Game for Cats

On my iPad I downloaded an app called ‘Game for Cats’, a couple of weeks ago on whim. Game for Cats has two separate levels—one free, one costing a buck. The free game simulates a large, fuzzy-edged laser pointer against a dark background. The pointer travels on and off the screen, sometimes pausing and gyrating slightly, as if waiting for the cat to attack. It varies speed, stops completely, and vanishes for unpredictable amounts of time. When the cat reaches out to catch the light, it dissipates with a soft, satisfying ‘bweep.’ And the cat scores a hundred points. That’s it. No boss levels. Just your cat’s dirty paw, your expensive iPad, and a rapid succession of slaps and bweeps.

The level that costs a dollar is vastly superior, my cats tell me (on the ‘select a level’ screen, it’s the only one they’ll go for, these days); it involves an animated mouse with a long, twitchy tale and beady eyes scampering across a cheese-colored screen. Sometimes it’ll peek out from the edges, and then dash to the other side. Once in a while it’ll linger in the screen’s center, doing whatever it is that mice do in their spare time, as if it thinks it’s unobserved.

The cats go freakin’ nuts over the mouse. Sarah, the cat that’s going on twenty-one, will rouse from her hard life of eating and sleeping on the heater vent to slap at the screen over and over, causing the mouse to scamper and squeak every time she scores. She’s the current household high score holder—over 20,000 in a single game—because she’s so determined to slap that little squeaker into submission before exhausting herself into another geriatric catnap.

Fred, on the other hand, is more crafty with the game. She seems to think the iPad is some kind of cage for the mouse; she’ll spend her time trying to reach under the device in order to get at it from the inside. Or she’ll attempt to use her nose and paws to turn the iPad onto its glass front, in order to tip out its contents. She’s also much more creative in her play. When I put the iPad onto the floor in the office while I work, in order to keep her from bugging me, she’ll sit on the desk for a while and watch the mouse from above—and then suddenly she’ll throw all thirteen considerable pounds of herself at the screen in a terrifying death pounce. Lately her favorite strategy has been to use her nose to nudge the pad over to where the office door lies open, and then to line it up so that its lip is perfectly parallel to the door’s edge (it’s eerie, how anal she is about that). Then she’ll tiptoe excitedly around to the other side of the door and bat at the mouse from underneath it.

I feel a little guilty about fobbing off Game for Cats on my pets when I’m too busy (or lazy) to get out their toys and give them some exercise. It feels a little bit like giving my young a couple of jelly doughnuts and a big box of McNuggets and muttering, “Go play with yer video games and get out of my hair, y'damn kids!” Though I can’t understand the hours of amusement they’ve both had with the thing, so far.

The worst side effect, though? They both regard the iPad as theirs. I can’t read in bed at night without Fred interposing herself between my face and the glowing screen to look for mice. When I lent the iPad to one of my friends the other day, Fred jealously hopped onto his shoulder then walked down his chest and attempted to push the iPad out of his hands.

Worse still, Fred seems to think that any flat-screen device is a potential mouse cage. I can’t answer a phone call without her running over to push the phone away from my ear. It was bad enough that she already checked her email and played World of Warcraft without me; now she sits behind my computer screen and hangs her head over the top, cocking her head so she can check for rodents. I have to hide the iPad itself when I’m not using it, because otherwise I’m likely to find it flipped over and nudged beneath a cabinet or a door. I’d even posted a video on Facebook last week of the cats alternating scoring points with the game; the sound of the slapping and squeaking will bring Fred running from the house’s most remote reaches, ears twitching and whiskers a-quiver.

Game for Cats. I’m still trying to figure out whether it’s the smartest dollar I’ve ever spent, or whether the decision means I’ll have to buy the cats an Apple device of their very own.