An SPP Valentine from my wife
Jeanne’s gotten herself hooked on this thing called SuperPoke! Pets.
And she’s turned it into a major playground, building elaborate constructed environments. With pets at the center. Grendl is her dragon. The whole thing has a manga-like feel.
My Valentine from my wife (above) took hours to build and features my absolute favorite food, crab. (It’s a San Francisco thing. And tearing thru all the shells, with one small fork, I consider an art form.) Each black dot is a piece of coal, each white and blue flower carefully placed. See the completed environment (animated) live today by clicking on the image.
Sort of watching from the sidelines, I’ve seen how elaborate this SPP universe has become. I have a few observations:
[1] Just like the real world, SPP has all the personalities one would expect. As users, there are nice people, pet lovers, shy folk, artists, housewives, obsessives, elitists, religious nuts, freaks and the downright sadistic. The users take this stuff really seriously. Like real life.
[2] There’s a Facebook version of the game and a MySpace version. The MySpace version is better.
[3] I had a pet named ‘Baby’ because I clicked on something in Facebook and everything just started happening. Since, Jeanne’s adopted Baby and turned him into a puppy named ‘Steve.’
[4] There’s this thing called playdates. That are really important or something. Personally, I avoid anything that has the term ‘playdates’ in it.
[5] Somewhere along the way, the users know that the original SPP artist is no longer involved. So the newest images they release is seen as ‘not as collectible’ as the older stuff. If, by a small chance the original artist is reading this: You are missed and loved.
[6] Everyone seems to hate the company that owns SPP. It’s sort of a ‘hating the man’ kind of thing.
[7] Building new environments out of odd things is cool. Like taking chili peppers and making a boat out of them.
[8] There’s no way to design your own environments, you have to use the supplied art. So . . . lost me right there.
[9] Spite can be a really powerful tool in SPP world. There’s this elitist club called ‘Gifting Nijas’ who don’t give decent gifts and are obsessed with playdates. Kind of reminds me of the Holy Roman Empire. My wife is now running a club that does everything the Gifting Ninjas don’t do. It’s called ‘Decorators Gone Wild.’
[10] If I hear profanity spewing from the other room, I know someone in SPP world is being a weasel. There are a lot of weasels in SPP world.
[11] Everything is traded using coins, though users can buy things with real money. True sport is to not spend real money, just the fake stuff. Facebook banned extra coins or something like that. Now people hate Facebook or something.
[12] It’d be really cool if there were a way to make real money off SPP. The founding company is netting a fortune. Which is probably why they’re hated so much.
You can find my wife’s universe here.
The images in this post are from her scrapbook. Click to jump/view larger.
Happy Valentines Day Jeanne!
