BARKSTORY #1: What Dogs Mean to Me

I'm a cat owner, but I love dogs. I'm making a game about dogs, in airports. I have lost too many nights of sleep looking through public domain stock photo libraries of Extremely Good Boys and Girls. The reason for this love is among the nerdiest things in my life; a life filled with nerdy things:

As an intellectual construct, I believe that dogs - the essence of dogs - are the single greatest animal to ever exist.

Look at this dog.

Look at how happy he is!

He's chilling on the grass in the shade of somewhere nice (not my fault), while inhabiting a shrine to both music and the Moth Man (absolutely my fault). 

I've used dozens of stock photo dogs for dozens of purposes, now, and no matter what environment or neuroses I saddle these characters with, they seem to inherently transcend them. As I looked at my own creative process, and the personification of dogs by the wider internet, I realized why this was the case:

Dogs are the projection of joyful enthusiasm into a complicated world.

That's it. It's taken me months, but those are the exact words I was searching for to understand these incredible, loyal, empathetic creatures, and how to do them justice with my world.  Dogs aren't oblivious. They're just... happy. And most seem to want to actively make the little universes around them better places.

They are the kind of friend who forgets stories you love to tell, so you can tell them all over again. They are spoiled, and loyal, and loving, and greedy: they are every mixture of every trait, in one lovable package that defies all label. They are the embodied hope that things do, eventually, get better.

So, I'm making a game about them, and I have somehow found people like you to help me.

Thank you.

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Tell me what dogs mean to you in the comments, and stay tuned for more Barkstory on the project!