Alone in a chilly, ultra-sterile Santa Monica hotel room last week, the ocean to one side of me and a vast network of Chipotles to the other, I turned to my laptop for a hit of human connection. On Steam's top-sellers list, I found a game that seemed suitable for hotel-grade wi-fi: the $5 Webfishing, which released earlier in October.
It's a fishing game, but really it's a cozycore hangout game with little lake and seaside environments, emotes, props, and text chat. Like every social game, though, the server's wallflowers will never muster more than a "hello" or a question about the controls unless some particularly outgoing player drums up a conversation—and there was no such bon vivant on the server I joined.
Things were looking dire after I said "hi" to someone and they immediately quit the game, but everything changed when I overheard one player reveal to another that you can press 'G' to meow. (I should note that we're all cats in this world. Except for one player who was a dog.)
I now had a far better way to communicate than text chat, with all the complex grammar and potential for misunderstanding that comes with: spamming meows. M-m-m-m-meow, I said to the fishercats lining the end of an ocean pier. They said m-m-m-meow back. Except the dog, who barked. Later I wandered around meowing in the faces of players who were minding their own business—fishing by the lake, listening to tunes on a boombox—and I understand better now why cats and certain puckish children like to do that. It says: "I exist. No questions, please."
(An aside: In games where you drive a car, it's disappointing when you can't honk the horn, but I now think I'd be just as disappointed to control a cat with no meow button, or anything at all with no 'make noise' button. Everything has its own sort of horn. Let us honk it.)
I probably ought to describe the fishing, since the game is called Webfishing, but there's not much to describe: It involves some holding down the mouse button and some rapidly clicking the mouse button, nothing hard. The first fish I caught was a puny 12cm crayfish from a pond—it was depicted with so few pixels that it barely had a shape—but later I snagged a 108.07cm flounder that was as big as my quite-big head, and saw another player catch a giant octopus. That was a little exciting, and there's probably more depth to the fishing than I know, because the truth is that I lost interest in fishing the moment I noticed another player bouncing on a mushroom.
And then, at the apex of my fifth or sixth mushroom bounce, I spotted a pair of cats rounding a corner and decided to tail them—no meows, this was clandestine. They led me to a beach shop which sold typical beach attire like gold monocles and big top hats, and to my genuine surprise, scratch-off lotto tickets. I instantly sold all the fish I'd caught and bought $100 worth of Fishillionaire scratchers.
Each time I scratched off a losing ticket my cat frowned. I frowned too. But then I won! $100! A break-even gambling session is a great way to feel good by first causing yourself to feel bad, and leaves you exactly where you need to be to do it again, so I went back to the shop intending to buy another $100 of scratchers. But it was the bouncy mushroom all over again when I spotted a $100 metal detector and decided instantly that I should pivot to treasure hunting.
After chasing beeps for several minutes, though, all I found were a junk ring and an old coin. I sold my crappy treasures and, possibly giving up on metal detecting sooner than I should have, spent all my earnings on scratchers like I'd originally planned. Fishillionaire hadn't let me down yet, after all!
No winners, just frowns.
My pockets now empty except for a handful of free worms, I moped back to the pier, where dandily-dressed cats were still reeling in big fish, quiet and content. How had I gotten so mixed up so fast, bouncing on mushrooms and gambling all my money away? I guess we can't escape life's trials even in Webfishing, but at least it comes with friends: I hit the meow key and everyone meowed back (except the dog, who barked). My existence affirmed, I cast my line into the ocean.
