What is a desktop pet?
A desktop pet is a small animated character, usually an animal, that lives on your computer screen while you do other things. It walks, sits, sleeps, and sometimes reacts to your mouse. It has no job. It is there for company.
Where desktop pets came from
The idea is older than the web. In the 1980s, Naoshi Watanabe wrote a program called Neko, the Japanese word for cat, for the NEC PC-9801 computer. A small cat chased the mouse pointer around the screen and fell asleep when the pointer stopped. In 1989, Kenji Gotoh brought it to the Macintosh, and from there it spread to other systems. (Source)
A second idea arrived in the middle of the 1990s: a pet you look after. Dogz came out for computers in 1995 and Catz in 1996, the same year the Tamagotchi keychain pet was introduced. These pets needed feeding and attention, and they got unhappy without it. (Source)
Both ideas are still around. Some pets keep you company and ask for nothing. Others are a small game.
Desktop pet, virtual pet, shimeji: what is the difference?
The words overlap, and people use them loosely. Roughly:
- Desktop pet or screen pet: a character that lives on your screen, on top of whatever you are doing.
- Virtual pet: the wider word for any digital pet, including ones you raise inside their own app or toy.
- Shimeji: a word you will often see for small characters that wander and climb around the screen, many of them drawn by fans.
- Browser pet: a desktop pet that lives inside your web browser, added as an extension.
The kinds you can get today
- Ready-made pets. You choose from a set of animals or characters, as in Shimeji Browser Extension. This is the quickest way to start.
- Pets you raise. You feed them, play with them, and watch them grow, as in Meow, The Cat Pet.
- Pets you draw yourself. Some programs let you replace the character with your own pictures.
- Pets made from your photos. You add photos of your real dog or cat, and the app draws and animates a pet that looks like them. Pawsome Family and FriendPet do this in the browser. Peekoo and MomoPlanet do it on the desktop.
They also live in two different places. A desktop app puts your pet on your whole screen, on top of any program. A browser extension puts your pet inside your browser tabs.
To compare the browser kind, see virtual pet Chrome extensions: 10 to know, and how to choose. To make one of your own pet, see how to turn your own dog or cat into a desktop pet.
Why keep one?
A desktop pet does nothing useful, and that is the point. It puts something alive-looking on a screen that is otherwise all work. It moves at its own pace while you move at yours.
A good one also knows when to stay out of the way. It rests when you stop, it keeps to the edge of the screen, and you can hide it when you need to.
Are desktop pets safe to install?
That depends on the program, not on the idea. Install from an official store, check who makes it, and read what it is allowed to see. For browser pets, Chrome shows a warning that worries a lot of people. See what “Read and change all your data on all websites” means.
A desktop pet of your own dog or cat
Pawsome Family is a Chrome extension that turns 1 to 5 photos of your dog or cat into a small animated pet. They walk, sit, and nap along the bottom of every tab, and they look like your pet, not like a breed. See an example orange tabby or dachshund.
One pet is free for 30 days, with no card needed. It runs in Chrome on a computer.