What Is It Like to Be a Cat? Musings on Stray

Christian Haines, Managing Editor

You can’t not knock the bottles off the table in Stray (BlueTwelve Studio). After all, you’re playing a cat, and if there’s a truth universally acknowledged about cats, it’s that they can’t help themselves. They’re shits, mischievous in their indifference to human property and propriety. Indeed, the great joy of playing Stray isn’t the game’s main quest. It’s all the little moments in which you play around as a cat, in which you toy with the environment, wandering through the game’s setting with little purpose. To BlueTwelve Studio’s credit, they obviously recognize the pleasure of straying from objectives.

Is the pleasure of straying in Stray the pleasure of the cat? Or, is Stray fun because you get to pretend to be a cat? Or, in general, can a videogame communicate what it’s like to be a cat? The philosopher Thomas Nagel posed the question of whether or not we can know what it’s like to be a non-human animal in an essay, “What Is It Like To Be A Bat?” Nagel’s essay concerns the mind-body problem, specifically the question of whether or not one can reduce consciousness to physical matter (the brain). Nagel answers no, and he does so by arguing that there is something like being a bat for a bat. In other words, there’s a certain battiness, an experience of being a bat, for bats. While this experience might be a product of bat physiology, the scientist dissecting the bat or observing its behavior won’t for all that know what it’s like to actually be a bat. They will know the bat without going batty.

Can a game communicate cattiness? Maybe. Stray tries. The game offers players a dedicated purr button. Pressing the button doesn’t just deliver different kitten vocals. It uses the haptics of the PS5 controller to send the rumble of a purr across the player’s fingers and palms. Stray also introduces elements in the environment that let the player-cat toy around with the world. Players can mimic the stereotypical behavior of cats; they can scratch rugs, balance along narrow edges, and get stuck in cardboard boxes. In short, Stray dedicates gameplay mechanics to evoking what it’s like to be a cat (call this the phenomenology of the cat), though notably these mechanics generally aren’t central to advancing through the game’s main storyline. Cattiness is incidental, if not accidental; it’s an intended part of the game, something towards which the game gestures, but it’s just a gesture.

Before dismissing Stray for faux cattiness, it’s worth acknowledging another feline element, as well as another animal philosophy. For all that Stray’s feline ambitions tend towards mere gesture, the game does make an effort to translate feline agility into the core gameplay loop. Stray is a platformer in that the game involves navigating environments by leaping from surface to surface, but it’s a puzzle platformer, because the ability to jump is context-specific – you can only jump when you’re near specific elements of the environment – and the goal is less to avoid enemies or obstacles than to figure out how to get from point A to point B. There’s an analogy, here, between the precise leaps of domestic cats and the fixed trajectories of Stray’s context-specific jumps. Stray may not communicate what it’s like to be a cat to its players, but it offers something like the digital equivalent of feline grace. In other words, Stray doesn’t evoke what it’s like to be a cat, but it might convey what it’s like to move like a cat.

Analogies are, by definition, loose. They establish a connection between two disparate things, but they also remind you that those things really aren’t the same. In playing Stray, it doesn’t take much more than the feel of the controller in your hand to remind you that if anyone’s moving like a cat, it’s not really you but your tabby avatar. The game inadvertently supports Nagel’s position that we – human beings – have yet to figure out how to know what it feels like to be a non-human animal. The sheer fact of our not being a cat prohibits us from experiencing cattiness.

But there are other philosophies that investigate animality, not the least of which is Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari’s concept of becoming-animal. In the book A Thousand Plateaus, Deleuze and Guattari offer becoming-animal as an alternative to ideas of personhood that emphasize autonomy or independence. There’s a long history, from René Descartes to Sigmund Freud, of treating human beings as separate not just from other animals but from their environment and even their own bodies. We like to think of people as rational or spiritual creatures capable of rising above their circumstances. For Deleuze and Guattari, this viewpoint isn’t just inaccurate, it’s debilitating. In narrowing what it means to be human, this perspective strips humans of all kinds of capacities, including capacities we associate with other species. In contrast, becoming-animal is all about blurring lines between species. Deleuze and Guattari like to talk about “multiplicity,” “contagion,” and “propagation.” Becoming-animal is a process of change in which differences between species loosen, in which human beings mutate in contact with other species or even the idea of other species.

Stray may not communicate what it’s like to be a cat, but it does raise questions about what it means to be human. It sends players into a process of becoming-animal. This has less to do with imitating an animal species than with experimenting with life. Stray plugs players into a system in which they interact with a virtual world in a manner that doesn’t try to replicate human mastery over nature. The dynamics of playing as a cat make it difficult to indulge in the standard videogame power fantasy. Moreover, the low standpoint of the cat – the proximity of its body to the surface on which it prowls – defamiliarizes urban environments: it renews our perception of space, making visible the taken-for-granted aspects of city streets and architecture. In doing so, it highlights the fact that the usual circuit between the human body holding a controller and the in-game human avatar is a very limited, if dominant, videogame convention.

Stray may not answer what it’s like to be a cat, but it poses the question of what distinguishes humans from cats in the first place. Asking this question means recognizing that human beings are a kind of animal and that if there’s anything special about humans – anything unique – it’s not because humans are the exception to the animal rule but because we are a distinct animal species with our own peculiar, not necessarily superior, behaviors. In other words, there’s not so much a divide between human beings and cats as a continuum – a spectrum of ways of being in the world – along which our species are scattered. As John Jeremiah Sullivan puts it, “This is what the study of animal consciousness can teach us, finally—that we possess an animal consciousness.” Which is to say we can’t be cats, but we can certainly become catty.