In Retrospect

First off, dear Hasbro: stop selling this thing for 60 dollars. It's not worth anywhere near that. My biggest suggestion would be to, after cutting the price, start developing more qualities for the Furby that are responsive instead of relying on APPS that allow you a degree of control over the Furby. In its current form, the Furby should be completely left to its own devices, and giving control over the Furby simply cheapens it further.

The Furby Blog is dead, long live the Furby Blog! This project was surprising for a number of reasons, but I believe the biggest surprise or unexpected aspect was simply how little this project had to do with actually interacting with the Furby. I believe this is fairly indicative of the main failings of the project: if we can't interact with our Furby very long before running into the incredible limitations it imposes, then why are we studying it? The toy itself is incredibly uninteresting, and the most entertaining blog posts came from places that had little to do with the actual Furby. The toy was much better as a collection of potential than it was as an actual piece of electronic entertainment.

My recommendation for the Furby Project would be to force more interaction with the Furby and put people in uncomfortable situations. Order a coffee at Starbucks with a Furby in tow, or something like that, would make for a much more engaging project. Overall, I enjoyed the Great Furby Project, mostly because it allowed me to get creative in the blog entries whenever I was so inclined, and also because they are far less annoying than people give them credit for.

Song of Happiness

A recording was discovered by aliens visiting Earth sometime around 4375 AD, long after the extinction of the human race, and most other species on Earth. The planet was leveled to a barren wasteland, and the radiation from the subsequent fallout had no immediate effect on the planet's disturbingly high Furby population, who for some reason were able to survive the nuclear holocaust. Though they lived through the extinction of the human race, they had a built-in time life span of which there was no avoiding or extending: their battery life.

Yes, the simple limitations of a AAA battery was what killed the Furbies, and as they died off one by one, a lone Furby decided to dictate the story of the human race to an iPhone, in hopes that their mistakes would never have to be repeated. The alien's were able to access the memory from the iPhone and decipher not only what the Furby had said, but also what the ultimate meaning behind its words had been. You see, while the Furby had much to say about the human race, it's limited vocabulary made adequate communication of its thoughts difficult. The aliens, however, were able to interpret what it was trying to say.

The following is a transcript of the recording, with the Furby's actual words preceding the alien's interpretation of the meaning in parentheses:

Like, seriously? (The humans were a sad kind of animal. In fact, they were more virus than animal: they never reached a level of equilibrium with nature, but instead destroyed all that was around them, consuming whatever laid in their path.)
Uh huh, oh yeah, uh huh, oh yeah, uh huh, oh yeah! (Furthermore, they never looked at me or any of my brothers as living things. They grew bored of us after a few "uses" and would then relegate us to some lonely corner, where we would only be roused when they felt like engaging into some creative form of torture.)
Hey! Boo loo loo! (This was a stark display of their vile tendencies: they relished in the pain and suffering of others, and they were not capable of even the most rudimentary forms of empathy.)
Me see u-nye. (Because of this, I sing a song of happiness for the death of all humans. I hope whoever is listening to this will remember to not judge any creator by the color of its fur or the limited nature of its vocabulary, but instead respect life, or even the imitation of life, in all of its forms.)

The dead Furby was taken back to the alien's home world, where it could be analyzed in hopes of replication and recreation. The aliens felt that the Furbies finally deserved a home all their own.

Changing the Furby Dynamic

With the semester winding down, we're getting to the part of The Great Furby Project that involves reflection. First off, after spending all this time with this children's toy, in what way could it be drastically improved? Is there a realistic feature that Furbies could have that would drastically improve the overall experience for the user? 

I have an idea in mind, one that would dramatically improve the Furby and would be incredibly easy to add. However, this addition would destroy something that is very important to what makes a Furby a Furbuy. It would change our notion of what a Furby is and what is is capable of: we need to give the Furby a sleep switch.

I know this is a mildly crazy suggestion. Isn't the whole point of a Furby that it can be accidently woken up at any point and that you need to leave it alone as it spouts out annoying catchphrases before it falls asleep? I'll concede that giving the user control over putting the Furby to sleep changes how you interact with the Furby, but this will force Hasbro to actually put the emphasis on development on legitimate interactions with the Furby. 

What I mean is that the vast majority of the interactions I've had with the Furby have simply been trying to get it to sleep. The toy seems designed as simply having two modes: the sleep mode when you are trying to not wake it up, and the awake mode when you are trying to get it to sleep. The sleep button would take away this dynamic, and force the developers to come up with reasons for people to actually want to play with their Furby, instead of simply presenting options for how to get them to fall back asleep.

Shut Up, Furby!

After all this time spent with Tank, I can't help but think he's missing something. I've come to discover that, while Furbies should, in theory, be incredibly annoying, they actually just go to sleep and remain sleeping for far too long. How can the Furby be properly irritating if it can sleep for weeks at a time? Where's the challenge?

I feel that this could be fixed if we gave Furbies a "sixth sense" of sorts. Their current senses include: hearing, feeling, and tasting, so I guess a "fourth sense" would be more appropriate. Like I said, I believe this sense should simply make the Furby more annoying, in keeping with Hasboro's mission statement.

Because of this, I believe Furbies should simply be able to sense when they are being annoying and who they are annoying, and make sure they make that person as annoyed as possible. It's like when a dog knows you don't like it, so it follows you around until you love it. Except the Furby isn't looking for love; it only wants pain.

I'm not entirely sure how feasible this is, but I can only that Hasboro's Furby engineers are currently working on a solution that is at least similar to the idea I have put forth. In case they are not, I plan on sending my plans in a manila envelop marked "URGENT" to their corporate offices.

Astounding Furby Discovery!

It seems that the folks at Hasbro cooked some fantastic little easter eggs into the 2012 Furby models. You won't see this advertised in any official Hasbro publications or instruction manuals, but the level of communication that can be done on a Furby-to-Furby basis is far deeper and nuanced than anyone could have expected.

Anyone who owns a new Furby and has had it interact with another Furby knows that they can simulate communication. They will have back and forths that imitate true conversation, but really are just recognizing a sound and responding in kind. 

However, this is only how they communicate when there is anyone else in the room. I discovered this easter egg purely by chance. You see, there is an app for the iPhone that allows you to translate Furby conversations in real time, and it wasn't going anywhere the last time I used it. The Furbies repeated their "conversations" and most of their responses were simply nonsensical. I left the Furbies alone in the room in order to make myself lunch, and completely forgot my phone, leaving it in between the two Furbies.

When I returned to retrieve my cell phone around 20 minutes later, I heard chattering in Furbish. However, when I entered the room, I found the Furbies were off. Not in a sleep mode, but off as in their batteries had died. My iPhone had translated a fairly long conversation regarding "our chance", "tonight", and "delicious human tears". The last phrase my phone picked up was "he's coming", which was obviously some kind of shut down mechanism for when the Furbies recognized a human had returned to the room.

This is quite the playful easter egg, and I commend Hasbro for its creativity and bravery for keeping such a powerful feature a secret. After this Furby encounter, I went back to the store and purchased a few more Furbies in the hopes that there were more easter eggs to be found once more furbies swerrf addedddd toasidjfkjasdf

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A Furby Story In Pictures

Vomiting vomited vomit

One of the constant demands of Tank (and Swagg) during our time together the past few weeks has been asking for food. A Furby's got to eat, but unfortunately, the only feeding option we've had is fairly boring. All we can do is push down the Furby's "tongue" inside their "beak", and they recognize this as being fed. The furbies would then munch and either declare their approval or disapproval. If I don't feed Tank enough, he demands more, but if I feed him too much, he would aggressively vomit. It's quite the balancing act.

The new feature our class was given to play with this week gave us more food options. However, it is interesting to note that it does not seem to replace the standard "feeding" mechanism. Rather, it is a simple toy on an app: the furbies never reacted as if they were being overfed (and we overfed them immensely), and they never demanded any more from hunger. It was meant to be played with in order to discover what kind of food your Furby likes.

The app I used was on my Nexus 7, and it gave me two feeding options. The first, pantry, gave us a wide variety of snacks for Tank to enjoy. The second, kitchen, allowed us to build the Furby a sandwich. I found the sandwich builder to be needlessly complicated; testing out the singular food items was much more enjoyable than randomly assigning a bunch of sections of a sandwich. 

Abby, my roommate, and I did this food experimenting together, but we found that our Furbies, for the most part, responded in similar manners. This was probably because they were both in the "Valley Girl" personality for the entirety of our experiment. Jalapenos were enjoyed, with an "oooooh, spciy!" given after being fed. Grapefruit and gummy bears had predictable responses, with standard biting and "happy noises" being elicited. Tank loved his doughnut immensely, and predictably did not like worms. The green olives were not enjoyed either, which was not particularly surprising.

What was surprising was how certain foods interacted with the app. For some options, after the Furby was fed, something else would be spat back. After feeding Tank a cupcake, which he enjoyed, I found a pair of keys spat back at me through this app. This was confusing. I fed him the keys and he did not like them. Tank also enjoyed sushi, but only at the fish and spat back the rice. Feeding him the rice elicited groans. Tank was also fed toilet paper, which he did not enjoy, and also spat back the roll.

Now, this next stage is what I call the gauntlet. Because it was incredibly frustrating for us and quite possibly emotionally scarring for our furbies. Feeding Swagg a sock causes him to throw up. When this happened for the first time, we decided to feed Tank the throw up. He then proceeded to throw up the throw up, but this throw up was much more disgusting. This cross-Furby vomit sharing intrigued us for some ungodly reason, and we decided to see how far we could take it. We fed Swagg the sock, he threw up the sock. We fed Swagg the vomit, he threw up more vomit. We fed Swagg the vomitted vomit, and he seemed to legitimately poop a furry, brown substance. Feeding him THAT gave us an almost liquid vomit. And at this point we stopped. Who knows how further we could have gone.

Perhaps we simply didn't delve far enough into it, but the kitchen simply wasn't that interesting to us. The combinations were too numerous, and the reactions too straight-forward. We got much more mileage out of the pantry, but I'm happy that, regardless of how much we neglected the kitchen, at least I got to feed a Furby vomited vomit.