You vs Cat: Bad news, the cats are winning online game - Hamilton Spectator

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You vs Cat: Bad news, the cats are winning online game - Hamilton Spectator Mar 14th 2012, 21:01 In the first cross-species online game, which pits cats against humans, it looks like it's game over for people: the cats are ahead. The iPad app You vs Cat is described as "one-sided air hockey." When the human flicks the puck across the screen, their feline combatant, goalie style, tries to block it with a paw swipe. It debuted this week at the South by Southwest Interactive Festival in Austin, Texas, by cat food producer Friskies. The company's world-wide leaderboard has the cats beating humans 2,091 to 1,250. Buzz Feed's Katie Notopoulos faced off against current promotional champion Buddy at the fair's demo. "His confidence and arrogance was evident," she wrote, "he wouldn't even look me in the eye after completely decimating me three rounds in a row." But games aside, experts say it's the brand that will win in the end. This is the sixth, cat-oriented iPhone or iPad game from Nestle Purina Petcare (Friskie's parent company), but the first known to be for cats and humans, and it's likely to be the one that most stirs up gaming cat lovers. "The angle to say that it's a cross-species game is good marketing; it's the first time that I've heard of an app being positioned that way," said Marlon Rodrigues, director of marketing for Toronto app creators Polar Mobile. "There's a lot of games that were built for newborns and toddlers; I can imagine it's a very similar dynamic to what you'd develop for a child — big touch areas, big graphics, not too many things moving at a time, and doesn't require a whole lot of articulation." With the free game available on iTunes later this week, Friskies cat food will likely be the long-term beneficiary of cat owners filming their favourite You vs. Cat matches and posting them online. "This something that we push with a lot of our clients," said Mark Pavlidis director of development at Toronto app developers Endloop Mobile. "Having the app which just kind of promotes your product isn't very useful…and nobody's going to want to download it… "But if there's some type of interaction point, some type of utility for people to use this app, the promotion of your product is the side effect of that and that's where that cat app is really clever." It's a marriage primed for YouTube. "That's just the long running joke about the Internet: that basically it's an enablement for people to show their cat videos," said Rodrigues. Torstar News This entry passed through the Full-Text RSS service — if this is your content and you're reading it on someone else's site, please read the FAQ at fivefilters.org/content-only/faq.php#publishers. Five Filters recommends: Donate to Wikileaks.

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