIRTUAL PETS FOR MOBILE PHONES

• IKI-IKI Phone: A Multi-user Alife Game for Mobile Phones. Christa Sommerer, Laurent Mignonneau, Roberto Lopez-Gulliver. IEEE International Conference on Multimedia and Expo. (ICEME 2001) Conference Proceedings. Tokyo Waseda University. 2001. This paper discusses a virtual pet game for mobile phones. The game has genetic qualities, similar to the Creatures game. Note, the paper downloads slowly, even on a DSL connection. [PDF].

• Virtual Internet Pets Based on Java-Enabled Mobile Agents. Gautam Gupta, Samridhi Ganeriwalla, Sanju Sunny and Stuti Nautiyal. Center for Advanced Information Systems. Nanyang Technological University. Singapore. Life-like internet pets demonstrate mobility, autonomy and location tracking using java-based mobile agents. They can carry there code between different computers via the net. [PDF].

• The Making of Alien Fish Exchange. Excellent story of the making of a virtual pet game (Alien Fish Exchange) for mobile phones by nGame Ltd.. The game was first released in December 1999.

• Wireless Virtual Pets for Mobile Phones. We wrote this article covering the the evolution of virtual pets in mobile phones in late 2001.

• Cpets.com business plan a Jan 2001 business plan. A class project from Victoria Jr. College in Singapore. [PDF]

  ROBOTIC PETS

• Cyberculture, Science and AIBO: A non-modern view on collectives, Artificial Life and playful quasi-objects. Jari Friis Jergensen. Masters Thesis. Institut for Informations- og Medievidenskab, Aarhus Universitet. December 2001. Discusses quasi-objects from a historical perspective and provides considerable coverage of AIBO, Sony's robotic dog, including some from internal Sony documents. The site provides several supporting materials surrounding the thesis. The thesis itself is also available in PDF format.

• Pets and Other Animals Interacting With Robotic Virtual Pets and Other Robots covers interactions between virtual pets and real animals. We also have a bibliography there on interactions with animals.

  PLUSH PETS

• Fluffy Tamagotchi a research project at the Z Lab in the UK. The project began in December 1997. It is an obvious forerunner of the Furby soft virtual pet concept.

• Congratulations, Its a Bot! Erick Davis. Wired. 8.09 - Sept. 2000. Covers My Real Baby a robotic baby from Hasbro.

  VIRTUAL PETS AS INTERACTIVE AGENTS

• eMuu - An Emotional Robot. Christoph Bartneck, Technical University of Eindhoven, The Netherlands and Michio Okada, ATR Media Integration & Communications Research Laboratories, Kyoto Japan. A robotic character, eMuu was constructed for future evaluation as an interface to a home control system (change temperature, turn on TV, etc.).

• Robotic User Interfaces. Christoph Bartneck, Technical University of Eindhoven, The Netherlands and Michio Okada, ATR Media Integration & Communications Research Laboratories, Kyoto Japan. More info on eMuu (see reference above) and extensive coverage of robotic interfaces of several plush toys and robotic pets. Includes excellent pictures of many of these devices. [PDF]

• Interacting with Virtual Pets and Other Software Agents. Pattie Maes. Presented at the conference Doors of Perception 2. 1995. It talks about using virtual pets as interactive agents between you and machines or other control systems. The talk is paraphrased at: http://www.comp.lancs.ac.uk/sociology/soc040ls.html

  BLUMBERG ARTICLES (an MIT researcher)

• Old Tricks, New Dogs: Ethology and Interactive Creatures. Bruce Blumberg. Phd dissertation. 1996. MIT Media Lab. This dissertation cites five key problems associated with constructing interactive creatures and develops a tool kit for their design. The pet example used is Silas T. Dog. [PDF].

• Interactive Training for Synthetic Characters. Song-Yee Yoon, Robert C. Burke, Bruce M. Blumberg and Gerald E. Schneider. All from MIT. Copyright American Association for Artificial Intelligences 1999. Discusses how humans "train" virtual pets.

• Sympathethic Interfaces: Using a Plush Toy to Direct Synthetic Characters. M.P. Johnson, A. Wilson, B. Blumberg, C. Kline, and A. Bobick. The Media Library MIT. In Proceedings of CHI 99. This paper focuses on the interface with virtual pets constructed as plush toys. [PDF].

• Observation-based Expectation Generation and Response for Behavior-based Artificial Creatures. C. Kline. M.S. Thesis in Media Arts and Sciences. MIT. September 1999. This thesis is by one of Bruce Blumberg's students.

  MISCELLANEOUS ARTICLES

• Aesthetically Evolved Virtual Pets. Thomas S. Ray. University of Oklahoma ATR Human Information Processessing Laboratores.
  Mr. Ray's article was later expounded upon and published as: Aesthetically Evolved Virtual Pets. Leonardo (MIT Press). 1 Sept. 2001. Vol. 34. No. 4. Pgs. 313-316. This new article focuses on users reaction to the Sims Creatures and how user aesthetic and emotional reactions might be manipulated to encourage users to bond with these pets.

• An Oz - Centric Review of Interactive Drama and Believable Agents. Michael Mateas. Carnegie Mellon University. Computer Science -97-156. June 1997. Mr. Mateas was part of the Oz project as CMU. They focused on interactive drama. This paper reports six elements Oz defined as requirements for believability and includes a brief review of each agent (including several virtual pets) on the scene at that time. [PDF].

• Creatures: Entertainment Software Agents with Artificial Life. Autonomous Agnets and Multi-Agent Systems. 1998. Vol. 1. No. 1. Pgs. 39-57. Very technical description of this biologically evolutionary pet by S. Grand and D. Cliff.

• MyFrenz Realistic Character Developer (RCD). July 2001. Discusses their animation technology that allows individuality, growth and other virtual pet characteristics to be animated in 3D. [PDF].

• Should Children Play With Monsters? (Pokemon) Time Magazine. 22 Nov. 1999. Great article!

• Mad Dog Productions syndicated column's At last the perfect pet this undated article was added 18 April 1997. It's not a true research article, but it does discuss the "virtual pet" concept and need.

• Free Creatures: The Role of Uselessness in the Design of Artificial Pets. This paper by Frederic Kaplan at Sony in France talks about the interaction between virtual pets and their owners, specifically Sony's Aibo robotic dog and how designers try to make users sense they are responsible for the well being of their virtual pet. [PDF].

• Friendship and Intimacy in the Digital Age. Timothy Bickmore. MIT Media Lab. MAS 714 - Systems & Self. Dec. 8, 1998. This paper discusses the concept of friendship with a virtual pet. It talks about the variables and methods involved and how they compare with interactions with "real" friends.

• Loving a Virtual Pet: Steps Toward the Erosion of Emotion. Journal of American and Comparative Cultures. 2000. Vol. 23. No. 4. Pgs. 81-88. This article is by D.W. Kritt.

• Disposable Love: the rise and fall of a virtual pet. L-R. Bloch and D. Lemish. New Media & Society. Dec. 1999. Vol. 1. No. 3. Pgs. 283-303. Mr. Bloch is with the Dept. of Communications of Tel-Aviv University in Israel. The Tamagotchi is discussed in societial terms of disposable relationships and how it is a "sign of the times". Excellent reference. [PDF]

• And They Call it Puppy Love.... Xavier Bensky and Usman Haque. Neo-Tokyo Magazine. March 1997. This article discusses the social aspects of virtual pets, especially the Tamgocchi (original English spelling used in Japan for Tamagotchi).

• Soft Toys with Computer Hearts: Building Personal Storytelling Environments. M. Umaschi, M. Published in CHI 1997 Proceedings. ACM. 1997. Pgs. 20-21.

• Cultural Influence on Popular Culture: A Case Study of Tamagotchi in Japan and the U.S.. Akiko Fukumoto. University of New Mexico. SISSI (Society for the Interdisciplinary Study of Social Imagery. Annual Conference Proceedings 2000. Page 127.

• From Gigapets to Internet: Childhood Technology Rituals as Commodities in Rituals of Childhood. Jo Ann Oravec (Associate Professor, College of Business and Economics, University of Wisconsin-Whitewater). Book Chapter (to be published 2003). (edited by Kathy Merlock Jackson, Virginia Wesleyan University).

• Interactive Toys and Children's Education: Strategies for Educators and Parents. Jo Ann Oravec (Associate Professor, College of Business and Economics, University of Wisconsin-Whitewater). Childhood Education, Winter 2000/2001. Vol. 77 No. 2. Pgs. 81-85.

• Play With Online Virtual Pets as a Method to Improve Mirror Neuron and Real World Functioning in Autistic Children. Eric Lewin Altschuler. Medical Hypothesis. Article in Press. 2007. (an Elsevier Publication).

• The Lowdown on Hi-Tech Toys Denise Mann. WebMD Medical News. 17 Apr. 2001. As technology takes over the toybox, the debate grows on how it affects children.

• Dr. Masahiro Mori's Uncanny Valley

  Dr. Mori, a Japanese robotist, proposed that as our emotional response to objects as they begin to become more lifelike is not a straight line. We warm up to objects that incorporate a "bit" of human characteristics, but as objects become more human their is a strong dip in our emotional response, then it sharply rises as they become almost indistinguishable from humans. Basically we are all warm and fuzzy with things like virtual pets, but repel from "human like" robots until they are so good they are hard to tell from humans.

  • The Uncanny Valley. Dave Bryant. Includes nice charts of Dr. Mori's concepts.[PDF]

  • The Man Who Mistook His Girlfriend for a Robot. Dan Febber. Popular Science. Sept. 2003. What began as a thesis evolved into a very "life like" representation of a human head. The article makes several references to Dr. Masahiro Mori's work.

• Turkle references (a reseacher in this field at MIT)
  • People Who Like Fake Dogs. NPR. All Things Considered. Interview with Sherry Turkle of MIT Media Labs. May 11, 2001. Discusses relationships with Sony's AIBO and other "computational objects". [Audio File].

  • Cuddling Up to Cyborg Babies Sherry Turkle. MIT. UNESCO Courier. Sept. 2000. Discusses the relationships between children and their pets and how some children see a new category of beings "kind of alive" or "fuby kind of alive".

  • Cyborg Babies and Cy-Dough Plasm: Ideas about Self and Life in the Culture of Simulation. Sherry Turkle. Chapter in Cyborg Babies: From Technosex to Technotots, Robbie Davis-Floyd and Joseph Dumit (editors). New York: Routledge, 1998. Somewhat similar to article above. Includes extensive references.

  • What Do You Mean, "Its Just Like a Real Dog?". Katie Hafner. New York Times. May 25, 2000. (requires registration). Discusses how children determine if something is alive or sort of alive, interviews Professor Sherry Turkle at MIT, talks about Furby and several other virtual pet toys.

  • The 3rd Culture. Sherry Turkle. MIT. Discusses a the similarities between virtual pets and Rorschach psychology blot tests. We see what we want to see. Also talks about how we perceive life in them.

  • Relational Artifacts: From Virtual Pets to Digital Dolls. Sherry Turkle. MIT. This video is shown by the Research Channel from time to time. I have seen an online copy, but cannot currently find a functioning one. She talks about how children sort through what is alive and "sort of alive", emerging technologies in this area, digital pets and how interacting with them affect people's ways of thinking about themselves, their humanness, and what makes humans special. It was also taped as part of the DANZ lecture series.

  • Profile: An Ethnologist In Cyberspace. Scientific American. Vol. 278. No. 4. Apr. 1998. Pgs. 29-30. Sherry Turkle explores emotional connections to virtual pets and other computer activities.

  • Virtual pet story collection project at MIT. They are collecting stories from virtual pet owners around the world.

• New Ways of Playing: Digital Toys for the New Millenium. Dr. Nicola Yelland. Dawin Conference Papers. Queensland University of Technology. Australia. About 1999. Discusses the coming technologies, children play learning experiences, the early "digital dolls" and an early online "virtual pet like" play area (MUD - Multi User Dungeon) called MOOSE Crossing, where children were able to bring their pets and create virtual interactive spaces.

• MOOSE Crossing: Construction, Community, and Learning in a Networked Virtual World for Kids. Amy Bruckman. PhD Dissertation. MIT Media Lab. May 1997. In depth discussion of a virtual play area including some statistics on users, how they found and use the site and actual communications.

• The Art of Creating Subjective Reality: An Analysis of Japanese Virtual Pets. Leonardo (MIT Press). 1 Sept. 2001. Vol. 34. No. 4. Pgs. 288-302. This paper by Machiko Kusahara discusses designing the interaction between the user and the toy in a manner that encourages the user to perceive a personality in the pet. Discusses how Japanese virtual pets promote a sense of reality by subjective as well as visual means. This is enhanced when Japanese users see an independent personality in their pet and their culture treats animals on an equal basis with humans.

• The Psychology of Dynamic Product Maintenance Decisions: On the Care and Feeding of Virtual Pets. Robert J. Meyer. Wharton School Marketing Department. under review for publication by the Journal of Consumer Research as of April 2002.

• Caring-About Virtual Pets: An Ethical Interpretation of Tamagotchi. Annie ORourke. Animal Issues. University of Sydney. Australia. Vol. 2. No. 1. 1998. This article fulfills a prophecy I made long ago that animal rights activists would become interested in the care of virtual pets (and perhaps rightfully so).

• Children's Attribution of Needs and Feelings to Virtual Pets: Does Gender Matter? Elizabeth A. Osborn. paper in progress 2000?

• Meaning and Embodiment in Life-Like Agents. Kerstin Dautenhahn. Univeristy of Reading Whitenights. United Kingdom. Discusses cyberpets. [postscript format]

• Toy Stories. Mark Pesce. The Sciences. Published by New York Academy of Sciences. Sept/Oct 2000. Discusses the appeal of Furby and other virtual pets, artificial life, simulated intelligence and Piaget's research on child development. [PDF]

• How to Console Your Pet in Cyberspace - a paper on memorial rites for the souls of deceased animals. Elmer Veldkamp, Thesis. Institute for Japanese and Korean Studies, Leiden University, The Netherlands. 1998. This paper talks about Japanese memorial traditions for people and animals and how they evolved into the online pet funerals and memorials. These later evolved into online memorials for cyberpets. It cites our Virtual Pet Home Page as a reference. [Microsoft Word format].

• Cars, Phones, and Tamagotchi Tribes. Ted G. Lewis. IEEE Computer. Binary Critic Column. Volume 30, Number 11, November 1997. Pages 142-144. Talks of a wish to move back to an agrarian society and how that influences vitual pet and car phone sales.

• The Web-Brain Hypothesis. Kristina Lerman. 12 April 1998. This article focuses on the similarities between the net and our brains. It attempts to measure rate content flowed to the net surrounding major stories or events by the number of usenet (newsgroup) postings and the number of web sites containing the term. Tamagotchi usenet postings and web sites are logged from 3/11/97 to 7/24/98. The number of messages decreased shortly after a sharp rise following the introduction of the pet. The number of web pages continued to grow. The author suggests Usenet posts may measure the transient response to the outside world, while the number of pages parallels our long term memory.

• Caring-about Tamagotchi: Responding to Virtual Pets. Anastasia O'Rourke (Australia). Animal Issues. June 1998. University of Sydney, Department of General Philosophy (6000 word article). (similar to article above).

• It is Forbidden to Feed a Tamagotchi on the Sabbath. M Suissa. Yediot Acharonot / Yediot Ahronot. 23 November 1997. Pg. 32. Raises an ethnic, religious issue surrounding feeding virtual pets.

• "Go Ahead and Jump!" Using Syndetic Modeling to Think Formally about Play and the Usability of an Electronic Lifeform. Mark Treglown. Computers and Learing Research Group. Institute of Educational Technology. The Open University. UK. Conducts usability case study on a Tamagotchi Angel. Excellent paper, but the notation is a bit hard for a novice to follow. Before you give up on understanding it, it is defined in an appendix along with the Tamagotchi Angel model. [PDF]

• Syndetic Modeling of Engaging Electronic Lifeforms. Mark Treglown. 1999. Proceedings of INTERACT'99. Volume II. BCS.
  S. Brewster, A. Cawsey & G. Cockton editors.

• Tool Supported Modeling of the Tamagotchi. Student project at Fraunhofer Institute for Experimental Software Engineering by the Software Engineeing Group at Universitat Kaiserslautern, overseen by Professor Rombach and Professor Broy. Winter Term 1998/1999. Students modeled a Tamagotchi from a list of informal text requirements. These are lengthy, excellent materials, but much of it is in German and tarred postscript files (not a common language, compression method or format for many U.S. viewers). But a considerable amount is in English html and pdf files.in HTML. Even the German pages have understandable graphics. With some luck, you can find English versions of some of the hard to convert sections on google in HTML format.

• Tamagotchi specification with Octopus part of study above.

• The Evolution of Virtual Pets - From 1970 to 1996. Robert Worne. Virtual Pet Secrets Magazine. Pgs. 56-61. Published 1997 by H&S Media. This excellent article points out many of the developments and toys that laid the groundwork for today's virtual pets, like the Petsters, Catster, Little Computer People, Conway's Game of Life (Cellular Automata), Teddy Ruxpin, Riso Petto and many more.

• "Recent Developments and Trends in Keychain Virtual Pets" our own article, originally posted fall 1997. It was later revised and updated in Virtual Pet Secrets magazine. It covers the history of the rapid spread of keychain virtual pet character types, housing designs and other variables.

• The Birth of Furby: Building a Furball with an Attitude. David Hampton. Multi-University Research Laboratory Seminar Series. Stanford University. 10 March 1999. Web page has brief introduction and provides link to 75 minute video presentation in 50 and 100kbs bandwidths. Congratulations to those involved for capturing and archiving this great presention.

• Moody Furballs and the Developers Who Love Them. Scott Kirsner. Wired. 6 Sept. 1998. Lots of info on the behind the scenes development of Furby by Tiger and Hasbro, including the "high stress" moments that always occur during presentations of high-tech toys and the rush to production.

• "Working With The Net." by Marcia Mogelonsky. American Demographics. Vol. 18. 1 February 1996. Page 8. This article provides a general description of those using the internet and then mentions they may also be using virtual pets. It provides some data now in historical context that might be useful to those researching "the beginnings" of pets on the net.

• Cpets.com business plan a Jan 2001 business plan for a virtual pet for mobile phones. Was a class project at Victoria Jr. College in Singapore. [PDF]

• Pokemon Case Study. Peter Oehlkers. Then at Emerson College, later moved to Communications Department at Salem State College in Salem, MA. Excellent in depth study of the marketing methods and way Pokemon grew to be a world-wide phenomenon. Looks like a case study paper for a marketing class.

• Honda Joy Machine. Honda had a firm create a Joy-magotchi patterned after the Tamagotchi to go along with a product launch. This page, operated by the pet designers provides some planning, statistics and information surrounding the pet site. The site was www.hondajoymachine.com

• Challenges of creating a virtual pet: Case study of Pumpui. Andy Best, Creative Director, MEET Factory Oy. Presented at Santa's Games 2002. 18 April 2002, Rovaniemi, Finland. Confererence page was http://www.elamystuotanto.com/programmes1.php3

• The Tamagotchi Model. The two pages here are part of a much larger paper. They discuss the wavefronts of a new product like the Tamagotchi and attempt to model its spread as a function of time and geography, including the geographical concentration of the pet needed to sustain the diffusion. The larger paper is titled, "Microscopic Simulation of Reaction-Diffusion processes - Creating the simulation environment and applications in models of the origin of life, population biology and product marketing" Eldad Bettelheim and Benny Lehmann. October 1998.

• Dynamic Simulation of the Supply Chain for a Short Life Cycle Product - Lessons From the Tamagotchi Case. Toru Higuchi and Marvin D. Trout. Computers and Operations Research. 2003. (not sure of exact issue).

• Virtual Goods Summit 2007 22 June 2007 Stanford University. One day conference on real sale of "virtual" goods.

• Neopets Case Studies
  • Who Let the Neopets Out?. Lisa M. Bowman. CNET News.com February 26, 2002. In depth info on the spread of Neopets and their marketing methods.

  • Pet Project: Apache & Linux Power Stickiest Site on the Web. Drew Robb. 101 Enterprise Linux. November 2000. Neopets has become one of the stickiest sites on the web (people stay there a long time). This article focuses on the heavy duty hardware and operating systems behind this high volume site. It also talks about marketing methods and demographics.

  • Harvard Business School has a case study for sale online, Neopets, Inc.. The 30 page study published March 12, 2002 was written by Thomas Eisenmann and Liz Kind. It is case study #9-802-100. The case explores tradeoffs confronting a firm that benefits from strong nework effects (users promote the service to others) as they try to decide whether or not to pursue international markets. Also discusses sequencing international expansion and possibility of relying on joint venture partners to provide resouces and local asssistance. Covers similar elements to the series of reports below.

  • The University of Washington held an international competition, Global Business Challenge 2002, in which teams from 16 colleges around the world proposed an international business plan for Neopets. The contest was also sponsored by Russell, Costco and The Ford Motor Company. The event schedule shows the presentations being put together and presented in a two and a half day period. Something tells me there was not a lot of sleeping going on. These are very well done presentations. Most of them are in Power Point format, but interestingly the winner is in adobe acrobat [PDF] format.

    If anyone thinks they may want to read these in the future, we suggest you download a copy of them as the University of Washington only leaves one year of reports up to the general public. The same comment applies to every link on this web site. You never know when they may be gone forever.

    • The presentation from Global Business School from Germany won the contest. Putting this together in two and a half days must have required a huge amount of effort. It is exceptionally well done considering the circumstances and could be a great guide and source of inspiration for others trying to put together high quality presentations for virtual pet projects. [PDF]

    • Shanghai Jiao Tong University from China was finalist. [Power Point]
    • Chulalongkorn University from Thailand was a finalist. [Power Point]
    • University of Washington USA was a finalist. [Power Point]
    • University of Botswana. (presentation not available)
    • University of Auckland New Zealand. [Power Point]
    • Seattle University USA. [Power Point]
    • Singapore Management University Singapore. [Power Point]
    • University of Economics Czech Republic. [Power Point]
    • SAA, University of Turin Italy. [Power Point]
    • Vladivostok State University of Economics Russia. [Power Point]
    • Koc University Turkey. [Power Point]
    • Florida International University USA. [Power Point]
    • University of Texas USA. [Power Point]
    • Yonsei University South Korea. [Power Point]
    • University of Technology Jamaica. [Power Point]

Game Based Learning / Training / Teaching (using virtual pets to train / educate users)

• TRIANGLE: A Multi-Media test-bed for examining incidental learning, motivation and Tamagotchi-Effect within a Game-Show like Computer Based Learning Module. Dr. Andreas Holzinger. Digital Institute of Medical Informatics. Graz University. Austria. Arnold Pichler, Wolfgang Almer and Dr. Hermann Mauer at Institute of Computer Supported New Media - Austria. Triangle software is a tool for examining motivational based factors in computer based learning. It incorporates "Virtual Learning Friends" to help you through the educational materials. [PDF]

• Incidental learning, motivation and the Tamagotchi Effect: VR-Friends, chances for new ways of learning with computers.Holzinger, A.; Maurer H. (1999): CAL99 Abstract Book. London. Elsevier, 70. (Similar to the reference above)

• A game-based training model: Development, application, and evaluation. R. Garris and R. Ahlers. Paper presented at I/ITSEC, November, 2001.

• Games, motivation, and learning: A research and practice model. R. Garris, R. Ahlers and J. Driskell. Manuscript in preparation (2002).

• Do computer-based games facilitate knowledge acquisition and retention? K. Ricci, E. Salas and J.A. Cannon-Bowers. Military Psychology. Vol. 8. No. 4. Pgs. 295-307. 1996.

• Improving Learning Persistence of military Personnel by Enhancing Motivation in a Technical Training Program. B. Whitehall and B. McDonald. Simulation & Gaming. Vol. 24 No. 3. Pages 294-313, 1993.

• In late 2001 we compiled a major listing of Virtual Pet Patents. They contain a great deal of information about the technologies behind virtual pets and their increasing complexity. They also frequently reference technical articles in this area.

• Numerous consumer magazine and newpaper articles on the early days of the Tamagotchi key chain pet and the frenzy surrounding it an be found on our Tamagotchi Page.

• Several web sites with additional information on virtual pet research and technologies can be found in the Virtual Pet Technical Research Links section of our Virtual Pet Links Page.

• Additional references can be found on our Future of the Virtual Pet Industry page.

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