The Player is Chewing the Tablet!: Towards a Systematic Analysis of User Behavior in Animal-Computer Interaction

There is an increasing demand for digital games developed for pets, in particular for dogs and cats. However, play interactions between animals and technological devices still remain an uncharted territory both for animal behavior and user-computer interaction communities. While there is a lot of anecdotal evidence of pets playing digital games, the nature of animal-computer play interactions is far from being understood. In this work-in-progress we address the problem of analyzing and interpreting user behavior in such interactions using the tool of ethograms from applied ethology, which are catalogs of typical behavior patterns.