Felino: The Philosophical Practice of Making an Interspecies Videogame

"Felino: The Philosophical Practice of Making an Interspecies Videogame" presents the design of a tablet game intended for simultaneous play between humans and domestic cats, arguing that interspecies design should treat the animal's reactions and preferences as central rather than peripheral. The authors, Westerlaken and Gualeni, ground their case in Animal-Computer Interaction and in philosophical frameworks including Plessner's positionality theory, De Mul's biohermeneutics, and Peirce's semiotics. Their central claim is that games are conventionally designed only for humans, and that a more ethical and effective approach begins from shared, pre-cultural physical play and shifts the design perspective from human-centred anthropomorphism toward the animal's own point of view.

The authors translate this reasoning into three guidelines: using animal curiosity to motivate voluntary engagement, analysing interaction through shared play, and supplementing observation with metric and biometric measures such as cortisol levels. These principles, refined through Grounded Theory, shaped the development of Felino. The empirical component of the work involved testing the game with 19 cats and analysing 1,666 video annotations of their interactions, providing the basis for the project's evaluation.

The scope of the work sits at the intersection of philosophy of technology, animal-computer interaction, and multispecies ethnography, drawing on literature from philosophical anthropology and interdisciplinary research on hybrid biological-digital play. Its contribution is primarily theoretical and conceptual, presenting Felino as a critical artefact whose design rationale and reception invite evaluation rather than as a source of generalizable quantitative findings. The project thus offers both a practical model for designing games with non-human players and a methodological argument for taking animal experience seriously within human-computer design.