How Animals Are Portrayed in Video Games
Much like film a century ago, the video game industry is maturing as artists and developers push the medium to better utilize its respective strengths and engage more complex themes. By letting you inhabit the world of an avatar that you control, video games can develop and engage empathy in a way that no other art form is able to. As both technology and storytelling has improved in games, so too has the complexity of non-human animals in gaming. While non-human animals are still too-often relegated to being tools or targets for the protagonist to use or kill, many games are now fleshing out the personality of non-human animal characters and even allowing players to step into the feet of animals in their habitats. By continuing to add more emotional and cultural complexity to non-human characters, gaming can better reflect changing societal attitudes towards animals as well as pushing players to expand their moral consideration and to empathize with sentient beings they may not have thought twice about before picking up a controller.
Historically, non-human animals in games were mostly used as tools for the player just like the non-sentient objects in a game world. In the Zelda game Ocarina of Time, Link’s horse, Epona, was called by some a “horse suit” since players use the same controls to direct Epona as they do Link and that she responds instantly to your commands, making her more of a tool for Link to quickly traverse the world than a character of her own. Other animal companions in more recent games still reflect this by mindlessly obeying your commands and existing solely at your discretion or for your convenience. Examples here include Roach, Geralt’s horse in The Witcher who appears as soon as your whistle — or Riley the German Shepherd in Call of Duty: Ghosts, who acts as an invincible weapon for you to deploy at will rather than a separate and distinct character.
Non-human animals were also used as set dressing for heavily anthropomorphized cartoon characters in early games. Characters like Sonic the Hedgehog, Fox McCloud, Sly Cooper, and Crash Bandicoot all represented a sort of animal hero as commodified “fur suits” for gaming protagonists.
Of course, animals in games also reflect the commodification and consumption of non-human animal flesh that is all too real in our non-virtual world. In a study of the role’s chickens play in culture, history, and video games, researchers Tyr Fothergill and Catherine Flick categorized five portrayals of chickens in games. These include chickens as food products, often given to characters in cartoonish drumstick form, and chickens as domesticated birds such as being bred for battle in Final Fantasy. In many games that feature meat as a consumable, the processing of turning a living, sentient animal into a piece of meat is not demonstrated. In Runescape, for example, felled cows suddenly turn into steak-shaped pieces of raw meat like those available at the grocery store; effectively erasing the violent transport, slaughter, and dismemberment that cow flesh goes through before ending up as steaks ready to consume.
Perhaps the worst treated of all animals in the virtual world are wild animals, who are commonly relegated to being used as target practice or objectives on a list to hunt down. There are of course explicit hunting simulators like Cabela’s Big Game Hunter and Hunting Simulator 2, but the killing of non-human animals as part of a checklist is also common in many modern open-world games. Erik Van Ooijen of Örebro Univeristy has argued that in some ways this problem has become worse as technological improvements have allowed for ever larger and more detailed game worlds and their fauna. Ooijen has also criticized both the discourse around violence in video games for exhibiting speciesism in focusing on depictions of violence against human characters, and also for how wildlife is seemingly portrayed as infinitely renewable and never changing in response to hunting or wildlife destruction (with some exceptions, such as the pigeons you can shoot in Grand Theft Auto IV).
In AAA-budget franchises like Far Cry, Assassin’s Creed, and Red Dead Redemption, players are taught early in the game how to hunt the wild animals that populate the open world, usually in exchange for crafting resources and special rewards for taking down specific ‘legendary’ animals. Activities like Assassin’s Creed: Black Flag’s optional whaling missions, have been specifically targeted for criticism by animal rights organizations for making animal suffering into a mini game.
While hunting is a feature in many contemporary open world action games, studios have also begun to incorporate wild animals into the world who work alongside the protagonist or are meant to be positively interacted with rather than simply shot. In Ghost of Tsushima, birds chirp and flutter about to lead the player to hidden discoverable locations off the beaten path. Foxes similarly can be followed to shrines where players can take a moment to bend down and pet their newfound furry friends. Just ten days after the game launched, PlayStation reported that there had already been almost 9 million fox pets in-game. This is part of a larger “good boy” trend in gaming, with an entire Twitter account recording whether or not you can pet the animals in video games.
However, Ghost of Tsushima does still include boar hunting to obtain pelts necessary for crafting certain items. This distinction between cuddly animals and hunting targets creates a hierarchy of moral worth amongst the animals on the island of Tsushima as some are worthy of being left relatively alone while others are sentenced to die. Other games have made similar distinctions between domesticated and wild animals. Fallout: New Vegas, for example, uses its in-game morality system to ding players who kill friendly or domesticated animals but applies no consequence to the killing of mutant or aggressive feral animals. Similarly, in Red Dead Redemption players lose ‘honor’ for shooting their own horse and can become wanted by the law if they kill domesticated animals but are free to slaughter as many wild animals as they want. And in Dragon Age: Inquisition, there is not any hit against the player in the game’s morality system if they kill a non-aggressive wild animal.
In many ways, this is merely reflective of speciesist trends in our world. Our society routinely allows acts of recreational hunting that if targeted at domesticated animals would be considered illegally cruel. Lucy Sparrow and Simon Coghlan, researchers from the University of Melbourne, have written about the ethical issue that arises as players kill or otherwise abuse non-human animals in ways they would not in real life. They found that while some players actively try not to harm animals in games, many others take what they call the “amoral” approach and disassociate in-game with real-world violence. As game designer Ayşegül Sürücü wrote in their thesis on this topic, many players segment what happens to animals inside Huizinga’s “magic circle” of video games. Others, such as philosopher Matthew Elton, have argued that vegetarians should not play video games as Elton argues that there is no moral difference between virtual and real animals. As an ethical vegan and longtime gamer, I disagree with Elton here — and I am not alone, other vegan gamers such as scientist and fiction writer Senora Hills have also written about being vegan and loving video games.
The same recent improvements in gaming technology that have allowed for more fauna to hunt has also conversely allowed for more complex and richly detailed worlds. This has allowed some developers to give more personality to in-game non-human animals. Unlike Ocarina of Time, in the 2017 Zelda game Breath of the Wild, your horse will not respond to all your commands if you are not bonded with them. Horses also have unique temperament and skill attributes that make each one feel like more of a character than just a tool to get Link from point A to point B. Similarly, in Red Dead Redemption 2 players can name their horses and will need to care for and bond with them by patting them, brushing them, and feeding them regularly. These activities not only keep your horse alive but increase your bond with them and make them faster and more responsive to your inputs.
All this means that you spend a not insignificant amount of time caring for protagonist Arthur Morgan’s horses. Players begin to develop emotional connections to each of their horses that are far stronger than in games like The Witcher 3 or Ocarina of Time where your horse has little to no personality of their own. In both Red Dead 2 and Breath of the Wild, your horses are ultimately still there to serve you as the player and therefore are not granted the freedom to do all that a horse might like free of their use by humans, but expansion of their personality is at least a welcome step in the right direction.
The designer of The Last Guardian, Fumito Ueda, said that the partnership between the boy you play as and Trico, a large half-mammal half-bird like creature, is meant to teach players what it is like to love an animal. Trico will not always listen to the boy’s commands — a feature Ueda said was designed to encourage players to understand Trico’s body language and listen to the sounds he makes. As the boy and Trico journey together, their interdependent relationship — where Trico is helpful in combat, but the boy excels in platforming sections — teaches players that they need each other. As Mark Brown of Game Maker’s Toolkit has noted, scenes where Trico seemingly overcomes what was a previously established ‘rule’ for his behavior demonstrates to the player that he is a character who can overcome challenges and fears of his own, rather than just a tool for the boy to use on his adventure.
Perhaps even more promising are the indie developers who allow you to step into the role of an animal and to try and understand their perspective on the world. In games like Lost Ember, Shelter 2, and Spirit of the North you play as wild animals exploring natural surroundings. Often without dialogue of any kind, these games get you to experience survival and exploration from a non-human animal’s point of view.
While not told from the animals’ perspective, games like Giant Squid Studio’s Abzû feature wildlife in their natural habitat with whom you can peacefully interact with or simply observe from a distance. Players can swim alongside Abzû’s beautiful whales, dolphins, turtles, sharks, and manta rays — or even hop a ride on their backs.
Other recent indie titles put you in the feet of animals in the human-built environment. Home Free sees players become a dog who loses their owner, while the sillier Butt Sniffin Pugs focuses on the emotional lives of pups in a dog park. As a pug, you navigate the social setting of playing with other dogs, and yes, sniffing their butts, in the park. In Untitled Goose Game, you play as the titular goose bothering residents of an English village. Other games are more explicitly educational, like myPeekaville, which was developed to foster social and emotional learning skills in children.
These sorts of games that center a non-human animal as the main character allows players to experience the rich lives of animals without having their social ties be restricted to a human companion or owner. By taking control of an animal and experiencing their daily routines through engagement, video games are starting to harness improvements in technology to explore the cultural lives of non-human animals in a way that can expand players moral consideration.
Image Sources: cinefil_, BagoGames, Playstation Europe
