Game: Animals, Video Games, and Humanity

Tom Tyler opens his quirkily engaging book discussing how a (relatively) ancient video game, Nintendo's 1984 Duck Hunt, provided gamers with “a pleasant emulation, at one remove or more, of the pleasures to be had shooting animals” (p. 1). It has always been difficult for me to understand the pleasures of shooting actual living animals, and I have similar (though less intense) feelings about shooting digital animals (including human animals). If it's probably not as bad as actually killing living creatures, still . . . why do it? Doesn't the gamed simulation somehow glorify or reify the literal violence it apes? Does it cultivate a taste for shooting, maiming, murdering? Or might it, as some believe, perhaps provide a release-hatch, satisfying that base desire without actually massacring living creatures, proving a harmless outlet for the male human need to show his own skill and acuity by opening fire on living targets and destroying as many of them as possible? But in any case, isn't there something more constructive we could all be doing with our time and media?I began reading Game: Animals, Video Games, and Humanity in a mood of cranky resistance to its premise that video games embodied some salient and worthy fields for anthrozoological exploration. But I also had a lurking suspicion that Tyler would surprise and seduce me as he did in his previous monograph Ciferae: A Bestiary in Five Fingers (University of Minnesota Press, 2012), where his rich multidisciplinary discussions undergirded a dazzling investigation of humans, other animals, hands (which humans do not have a monopoly on!), and the history of consciousness predicated—until Tyler gets his deconstructive chops into it—upon exceptionalist human supremacy shining against a dim backdrop of negligible, marginalized animality.And indeed, after an opening gambit leaves the reader spattered with the figurative viscera of dead ducks, Tyler launches into a baker's dozen of essays, mostly previously published individually and effectively woven together here, examining “some of the complex ways in which players of video games have been invited to encounter, understand, and engage animals” (p. 3). OK, I'm game. Game on.Game explores how the digital discourse at hand has “articulated or elided differences between individual animals, or between species or entire classes of animal” (p. 3). How are the featured animals presented? How are they contextualized as quarry/objects/resources? And crucially, Tyler asks, returning to his interest from Ciferae of interspecies contiguities and constructed disruptions, “how have games imagined, addressed or suppressed the differences and similarities that are supposed to pertain between animals and human beings?” (p. 3).The clever video games are created by clever human designers for clever human consumers. But Tyler wonders, subversively, whether other animals might help us humans understand how to play the games—“the conditions that qualify as winning or losing” and “the values and ideologies . . . that exert themselves through games” (p. 3). Drawing on a bountifully eclectic range of cultural texts including children's TV shows, myth, fable, fiction, poetry, film, Edwardian comedy, and Shakespearian tragedy, not to mention the collected letters of the fourth Earl of Chesterfield, Tyler curates a groaning board full of “incitements to think differently about animals and video games” (p. 6).Tyler interrogates such topics as the economic value of gamed animals, in their own right or as commodities (think of FarmVille), and the resonance of such animal protagonists as Donkey Kong and Sonic the Hedgehog. He discusses a 2012 game called Plague Inc. in which the player takes on the role of a pathogen—bacterial, viral, parasitic—with the goal of spreading as widely as possible to obliterate humanity. (I wondered how Covid-19 impacted the popularity of this game and whether other similar games arose in the pandemic's wake.) Tyler provocatively propounds that the experience of playing as the plague itself “provides for nonanthropocentric modes of opposing humanity” as the game requires the player to “invest in the values, in the evaluations and preferences” of a virus or parasite (p. 122).Considering the cultural meanings of meat, Tyler looks at carnivory in games like Cooking Mama, Don't Starve, Monster Hunter, and Super Meat Boy. People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals responded to the last of these with its own game, Super Tofu Boy, who has to navigate through spinning blades and meat pounders in a slaughterhouse. The organization also parodied Cooking Mama with its own Cooking Mama: Mama Kills Animals; the original game producers later offered their own vegetarian mode.A kerfuffle in animal games arose in response to FarmVille, an enormously popular but also somewhat simplistic, boring way to engage with animals. Tyler reports that edgy game designer Ian Bogost wrote that games like FarmVilleWhat fun! Discussing the nihilistic absurdism that Bogost unveils, Tyler relates “the employment of animals as ciphers” to Carol Adams's idea of animals as “absent referents,” which denies their individual existence and makes them ripe for butchering by alleviating guilt, inducing meat-eaters to perceive animals as not there: steak or burgers, ribs or sausages, not cows and pigs.Tyler unpacks the phenomena of orangutans who play Pong, pigs who play Pig Chase, cats who play Cat Cat Revolution, and a bearded lizard named Crunch who crushes virtual insects with her tongue as she plays Ant Catcher—it's true! Such activities are most often reserved for captive animals: Zookeepers think of video games as “unlimited enrichment opportunities” for their inmates (p. 133).One of the more strangely wonderful gaming tropes that comes under Tyler's microscope is feces. In a chapter titled “Total BS!” with a subhead exhorting “Why You Should Be Passionate About Crap, and Much Else” (p. 90), Tyler mulls the Pac-Man characters’ insatiable consumption of cherries, strawberries, and so forth as they bounce through their mazes and then poses the extremely sensible question (that I had never thought to ask during the years when I fed suitcases of coins into the Pac-Man console in my student union), “Where does their food go?” If the game is a model of capitalist consumption, as Tyler suggests, then what about its “inevitable corollary . . . the equally important matter of excretion?” (p. 91).Tyler obligingly arranges a shit-themed tour of video games. Sometimes the excretion is human, featured in the scatological humor in the Duke Nukem games, the sewers in SimCity, and the defecating avatars in South Park: The Stick of Truth. But the poop more often emanates from other animals: Droppings help the players track prey in The Hunter: Call of the Wild, and ammunition in the form of “dung pods” causes monsters to flee in Monster Hunter: World, where an especially crafty combatant becomes a Dungmaster. In Ōkami, too, the “explosively effective ‘Brown Rage’ combat technique” (p. 92) weaponizes animal poo.Animal droppings pose an annoying chore in the companion animal simulator game Nitendogs + Cats, where players must clean up and bag their animal companions’ mess. In a business management game called Zoo Tycoon, that chore “burgeons into the unending responsibility of cleaning up the elephants, baboons, zebras, and dozens of other creatures” (p. 92). (An object lesson from that game might be that we shouldn't have zoos, but perhaps that's another book.)More anthrozoologically uplifting iterations of poop appear in games like Farming Simulator, Survival Evolved, and Don't Starve, where animal manure serves the function of increasing crop yields and thus facilitating victory. In Dung Beetles, “an unapologetic variant on Pac-Man,” players navigate their way “gobbling up dots as they go, whilst avoiding a number of dung beetles” (p. 93). As they munch dots, the players “leave behind a trail of tiny red turds” (p. 93) that the beetles find and devour, which leads them directly to the avatar. “Should one of the dung beetles manage to catch you, the game ends with a taunting, synthesized ‘We gotcha!’” (p. 94).Interesting, but, as Tyler notes, inaccurate. In the game, the titular “ravening antagonists are a serious menace, tracking you by your telltale turds and, if successful, causing your immediate demise” (p. 102). In fact, of the 7,000 species of dung beetles who live in habitats from rainforests to deserts, none “follows trails of dung at speed or fatally terrorizes the excrement's producer” (p. 103). What they actually do in pursuit of dung is fascinating, and, to my mind, might make a better and more ecologically useful (i.e., accurate) series of video games: Some make dung into balls, which they roll away and hide for when they are needed; some dig burrows beneath the dung and push chunks of it inside; some steal other beetles’ dung; and some just settle down wherever the dung happens to sit, which seems to me the path of least resistance and the option I would probably choose if I were reincarnated as a dung beetle.Game demonstrates resplendently how video games about animals offer opportunities for education and reflection about human-animal encounters—teachable moments—but also threaten to magnify prejudices and disinformation. Tyler's writing marvelously extrapolates, from the video screens into the world, the conditions, cultural constructions, and fates of other animals.