Happy Mice

A Game of Wild Animal Suffering

The superior power of population cannot be checked without producing misery or vice.

- Thomas Malthus

Overview

Some mice have found their way into your pantry, where there is some food. Without more, they will starve to death. You can feed them, but beware: they may multiply.

There is no official goal to the game, but mice are sensitive creatures who are capable of suffering, and so it would be better that they be happy. To assist you, some stats regarding their happiness are provided.

Gameplay

Your only control over the mice is through when and how you feed them. You can deposit a fixed amount of food by clicking on the "Feed Mice" button in the pantry window. There is no maximum amount of times you can feed them, so if you want to feed more, click faster!

Every second of the game, another week passes. In that week the mice will eat and may breed. Each mouse will try to eat at least once. Eating makes mice happy. If it cannot, its robustness will go down. Failing to eat makes mice unhappy.

Some mice will try to eat twice. If they succeed, their robustness will go up. If a mouse's robustness reaches 6 or more, the mouse may reproduce. This will cause 4-13 new mouse pups to enter the game.

If an adult mouse's robustness ever drops below 3, or if a mouse pup's robustness ever drops at all, the mouse will die. Starvation is an unpleasant way to die and will hurt the mouse's happiness score. Mice which live more than a year have a chance of dying of old age.

Thanks

This game was created between 1/5/19 and 1/12/18 for the Philosophy Game Jam.

The mouse artwork for this game was uploaded to the Open Clip Art Library by artbejo.

Sounds for this game were uploaded to Freesound by Reitanna and Jon285.

This game uses Coiny and ZCool QingKe HuangYou from Google Fonts.

This game was written in JavaScript using React. Code for the game available on Github.

For Oates

By Derek Shiller, 2019 X