Skip to main content

Pigs are smarter than we thought. Scientists taught them to play video games

 

Picture an early Atari-style game of the same era as, say, Pong or Breakout. In the game, the player scores points for maneuvering a cursor using a joystick so as to hit a colored target. On level one, it’s easy. The player is in the middle of what looks like an abstract representation of a room, surrounded by four blue walls. Each wall, running the length of the screen, is a potential target. The player need hit any wall to complete the stage. Level two is harder. Now there are only three walls to hit. Level three has just two walls. Before long, the walls are shorter, eventually forming a single square on the screen. Then the square starts to move around.

Recommended Videos

OK, so it’s not exactly Call of Duty or GTA in its complexity, but as tests of dexterity go, it isn’t bad. And while hardcore gamers might want something a little tougher, that’s alright: It’s not meant for them. Literally. The game described above is a video game designed for pigs. And the pigs are pretty darn good at it.

pigs playing video games
Purdue University

“Almost all of our pigs got to the one-sided target,” Candace Croney, professor of Animal Behavior and Well-being at Purdue University, told Digital Trends, a hint of pride creeping into her voice. “And we did have a couple of pigs that were able to get to the one-sided target that became the much shorter box. None of them got to the stage where you had the smallest box possible and it moved around. But two of them at least got to the stage where there is one target wall that shrinks down and becomes fairly small.”

World of Boarcraft

It would be great to be able to report that, with gaming proving more popular than ever, developers are turning to other species to sustain industry growth. Sadly, that’s not the case here — although the real reason is just as interesting. The video game setup, in which the animals have to nudge a joystick with their snouts to control the on-screen cursor, is intended as a test of the cognitive abilities of pigs, an animal that has not been so well-studied in this domain as some of its contemporaries. While it is well-documented that pigs are smart enough to learn basic commands, such as “sit” and “come here,” they have not previously had their higher-level cognition put through the wringer in this way.

“The bigger goal was really to get at what they can show us about the level of mental sophistication that it takes to do conceptual learning,” Croney said. “That’s the type of learning that an animal really has to figure out on their own. You can give them the tools to express behaviors that let us know if they are responding in ways that indicate knowing versus guessing. But you can’t actually give them the concept. They have to either figure it out or not.”

Cute Pig Playing Video Games

In other words, you can lead a pig to water, but you can’t make it master Civilization VI.

The pigs in the experiment — two Panepinto micro pigs and two Yorkshire pigs, named Ebony, Ivory, Hamlet, and Omelette — had to make the necessary mental leap that the manipulation of a controller was commanding another object, in a separate space, that the pig cannot otherwise interact with. It is these abstracted actions that determine whether or not the pigs receive a tasty reward, as they do when successfully completing game stages.

“It’s not just ‘move this joystick and get a reward,’ right?” said Croney. “That’s not the thing that triggers the reward. They have to move the joystick with intentionality to control this cursor on the screen. They have to make the link that that behavior is manipulating this other thing’s behavior or movement. It’s super abstract. They have to make that mental connection between what they’re doing and the effect. That’s what gets them the reward.”

How pigs process information

Interestingly, in scenarios where the machine dispensing treats stopped working, the pigs responded to verbal encouragement from the human researchers. Although they did not exhibit the skill level of nonhuman primates on a similar task, the pigs nonetheless performed well above expectations.

pigs playing video games
Purdue University

Croney said that the researchers experienced “shock and awe” when the pigs successfully moved beyond “what looks like guessing behavior — where they’re not operating above chance level of success, just playing around with the joystick — to this ‘aha’ moment where something different is happening. Once they made that connection, and you could see it in their data, we could just let them loose and they’d keep going.”

Going forward, this research could help investigators discover more about the intelligence of pigs and how they process information. It could also open up some intriguing possibilities when it comes to showing the animals symbols that might allow researchers to communicate with them more directly.

Croney said: “If you have an animal that can understand that their behavior is manipulating the behavior of something else, as abstract as a cursor, it’s not a leap to think that they could [also understand] that their behavior could result in manipulating some real-life objects someplace else — because they’ve clearly shown that they have some capacity to grasp that. And [you could conceivably imagine moving from that to], ‘maybe my behavior is actually going to impact the behavior or the response of another individual.’”

A paper describing the project was recently published in the journal Frontiers in Psychology.

Topics
Luke Dormehl
Former Digital Trends Contributor
I'm a UK-based tech writer covering Cool Tech at Digital Trends. I've also written for Fast Company, Wired, the Guardian…
The best games we played at PAX East 2025
Two cartoonish figures, one with a hook for a hand, lean towards each other for a sly conversation.

PAX EAST returned to Boston this year with nearly three hundred exhibitors for four days of video games and gamer culture. With over 100,000 attendees, it was a weekend full of games to play, people to meet, and spectacular cosplays to marvel at. Digital Trends attended this year's show and went hands-on with several upcoming games that should be on your radar. From an RPG about exploring the digital afterlife to a roguelite about exploring trains, here are the most must see games we played at PAX East 2025.

Fresh Tracks

Read more
Kingdom Hearts: Missing Link cancelled, but there’s a silver lining for fans
The protagonist of Kingdom Hearts Missing Link.

Kingdom Hearts fans are witnessing one door closing and another opening up -- literally. Square Enix has announced that Kingdom Hearts: Missing Link, the mobile spin-off title that was being developed for Android and iOS, has been cancelled.

The company made the announcement in a statement shared on X, formerly Twitter, on Wednesday explaining its decision to cancel the game, which was set in Master Xehanort's hometown of Scala ad Caelum between the events of Kingdom Hearts Union Cross and Kingdom Hearts Dark Road. Square Enix said it would be hard to serve up a Kingdom Hearts live-service game that fans would enjoy for a long time despite its best efforts to fine-tune its development and hold multiple closed beta tests, causing the game to be delayed more than once. The release of Missing Link was last delayed to the end of 2024, but that has since passed.

Read more
The best selling games on every console
A Nintendo 64 fan's collection of games.

Looking back at the entire video game console timeline lets us get a clear picture of how the industry has evolved. It is fun to rank the best consoles of all time and look at things like the best Nintendo launch games to remember what we were playing when we first got our hands on those new systems. Those kinds of subjective lists are fun, but there are some equally interesting objective things to explore as well. Game sales don't necessarily represent the best games of all time, but do show what was most popular at the time for one reason or another. There's typically a disconnect between what sells the best and what is the highest rated, which is fun to see. This isn't the kind of thing most people know off the top of their head, so we dug through all the financial reports for as far back as we could to find the best selling games on every video game console.

Note: We are only covering the major home and handheld consoles and leaving out the more niche systems that few people owned or remember. We are also only able to account for officially released sales data. It is possible some of these numbers have changed or are in the wrong order, but as of 2025, it is as up-to-date as possible based on the latest official data.

Read more