How to Pet Your Cat

How to Pet Your Cat(HTPYC) is an alt-control game and social installation that explores human–human–machine connection through an act as simple as petting a giant cat. At its center is an oversized plush cat-butt controller wired with a grid of pressure sensors, driving a two-player PC game. Players touch, stroke, and pat the controller’s cheeks while two virtual cats respond with purrs, protests, and score feedback in real time; in 30-second rounds, they compete to see whose cat is more pleased. The piece treats touch as both input and performance. Every gesture has a location, rhythm, and intensity that the system reads and translates into animation and sound, “teaching” players how to pet their cat. Players test strategies, search for sweet spots, and learn to read the cats’ moods from their responses. Around them, onlookers laugh, shout advice, and often end up taking a turn themselves. The controller’s absurd scale and softness lowers inhibition, turning play into a shared, contagious event. As a human–human–machine interface, HTPYC positions the device as a mediator between bodies rather than a replacement for them. It creates a low-stakes buffer zone where physical comedy, embarrassment, care, and curiosity can surface safely, with the virtual cats acting as focal points for a temporary community around a shared tactile medium. Sitting between arcade cabinet, performance piece, and soft sculpture, it invites people to play with, and with each other through, a gently ridiculous machine. Developed by DaChu Interactive, the project has been exhibited at game festivals and cat conventions, including fundraising events with animal nonprofits. In each context it generates queues, repeat play, and spontaneous conversations between strangers. By foregrounding touch, humor, and social presence over purely visual spectacle, HTPYC asks what kinds of playful, felt connections remain difficult to reproduce in purely digital space.