My Cat’s Gaming Killcount

Five years ago, Sydney and I adopted a ragdoll named Bean who has quickly eclipsed both of us as the owner of the house.

What few cats my family had in my childhood were aloof outdoor loners, so Bean was my first real experience with just how affectionate and loving a cat can be. It’s incredible how many different emotions and personality quirks she has, and she’s become far and away one of the best parts of my life since she entered it. Even when she sits on my keyboard in the middle of a high-stakes gaming moment, I can’t get mad at her and usually just stop playing to hug her and get purred at.

But this predilection for planting her posterior on our PCs means that she’s not just a cat, she’s technically a gamer herself! Any time she’s nudged my mouse or walked across my keyboard, she’s inputting actions into whatever I’m playing and unwittingly claiming the title of ‘player’ for herself. And some of these moments were serendipitous enough that she manages to frag either me, an NPC, or another hapless player. Just for fun I thought I’d chronicle my cat’s KD;R for posterity, almost certainly among the upper echelon for her demographic.

1. Vaporizing a Cloaked Spy in Team Fortress 2

A few years ago I was messing around in TF2, one of those neverending 2fort matches where I’m just brainlessly DMing as Demoman. I had just respawned and was running through the lower hallways to reach the central bridge when Bean jumped on my desk and landed on my mouse, launching a pipe that obliterated a cloaked spy crouched in the corner. I will forever wonder if he questioned how on earth I randomly guessed he was there, but any honest explanation would have been even less believable.

2. Turning my World of Warcraft Zombie into a Ghost

On this occasion I was doing the Horde questline that unlocks Zandalar, WoW’s featured continent from the Battle For Azeroth expansion. I had just finished the never-ending starter quest and an NPC had flown me to the top of this massive ziggurat, all I had to do was talk to the Emperor to complete the quest and unlock the flight path for the new continent. But Bean walks across my keyboard and causes my zombie warlock to sidestep off the edge and plummet 15 stories to his death.

This was annoying enough, but the problems only compounded from there; I had no way to ghost-walk up the side of the ziggurat to reach my corpse, and upon respawning at the graveyard I found I also had no way to actually enter the ziggurat, as I hadn’t completed the quest to unlock access. The game really banked everything on that one-time scripted flight which, in fairness, deposited you right where you needed to go. Ultimately I had no choice but to cancel and restart the quest, which began in Ogrimmar so I needed to hearth all the way back, it’s honestly impressive how she picked the worst conceivable moment to waste the maximum amount of my time. Blizzard would be proud.

(Sydney would like to add that Bean has similarly gotten him killed via ‘surprise repositioning’ in multiple Final Fantasy XIV savage raids. And since he’s the main healer, those often count for eight!)

3. Dispatching Creatures of Sonaria in her Sleep

Creatures of Sonaria is a free Roblox game similar to The Isle but with original fantasy creatures instead of dinosaurs. From what I’ve seen, it’s a very unique experience where the player is birthed as an herbivore, carnivore, or othervore into an untamed wilderness teeming with other players to eat, flee, or reproduce with. Sydney’s been obsessively filling out his collection with an ever-growing menagerie of exotic species, and has reached the point where the remaining snipe hunts require hyperoptimized strategies to realistically obtain.

To that end, he setup a mouse macro to keep his computer clicking on a waterhole while he slept, so his critters could idle through the night farming resources. But they kept dying and he couldn’t figure out why, screen recordings showed the cursor would occasionally wander off the ‘Drink’ button for no reason at all. Until he once entered his office at 3am to witness Bean sleeping on his desk next to the mouse, her nudges screwing up the macro positioning and causing the poor Sonarians to thirst to death mere inches from water. It’s a tragedy right out of Coleridge!

4. Choosing Her Starter in Pokémon Go

She had help for this one, but Bean is also a certified Pokémon trainer! One time she wouldn’t stop sniffing my phone and sticking her head in the way while I was trying to play, so we decided to let her take the wheel. Sydney held her in his arms while I used her paw to tap the nearest wild Pokémon and then throw the Great Ball, but that still counts as her catch! So far, she has not felt the need to progress further on her Pokémon journey and risk losing that 100% catch rate.

5. Critting an Investigation Check in Dungeons & Dragons

So these are all assist kills (and this is a tabletop game), but she deserves a tuna treat for helping me unlock the greatest Wildshape form my druid ever got her robotic hands on. Back in the time I was playing the D&D campaign that inspired my Druid Handbook, Bean walked across my keyboard and orchestrated an in-universe moment referred to as “Gutter’s pathfinding error” when I glitched out and dove from the ship, swimming at top speed in a straight line through the ocean until the party could catch up and reboot me. By sheer coincidence I ended my journey across the gargantuan tilemap in view of a Giant Octopus background sprite, which neither me nor my GM realized was the incredible power boost it turned out to be. I used that form in countless fights after that; the tanky 52 HP coupled with auto-grappling attacks, stealth bonuses, wallclimbing, prehensible limbs, and an ink cloud disengage at only 1CR was an incredible laundry list of features that excelled in combat, infiltration, and puzzle-solving situations. Thanks Bean!

6. Topfragging in Mouse For Cats, Her Favorite Game

But if we were to graph her global kills in a pie chart, all of the above would be mere blips compared to the title in which she’s racked up most of her gametime. Mouse For Cats is an iPad app where digital mice skitter across the screen emitting death squeaks when you click on them, and Bean will spend ages doggedly (cattedly?) massacring these digital varmints with merciless persistence. Nobody else in the household can hold a candle to her mastery, and she’s also made it clear she only plays the dirt background with gray mice. We’ve tried changing it to grass, or fish, or other available customization options, but she only wants the default. What can I say, she’s a purist!

Conclusion

I hope you enjoyed a silly little jaunt through my cat’s illustrious career wreaking havoc on pixels of every shape and size. Whether you’re playing PvE or PvP, you never know when she might unexpectedly turn your gaming session into a PvC without warning. And when it comes time to “touch carpet,” she’s also perfectly willing to 1v1 you IRL!