Twitter’s determined dog-petter thwarts game designer’s troll job

For more than a year, Tristan Cooper has catalogued which video games let a player characters pet NPC doggies. In February, Dan Marshall and Ben Ward launched In the Lair of the Clockwork God, a humorous point-and-click-adventure that contains a random encounter that deliberately means to frustrate Cooper’s efforts.

But Cooper prevailed! And (spoiler alert) In The Lair of the Clockwork God, you can pet the dog.

Marshall, who in 2017 made the outstanding sports satire Behold The Kickmen! hit Twitter this week in fist-shaking despair, cursing Cooper’s determination in giving his game’s dog a pat on the head. “The dog, and the convoluted difficulty in petting the dog, was entirely put into the game with the specific intention of trolling Can You Pet The Dog,” Marshall admitted.

I’m actually quite angry about this because the dog, and the convoluted difficulty in petting the dog, was *entirely* put in the game with the specific intention of trolling @CanYouPetTheDog into declaring you could not pet the dog.

And…he just…he tweeted it out. https://t.co/Ib2OmTREGA

— Dan Marshall (@danthat) March 19, 2020

Cooper didn’t take the bait! Or maybe he did? Either way, add another game to the list of titles where, yes, you may pet the dog.

Cooper is presently engaged with documenting which video games have waterfalls the player may peek behind. Marshall’s studio, Size Five Games, most recently published Devil’s Kiss. That’s billed as a prequel to the story in In The Lair of the Clockwork God, in which protagonists Dan and Ben “meet at high school and promptly uncover a vast, horny conspiracy involving some demons.”

—
Owen S. Good
Polygon