There are more animal gamers than you might think. In California, for example, US Navy sea lions have been trained to navigate an on-screen cursor through a maze, using their snouts to press four buttons (up, down, left and right).
The sea lions, which the Navy uses to locate and recover objects in the ocean, receive a reward when they complete a level: not a loot box or power-up, but a real-life herring.
The games are designed to test the sea lions’ cognitive capabilities, but the marine mammals face stiff competition from the Navy’s bottlenose dolphins, which have been taught to play games by controlling joysticks with their mouths.
On land, it’s primates who are the expert gamers. Chimpanzees and orangutans in zoos in Edinburgh, Scotland, and Leipzig, Germany, were recently trained to forage for food in a virtual environment.
When one of them found a digital snack (apples, grapes and bananas were scattered throughout the game) they were rewarded with the real-life equivalent.
The game provided insights into how these animals use landmarks, such as trees, to navigate when looking for food.
Meanwhile, chimps in the US have demonstrated a knack for negotiating virtual mazes: a 2014 study at Georgia State University’s Language Research Center found that they performed as well as children aged between three and six years old.
But like the sea lions, the primates also face stiff competition. In 2021, four pigs in the US were taught to operate a joystick with their snouts to steer an on-screen cursor into a target (the researchers responsible say it required “conceptual understanding of the task, as well as skilled motor performance”).
There are also tablet apps for cats that allow them to ‘catch’ digital mice and fish with their paws.
Where will it all end? Hedgehogs playing Sonic Racing? Hamsters playing Grand Theft Auto? Probably not, but these gamers are showing us that we still have much to learn about animals’ cognitive capacity.
This article is an answer to the question (asked by Guy Russell, via email) 'Can animals play video games?'
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