This game's an exciting mixture of the boring and frantic. There's no time limit or anything, no real pressure at all, but any given measurement can only be taken for a second or so at a time before the boxy hop-dog does its thing. That means there's a lot of scrambling to get your mouse in position and dragging it out too far, then trying to reel it in only for it to hop away before you can get a precise measurement. A pro strat is to anticipate the next hop by getting your mouse into position, then using that to make a quick measurement. It's fun!

If patience and observation is supposed to be a theme for this, which I think the description implies, I'm not sure if those themes come through. The boxy hop-dog turned around often enough that, through a couple of playthroughs, I never had to wait for the right shot or angle. Mostly, I measured whatever was available to me at the moment that I hadn't already filled out until I found myself having filled out the entire form.

I had a little difficulty using the measuring tools. The first time I played, I found that I was uniformly ~20 px off from the actual value--that's because I hadn't realized you were supposed to measure with the edges of the markers rather than their centers. After a little thinking, and a look at the gif that comes with the game, I figured out what I was doing wrong, but still found myself with an error of 1-2 pixels that I couldn't quite to account for, even when I reduced the hop-dog's speed to see how precise measurements I could take. Oh well, that's probably just user error.

The idea behind giving the Pokemon measurements, I think, is that it helps draw players into the fantasy. Pokemon are already very colorful, complex creatures, but giving them concrete heights and weights lets a player picture themselves alongside their pokemon. (Did you know that Charizard is only 5'7" tall? You might be that tall someday, or even taller!) Now, that pokemon measurements are universally considered to be contrived and arbitrary calls into question just how successful that is, but it's still clear that they're a means to facilitate an escapist fantasy.

What does measuring the boxy hop-dog do for it, though, and for us? In my experience as an insect enthusiast, which comprises most of my exposure to biology, measurements most prominently come up in taxonomy: often times, the size of an insect is one of the key aspects used to distinguish its species. Measurement objectifies something, and quantizes it as an object of study--we are, here, not just observing an animal, but laying down the groundwork for its further observation. How close can one be to something one is observing? In this game, we exist at a fixed camera distance, measuring the boxy hop-dog in the arbitrary metrics of screenspace, twice removed from its presence by physical distance and by the highlighted constraints of the medium. In this game, learning the dimensions of the boxy hop-dog puts us about as far away as we can be from it, short of not knowing of its existence at all. As a side note: we're measuring the boxy hop-dog, but if it changes every playthrough (sometimes drastically), what makes this the boxy hop-dog, as opposed to any other one?

This game makes me want to play another game, too. One where you get to know the boxy hop-dog a little better, rather than viewing it at a distance. What does it eat? How does it get along with other critters? Can you bond with it? (Maybe I'll make that game at some point. I've always wanted to make a virtual pet, but never got around to doing it.)

I really liked this game. It made me think a lot. Thank you for sharing it.

This is the best title a game's ever had.

I liked measuring it at speed- did it pretty fast cause I'm pretty good with the ol' cursor.