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SIMULATED SPECIES: THE QUESTION OF THE ANIMAL IN DIGITAL GAMES

MELISSA BIANCHI

A DISSERTATION PRESENTED TO THE GRADUATE SCHOOL OF THE UNIVERSITY OF FLORIDA IN PARTIAL FULFILLMENT OF THE REQUIREMENTS FOR THE DEGREE OF DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY

UNIVERSITY OF FLORIDA

2018

To Crissy, my first and best Player 2 To my loving parents who always find time for playfulness To all the animals who mystify and inspire me

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

This research was supported by the Department of English and the College of

Liberal Arts and Sciences at the University of Florida.

I would like to express my deepest appreciation to my committee chair, Dr. Terry

Harpold, who has taught me more than I could ever say here. By his example, he has shown me what a good mentor, scholar, and person should be. This dissertation would not have been possible without his encouragement and understanding.

I would also like to express my gratitude to my committee members, Dr. Sidney I.

Dobrin, Dr. Susan Hegeman, and Dr. Susan deFrance. Through their extensive personal and professional guidance, I have learned a great deal about academic research, writing, publishing, and life in general.

I am also grateful to my colleagues who devoted time and energy to provide me with thoughtful feedback on this work and related scholarship. The insights they have shared have played a significant role in shaping the direction of my research.

And finally, last but by no means least, I thank my family, friends, and animal companions whose love inspired and sustained me throughout this process.

TABLE OF CONTENTS

page

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS ...... 4

LIST OF FIGURES ...... 7

LIST OF ABBREVIATIONS ...... 10

ABSTRACT ...... 11

CHAPTER

1 ANIMALS AND DIGITAL GAMES ...... 13

Monkey See, Monkey Do—A Design Principle ...... 13 An Overview of Digital Games ...... 18 Animal Studies and Theories of Play ...... 25 Animals in Games ...... 32

2 SIMULATIONS OF CAPTIVITY AND CARE ...... 37

Orca 167 is Not Happy...... 37 The Digital Zoo ...... 42 Ways of Looking ...... 47 Alternative Captivities ...... 56 The Farmer’s Menagerie ...... 63 Play and Pastoral Power ...... 69

3 SIMULATIONS OF DISTANCE AND DISTINCTION ...... 80

Off the Beaten Trail ...... 80 Deer and Distancing ...... 83 Ducks, Dogs, and Design ...... 92 Hyperreal Hunts ...... 99 Fishing for Alternatives ...... 104

4 ANIMAL AVATARS ...... 113

A Menagerie of Becomings ...... 113 Bugged Programs, Broken Goats, and Botched Taxidermy ...... 123 Evolutionary Anomalies ...... 132 A Jungle Utopia ...... 139 Technologies of Becoming ...... 145

5 INKLINGS OF THE IN-BETWEEN ...... 159

Kinship in the Chthulucene ...... 159 Becoming-with and the Tentacular ...... 161 The Werewolf Warrior and the Twilight Princess ...... 165 The Trouble with Tentacles ...... 176 Who’s Your Octodaddy? ...... 180 Squid-Kids with Squirt Guns ...... 184 Player-Animals ...... 191

LIST OF REFERENCES ...... 209

BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH ...... 220

LIST OF FIGURES

Figure page

1-1 Samus meets the Etecoons...... 36

1-2 Samus meets the Dachora...... 36

2-1 A screenshot of Zoo Tycoon (2001) posted to the free image-hosting site Imgur ...... 72

2-2 A screenshot of Zoo Tycoon (2001) posted to Reddit ...... 73

2-3 The three-fourths overhead perspective of Zoo Tycoon (2001)...... 73

2-4 Tycoon Mode ...... 74

2-5 Zoo View ...... 74

2-6 The first-person perspective in Zoo Tycoon (2013) ...... 75

2-8 Human handprints visible on exhibit glass...... 76

2-9 A happy snow leopard...... 77

2-10 A panda expressing its desire for a toy ...... 77

2-11 Animal Creator mode ...... 78

2-12 A player pets a giraffe ...... 78

2-13 Three players in the Arctic level of Zoo Ramapage ...... 79

2-14 The barn in which players’ cows are kept...... 79

3-1 Hunting simulation...... 107

3-2 Hunting simulation...... 107

3-3 Hunting simulation...... 108

3-4 Hunting simulation...... 109

3-5 NES Zappers...... 109

3-6 A player shoots a duck for points...... 110

3-7 The hunting dog laughing ...... 111

3-8 A pronghorn shot through the heart...... 112

4-1 A player attempts to cross the street with two extra frog lives ...... 147

4-3 The avatar from The Plan ...... 149

4-4 The “feather goat” (ostrich) and “giant goat” (sperm whale) ...... 150

4-5 A “tall goat” uses its grappling tongue to latch onto a human ...... 151

4-6 Examples of bugged game physics ...... 152

4-7 A player sacrifices human NPCs to appease the “Devil Goat.”...... 153

4-8 A player at “Goathenge.” ...... 153

4-9 One version of a fish avatar ...... 154

4-10 One version of a reptile avatar ...... 155

4-11 One version of a mammal avatar ...... 156

4-12 Two different cubivores ...... 157

4-13 The final cutscene of Tokyo Jungle...... 158

5-1 Midna speaking to Wolf Link ...... 195

5-2 GUIs for Wolf Link and Link ...... 196

5-3 Scents depicted in Sense Mode ...... 197

5-4 GUI for howling as Wolf Link ...... 198

5-5 Wolf Link’s conversations with cats ...... 199

5-6 Wolf Link amiibo featured on Nintendo’s official website ...... 200

5-7 Wolf Link amiibo in Breath of the Wild ...... 200

5-8 The tutorial during which Octodad prepares for the wedding...... 201

5-9 Octodad swimming in an aquarium ...... 201

5-10 A player attempts to grill and serve burgers as Octodad ...... 202

5-11 Inkopolis ...... 203

5-12 The Great Zapfish of Inkopolis...... 204

5-13 Characters from Splatoon (2015) ...... 204

5-14 Inklings in their two forms ...... 205

5-15 Some of the weapons used by Inklings...... 206

5-16 Two multiplayer battles in Splatoon ...... 207

5-17 Nintendo’s Wii U console playing Splatoon ...... 208

LIST OF ABBREVIATIONS

ACI Animal-computer interaction

CMS Construction and management simulation

FPS First-person shooter

GUI Graphical user interface

NPC Non-player character

PC Personal computer

RPG Role-playing game

SNES Super Nintendo Entertainment System

Abstract of Dissertation Presented to the Graduate School of the University of Florida in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy

SIMULATED SPECIES: THE QUESTION OF THE ANIMAL IN DIGITAL GAMES

Melissa Bianchi

August 2018

Chair: Terry Harpold Major: English

While scholars examine how art, literature, and film shape concepts of the animal, the recent proliferation of computer technologies demands research investigating how the digital mediates notions of a human-animal divide. Digital games, as transmedial objects and as medium, offer one significant avenue for such explorations. As media studies and animal studies scholar Tom Tyler observes, the unique properties of games allow players nuanced and insightful engagements with animal ontology, otherness, and agency. Still, representations of animals in digital games remain mostly neglected by scholarship in animal studies, game studies, and other related fields. This dissertation attempts to address this paucity of scholarship by providing an interdisciplinary approach to reading animal representations within the medium.

Simulated Species argues for scholarly engagement with animal representations in specific computer game genres. The project proposes a framework for understanding how different genres address animals by drawing on the works of media studies scholars such as Terry Harpold, Ian Bogost, Alexander Galloway, and others.

Scholarship in animal studies, posthumanist theory, play theory, and game studies

inform my analysis of how storytelling, user interfaces, and game mechanics respond to dominant discourses about animals. In reading several games, such as Zoo Tycoon

(2013), Goat Simulator (2014), Splatoon (2015), and others, Simulated Species argues that some games uniquely model nuanced understandings of animal ontology and human-animal biopolitics, suggesting ethical approaches to both human-animal interactions and to game design.

The first chapter of this project reviews relevant scholarship, each subsequent chapter attends to distinct game genres. The first and second body chapters examine genres that cast players as human characters and simulate their institutional and individual interactions with nonhuman species. The fourth and fifth chapters explore games that (re)imagine human-animal relations through games that have players play as (rather than with) digital animals. These latter games can teach players to acknowledge and appreciate biological others beyond the confines of the game world while also challenging notions of the player as predominantly, if not exclusively, human.

CHAPTER 1 ANIMALS AND DIGITAL GAMES

Monkey See, Monkey Do—A Design Principle

On the planet Zebes, bounty hunter Samus Aran explores the labyrinthine subterranean jungle of Brinstar. Encased in an amber weaponized mechanical suit, her humanoid figure brightly stands out against the planet’s deep green flora. As she passes through murky passages of forest foliage, Samus stumbles upon a corridor blocked by densely packed vegetation. Here, she encounters three small, simian creatures, called Etecoons. Upon seeing Samus, the blue-green animals bounce up and down eagerly before quickly scaling the forest walls into the dark, cavernous tunnel overhead (Fig. 1-1). Once the Etecoons have gone, Samus is left alone in the passage, facing an impenetrable wall of knotted vines. In her wake lies the maze of jungle she has already traversed. It is at this point in the video game that players of Nintendo’s

Super Metroid (1994) must determine how to propel the game’s heroine closer to

Brinstar’s exit and the Zebesian space pirates she is pursuing. The Etecoons are the only hint for moving Samus forward that the game’s designers have provided.

Like many two-dimensional side-scrolling video games released in the 1990s,

Super Metroid for the Super Nintendo Entertainment System (SNES) relies on visual cues, rather than an explicitly scripted tutorial, to teach players game mechanics. Game designers Anna Anthropy and Naomi Clark describe this type of gameplay in their analysis of Super Mario Bros. (1985) as “us[ing] design, a communicative visual vocabulary, and an understanding of player psychology—gained from watching players play the game, changing it, and watching them again—to guide the player to understanding the basics of the game” (5). Visual and structural cues that teach players

how to play in this way take many forms. In Super Metroid, for example, the games design relies, in part, on “monkey see, monkey do” logic, offering scenarios where non- player characters (NPCs) perform actions that players watch and attempt to mimic using the game’s controls. The Etecoons, and later a large, ostrich-like creature called a

Dachora, demonstrate how Samus might maneuver through the game’s stages using unique actions that players have not previously encountered. The pedagogical effectiveness of these encounters in Super Metroid relies largely on players’ non-verbal literacies as well as on a logic that draws parallels between different animal bodies, in this case Samus’ humanoid capabilities and the capabilities of the nonhuman Etecoons and Dachora. Relying on these literacies and logics, players learn to make Samus “Wall

Jump” from the Etecoons and “Shinespark” from the Dachora, two abilities that are necessary for completing the game.

While these particular creatures in Super Metroid are deployed as mechanisms to teach players how the Samus avatar can interact with its digital environment, their specific representation as animal-like NPCs, as opposed to humanoid characters or objects, merits closer examination. Though the Etecoons and Dachora appear as a design choice made to maintain narrative consistency in the game (many of its NPCs are wildlife native to Zebes), their animal-like representation might also be read as way to trouble players’ understandings of the human and its relations to animals and technology. For example, through the technology of the Power Suit—her mechanical exoskeleton—Samus can perform the animal-like movements of the Etecoons and

Dachora. Technology, here, while mediating between the humanoid body and the planet’s environment also allows Samus to inhabit a liminal position between human

and animal. Her liminality becomes even more clearly defined later in the game series when it is revealed that Samus is a human infused with the DNA of a bird-like race called the Chozo. She is at once human, nonhuman animal, and technology. It is likely no coincidence then that the Etecoons appear primate-like and the Dachora appears bird-like, reflecting the hybridized organisms in Samus’s biology. Moreover, players often use Wall Jump and Shinespark in subsequent playthroughs of the game well before Samus encounters these creatures, a reminder of her inherent animality that is reinforced by players having mastered the affordances of the game.

We might push this proposed reading of Super Metroid a step further, considering its parallels to the relationship between the player and the game’s technology. Like Samus, players are cyborgian creatures that depend upon several technologies to mediate their interactions with elements of the digital world. At the same time, the game technology assigns players a specific subjectivity—in this case that of a mechanized human-chozo female hybrid—that they must enact to complete the game.

This experience of playing at being something other than themselves is comparable to the experience of Samus playing at being an animal; the affordances of the game insist on this comparison, as it is necessary to successful completion of the game. Players might come to understand themselves as both human through the game’s design, which targets an anthroponormative audience, and as something else or more through shared qualities with the otherness of the game’s avatar. Thus, the animal-like creatures in

Super Metroid raise important questions for thinking about relations between humans, nonhuman animals, and game technologies. Specifically, beyond play mechanics, what else might we learn from looking at nonhuman animal representations in digital games?

Or, put another way, what might gamic animals teach us about experiences of gameplay broadly and its cultural and technological implications?

This inquiry, while specific to the context of video games, is aligned with scholarship that investigates how we (humans) understand and represent human- animal relations. For example, John Berger’s “Why Look at Animals?” (1977) argues for being critical of “animals of the mind,” or the schemas we use to understand nonhuman creatures. Berger explains that animals of the mind manifest as representations in language, literature, art, film, games, and other media (25). Moreover, these depictions often teach us to (mis)understand animals as something other-than-themselves (e.g., family, spectacle, etc.), promoting practices that marginalize and decentralize the animal category (26–7). Berger compels readers to examine nonhuman species (both live and imagined or mimicked) to understand how conceptions of the animal category influence the myriad ways in which both human and nonhuman animals are understood, represented, and acted upon in a world shaped by human agency and anthropocentrism.

Since Berger’s initial contributions to this subject, many scholars have examined how media conceptualize and challenge humans’ relations with nonhuman species. For example, Steve Baker’s The Postmodern Animal (2000), Akira Mizuta Lippit’s Electric

Animal (2008), Sherryl Vint’s Animal Alterity (2010), and Jussi Parrika’s Insect Media

(2010) explore the cultural and political implications of nonhuman animals represented in (human) art, film, literature, and digital/cybernetic technologies, respectively. Despite these and others’ efforts to explore how media shape our perceptions and interactions with nonhuman animals, few scholars have attended to animal representations in digital

games. Only recently has game studies scholarship turned its attention to representations of the agency of nonhuman animals. As media studies and animal studies scholar Tom Tyler observes, the unique properties of games allow for nuanced and insightful engagements with human constructions and projections of animal ontology, otherness, and agency. Responding to this body of scholarship, I argue for further critical engagement with animal representations in digital games. I propose that the field requires a framework for understanding how important game genres address animals because of the consequences of their representations—the material impacts— that these digital models have on human and nonhuman animals.

Critically attending to gamic animals can help us better understand how the medium shapes and is shaped by humans’ conceptions of nonhuman creatures. The reciprocal relationship between game design and our engagements with nonhuman animals informs personal and institutional as well as public and private practices.

Moreover, these practices have meaningful social, political, and economic implications for live animals (human and nonhuman). Recent work at the intersection of game studies and ecocriticism has illuminated many aspects of these relationships, as several scholars demonstrate that digital games model and help determine humans’ interactions with actual, lived environments and the animals that inhabit them. Scholars, including

Alenda Chang, John Parham, Robert Meija, and others, demonstrate that digital games reflect dominant ideologies about environmental resources, wildlife management, and urban development. Moreover, these scholars argue that gameplay and game hardware have tangible impacts on ecologies beyond the games themselves. Regarding animals specifically, how games model the ideologies and practices concerning human-animal

interactions is important considering endeavors working towards comprehensive animal ethics and ecojustice. As I will demonstrate, digital games can encourage alternative modes of engaging with animals that promote animal welfare.

From a cultural studies perspective examining animal representations in games can support and unify efforts that are critical of how games and game culture treat marginalized human groups. Many extremely popular video games, their producers, and game culture more broadly have been critiqued by academic and popular figures for games’ troubling (if not also discriminatory) treatment of marginalized subjects, particularly women, ethnic and racial minorities, LGBTQ communities, and individuals with disabilities. Works by Anthropy, Lisa Nakamura, Adrienne Shaw and Elizaveta

Friesem, Mary Flanagan and Helen Nissenbaum, and many other scholars illuminate how digital games disenfranchise specific human groups, as well as how we might rectify and avoid these issues through ethical game design practices. Considering these scholars’ works alongside texts that establish links between the marginalization of humans and nonhuman animals, such as Marjorie Spiegel’s The Dreaded Comparison

(1996) and Cary Wolfe’s Animal Rites (2003), can provide another perspective from which game studies might understand how and why particular groups are marginalized in the medium.

An Overview of Digital Games

Before examining how animal representations in digital games operate, it is necessary to unpack several understandings of what constitutes a game and the experience of playing one. Scholars have found it challenging to settle on universal meanings for “game” or “play” because each term has broad, often inconsistent,

historical and cultural applications.1 Moreover, the development and proliferation of computational systems over the last several decades have contributed to a growing diversity of meanings for both terms. Games and media scholar Frans Mäyrä describes some of the difficulty of formalist efforts, observing that “there are inherent challenges in preparing an all-inclusive definition of games or play, as the flexibility, ambiguity, and diversity of the phenomena become oversimplified in the process” (33). Thus, any specific definition of “game” or “play” risks reducing the medium and players’ engagements as well as disregarding nuances across genres, contexts, technologies, etc.

Still, games studies scholarship has converged upon many qualities of games that, when taken together, distinguish them from other media. Chief among these traits is the governance of players’ actions by rules within a system. Katie Salen and Eric

Zimmerman—two scholars and game designers whose definition is cited widely— explain that a game is “a system in which players engage in an artificial conflict, defined by rules, that results in a quantifiable outcome” (96). Jesper Juul, who writes shortly after Salen and Zimmerman in 2004, synthesizes this definition with works by play and games studies scholars from previous decades, including Johan Huizinga (1938), Roger

Caillois (1961), Bernard Suits (1978), and Brian Sutton-Smith (1997). In his book Half-

Real (2005), Juul proposes an expanded definition of “game,” explaining

A game is 1) a rule-based formal system; 2) with variable and quantifiable outcomes; 3) where different outcomes are assigned different values; 4) where the player exerts effort in order to influence the outcome; 5) the

1 In his Philosophical Investigations Ludwig Wittgenstein demonstrates the difficulty of settling on a precise definition of “game,” ascribing the problem as much to the operations of language and meaning as to the breadth of referents for the term. He argues that, though there is no specific, clear definition of “game,” one is not necessary because the word can still be used effectively in communicating.

player feels emotionally attached to the outcome; 6) and the consequences of the activity are optional and negotiable. (6–7)

Juul’s explanation captures the complex network of interactions between players, rules, values, outcomes, and investment that determine play experiences. Moreover, his definition reveals several avenues by which players may interpret the actions, rules, and computational processes involved in play.

In addition to understanding games as rule-based, Juul explains that games are fundamentally shaped by the fictions they communicate. To distinguish between rules and fictions, Juul defines rules as “definite descriptions of what can and cannot be done in a game” (197), and he describes fiction as an amalgam of “coherent fictional worlds”

(197) that games project and that players imagine. He also cautions that understanding a game’s rules and fictions as separate spheres elides the realities of their entanglement within any given game. For example, game rules often represent the ideological practices of fictional entities, environments, and events in the game world. At the same time, designers, and sometimes players, may rewrite or reprogram game fictions to accommodate new or necessary rules.

Despite the interconnectedness of rules and fiction in games, Juul’s distinction between the two is necessary for understanding how to analyze digital games. Because both digital and non-digital games are comprised of rules and fiction, Juul argues that

“Games are transmedial, and computers are a game medium” (198, emphasis in the original). He claims that digital games can be studied not only as objects unto themselves (as instances of a medium), but also for their role in a general media ecology (their transmediality, their relations with one another, and with a fuller range of media). Juul’s arguments about games offer an impetus for examining the rules and

fictions that create nonhuman animals in games, as well as for identifying how these nonhuman animal representations relate to those that appear in other media broadly.

While Juul’s work focuses on games and their embeddedness within media ecologies, other scholars explore specific systems through which games signify. Terry

Harpold, in his essay “Screw the Grue: Mediality, Metalepsis, Recapture” (2007), notes that “Gameplay is the expression of combinations of definite semiotic elements in specific relations to equally definite technical elements” (91, emphasis in the original).

His observation recognizes the plurality of semiotic systems—visual, verbal, auditory, etc.—operating during gameplay and accounts for technology’s role in shaping their expression. The limits of both hardware and software determine the realm of possible meanings for any given game, and designers must often accommodate technical constraints by adjusting games’ fictions or rules accordingly—a process Harpold identifies as “recapture.” In other instances, technical aspects, including processing speed, frame rate, latency, etc., have indeterminate or indirect impacts on game semiotics. Regardless of their degree or kind, when technical constraints become distinct, observable moments unaccounted for by games’ coherent fictional worlds or rules systems, Harpold argues that they operate as a metalepsis. Metalepsis, a concept dating back to the seventeenth century, describes rhetorical and narrative practices that challenge the structure of a text. A metalepsis can occur in many forms in a variety of media with rhetorical and ontological effects on the reading of a text (Ryan 204–230,

246). In games, Harpold argues, a metalepsis can result from a rupture between the fictional and the technical, making the games’ mediality apparent and influencing how and if gamic moments signify for players. Harpold’s work demonstrates the necessity of

engaging with games’ technical elements and materiality, in addition to their rules and fiction, to determine how and what they communicate.

Along with acknowledging digital games’ technical aspects, it is essential to review two expressive forms that fundamentally shape gameplay semiotics: action and procedure. In Gaming: Essays on Algorithmic Culture (2006), Alexander Galloway argues that gameplay occurs along two axes, and that the intersection of these axes produces four types of gamic actions. These actions include diegetic machine acts

(process), nondiegetic operator acts (algorithm), diegetic operator acts (play), and nondiegetic machine acts (code). He cautions that these categories are not fixed or ideal types, but rather they are tendencies characteristic of many games (38).

Galloway’s framework conceptualizes the act of playing a game as “an undivided act wherein meaning and doing transpire in the same gamic gesture” (104). The covalence of meaning and doing in games requires that scholars interpret gamic acts as a form of narrating discourse (104). Galloway argues that “the game critic should be concerned not only with the interpretation of linguistic signs, as in literary studies or film theory, but also with the interpretation of polyvalent doing” (105, emphasis in the original). Here, gamic acts operate as a semiotic system through which players understand game meanings and engage with narrative. Galloway likens gamic actions to narrative allegory, explaining how the latter’s definition as “extended metaphor” can help critics understand games as “enacted metaphor” (105)—or as texts created by players’ performances. Thus, gamic acts create meaning (diegetic and non-diegetic) for both players and machines, operating as one of the medium’s semiotic systems.

While Galloway’s work emphasizes action, Ian Bogost’s work in Persuasive

Games: The Expressive Power of Videogames (2007) attends to game procedures.

Bogost proposes “procedural rhetoric” to describe how computational media uses processes persuasively. He defines procedural rhetoric as “the art of persuasion through rule-based representations and interactions rather than the spoken word, writing, images, or moving pictures” (ix). Bogost claims that because digital games are procedurally designed using rules and algorithms, meaning emerges from both their expressive and computational aspects (ix). He identifies the rule-driven, action-oriented, and process-based qualities of games as their “procedurality,” arguing that procedures operate rhetorically. Though players may derive particular meanings from game procedures, Bogost notes that these meanings are not isolated from other expressive qualities in games (text, images, etc.) and often build on or come into conflict with their meanings.2 Thus, game critics must attend to gameplay procedures and their relations to other systems of signification in order to understand games effectively.

Bogost also argues that the combination of expressive and procedural representations in digital games can communicate ideologies, teaching players their associated values. Bogost’s claim regarding the ideological pedagogy of games has been explored by several scholars who study the roles of ethics and values in gameplay and game design. For example, Miguel Sicart applies information ethics and constructivist theories of virtue to the study of games in The Ethics of Computer Games.

He argues that digital games present players with ethical values through rules, and, as

2 One example of the conflict between games’ procedures and other expressive (and diegetic) elements is “ludonarrative dissonance,” a term coined by Clint Hocking in 2007. Ludonarrative dissonance refers to any instance in which a game’s narrative and its gameplay conflict with one another directly (Hocking).

moral agents, players respond to these values in the choices that they make. Sicart also argues that both players and game designers must take moral responsibility for their actions in games and the games they choose to play or design. These points are particularly important to the dissertation as representations of nonhuman animals in games often express specific values and ideologies about human-animal relations and animal welfare that have material effects beyond digital worlds.

Thus, to address the multiple and complex elements of games, this project draws on a method of reading proposed by media studies scholar Terry Harpold in Ex- foliations: Reading Machines and the Upgrade Path (2008). Harpold’s method is defined by two significant concepts, “ex-foliation” and “historiation,” which form the foundation for this project’s engagement with digital games. Ex-foliation refers to a “loosely grouped set of procedures for provisionally separating the layers of [a] text’s surfaces without resolving them into distinct strata or hierarchies, with the aim of understanding their expressive concurrencies” (10). Ex-foliation critically engages with multimodal digital texts, including digital games, by accounting for their distinct and multiple layers of signification and how these layers operate in conjunction with one another. While useful for reading any medium, ex-foliation is particularly helpful for examining digital games because it can attend to the medium’s complexity and multi-modal quality opportunistically, addressing the relations and interrelations of game elements in various configurations as required by the critical task at hand.

Harpold’s second concept, historiation, addresses players’ distinct engagements with digital games. Historiation is “a form of recollection activated by visible traits of the reading surface” (8) and as “the medial basis of a reader’s mnemonic relation to the

text’s surface” (8). Historiation encompasses the body of individual and cultural knowledge summoned, consciously and unconsciously, by players’ engagements with a text. For digital games and their animal representations, historiation attends to how players’ prior knowledge of games and other applicable media, animal representations broadly, and live animals themselves affect players interpretations and responses to game mechanisms. In my earlier reading of animal figures in Super Metroid, for example, historiation accounts for how new players might play the game, but also how players with previous game experiences—perhaps with knowledge of how Wall Jump and Shinespark work or of later games in the Metroid series—might interpret and respond to Super Metroid. Together, ex-foliation and historiation are critical strategies that can account for the intricate relationship between games’ semiotic elements and players’ knowledge in ways that attending to only one part of the system (game visuals, narrative, rules, technology, etc.) cannot. Understanding how several parts of a game contribute to the meanings of gameplay is vital for untangling players’ reception of the animal category as it is represented (enacted, acted upon) in the most basic, material procedures of games.

Animal Studies and Theories of Play

Examining how games and play intersect with conceptions of animals also requires familiarity with changing philosophical approaches negotiating the relation between humans and nonhuman animals. Matthew Calarco’s Thinking Through

Animals: Identity, Difference, Indistinction (2015) provides a comprehensive overview of a few dominant modes for considering the animal category and its cultural, political, and ethical implications. In each of the three chapters of the text, Calarco outlines one of

three frameworks in critical animal studies for thinking through animals: identity, difference, and indistinction.

The first, identity, is founded on the belief that nonhuman animals share specific traits in common with humans, such as sentience, subjectivity, and intentionality.

Identity theory argues that if we believe nonhuman animals possess certain qualities in common with humans, humans must rethink their perspectives and interactions with other animals to address animal well-being ethically. Calarco notes that the identity framework for thinking through animals forms the foundation for the animal liberation and animal rights movements, citing Peter Singer, Tom Regan, and Paola Cavalieri as well-known proponents of this perspective. The identity approach, however, faces limitations in its consideration of animals, notably, as Calarco points out, logocentrism and anthropocentrism (22–27). In using various definitions of what is human to establish animals’ personhoods (and thus their need for ethical treatment), advocates of identity theory problematically maintain the human as the standard for defining which animals should and should not receive ethical treatment by humans. While identity theory has made strides in securing animal rights for several species, this approach falls short for animals that evidently share very little in common with humans by way of sentience, subjectivity, and intentionality. Many games discussed in the chapters that follow rely on variations of identity theory to facilitate players’ investment in or distancing from specific animal characters.

In contrast to the identity approach to understanding animals, the difference framework offers ways to provide a more inclusionary approach to animal justice and ethics. Difference theorists, such as Jacques Derrida, Cary Wolfe, and related scholars,

argue for a framework that acknowledges and appreciates animals and the animal category writ large without necessarily relying on animals’ observed similarities to humans to justify their value. The difference perspective attempts to blur the boundary between human and nonhuman animals without necessarily collapsing the distinction entirely, attending to both animals’ ontological differences and the characteristics that make humans unique among other species. The framework has been to date

“characterized primarily by an intellectual and conceptual approach to animal issues that is somewhat removed from broader policy and political debates” (46), and its proponents often reluctantly support the efforts of identity-based politics because they offer a pragmatic approach to addressing animal justice issues (44). Calarco also views the framework’s insistence on anthropological differences as a potential limitation to the progress of thinking through animals and animal justice. He notes that there may be something to gain from setting aside the human-animal distinction entirely—a point he addresses through indistinction theory.

In contrast to both the identity and difference viewpoints, the indistinction framework deemphasizes human exceptionality and the human-animal divide to explore humans’ shared qualities with nonhuman animals (as opposed to animals’ shared traits with humans). Indistinction theorists argue that nonhuman animals, like humans, demonstrate their own, distinctive forms of agency, creativity, and potential. These theorists also explore how to minimize practices that stymie nonhuman animals’ agency and subjectivity. Calarco identifies himself as a proponent of the indistinction perspective because he believes that the framework offers the most potential for addressing anthropocentrism and advancing progress towards animal justice,

particularly through efforts that support alternative modes for human-animal relations

(68–69). The scholarship produced by indistinction theorists, most notably the works of

Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, Brian Massumi, and Donna Haraway, serve as frameworks for the dissertation’s later chapters.

While theories of critical animal studies have had few intersections with digital game studies, the study of play has marginally acknowledged nonhuman animals and the traits they share with humans. These endeavors, however, often have little, if any, concern for animal-related ethics or politics. For example, in the 1930s understandings of animal cognition and animal behavior shaped play theory and its later influences on game studies. Huizinga’s Homo Ludens (1938), a text widely cited in games studies that explains play and its role in cultural construction, argues that play predates the formation of culture; citing similarities between nonhuman animal and human play as evidence for this chronology. Huizinga claims, “We can assert, even, that human civilization has added no essential feature to the general idea of play. Animals play just like men” (1). While his claim seems to support indistinction between human and animal behaviors, Huizinga later observes,

The very existence of play continually confirms the supra-logical nature of the human situation. Animals play, so they must be more than merely mechanical things. We play and know that we play, so we must be more than merely rational beings, for play is irrational. (4)

Play, as Huizinga describes it, paradoxically and problematically demonstrates human and nonhuman animals’ similarities and differences. While both human and nonhuman animals play, humans’ self-reflexivity during play sets the species apart from other animals because nonhuman animals do not—as far as Huizinga has observed—

acknowledge that they play. Huizinga’s claims about animals and play in Homo Ludens establish a hierarchy between humans and animals based on an inherent logocentrism.

While Huizinga’s understandings of the relations between humans, animals, and play require nuancing in relation to recent studies in human and animal behavior, his work foregrounds an early point of intersection between the study of animals and the study of play and games. The animal in Huizinga’s work serves as a point of comparison for examining human play but is not the central subject for theorization, falling in line with the long tradition of anthropocentrism that has marginalized nonhuman animals as subjects for cultural studies. Moreover, Huzinga reduces nonhuman animals to a single, homogenous category that overlooks possible wide and irreducible differences in cognitive function and behaviors among distinct species and individuals. Huzinga uses this reduction of animals to describe the human (a category which can often overlook, if not exclude, members of our own species based on difference) and human play in oppositional terms. The treatment of animals in Homo

Ludens may indicate why much subsequent research in play and game studies—and perhaps in the design of specific play experiences as well—has continued to view animals as tangential or irrelevant subjects. Regardless, Huizinga does demonstrate that it is necessary, in some capacity, to examine the human in relation to nonhuman animals in order to understand play and culture.

In The Ambiguity of Play (1997), scholar Brian Sutton-Smith also formulates understandings of “play” that draw comparisons between humans and nonhuman animals. Sutton-Smith claims that the term “play,” its popular cultural rhetorics, and the theoretical approaches used to understand it, lack clarity and coherence. He argues that

this ambiguity makes reconciliation between different theorizations of play difficult for scholars across disciplines. Thus, his work sets out to review and provide some coherence to play theory by identifying rhetorics of play across its disciplines of study.

Sutton-Smith argues that understanding play through its rhetorics is crucial for not only understanding games but also literature and other works, which are often “playful” (3).

He also suggests that play theory can bridge the gaps between the study of games, literature, and other media. From here, Sutton-Smith identifies seven rhetorics of play, noting that within each category there are multiple variants. He names these rhetorics as follows: the rhetoric of play as progress, the rhetoric of play as fate, the rhetoric of play as power, the rhetoric of play as identity, the rhetoric of play as the imaginary, the rhetoric of the self, and the rhetoric of play as frivolous (9–11).

Of these categories, the rhetoric of play as progress is most relevant here because Sutton-Smith uses its associated chapter to draw connections between human and nonhuman animals. The second chapter of The Ambiguity of Play, titled “Rhetorics of Animal Progress,” explores play behaviors that both humans and nonhuman animals share. Sutton-Smith argues that identifying play as progress means viewing play as an integral part of an individual’s development rather than as an activity performed for one’s own enjoyment. He associates this rhetoric predominantly with nonhuman animals and children and cites studies (particularly in education and animal behavior) that discuss play as a process of socialization and cognitive growth. Moreover, Sutton-

Smith draws an important observation from the field’s study of animal play, observing that

The compromise I adopt here is to present the animal researchers’ propositions as they might be viewed in terms of several rhetorics; thus

they become statements about animal play as skill training (progress), playfighting (power), bonding (identity), flexibility (the imaginary), and emotional experience (the self). The categorization of the animal literature in parallel with the rhetorics is not quite as humorous as the headings might suggest. Either the parallel is drawn because there is an empirical relationship between animal play and human play, or the animal play theories are an anthropomorphic projection of the human rhetorics. (26)

Sutton-Smith at once acknowledges the complexity of connecting nonhuman animal play to human play while also making those connections explicit. Because researchers can only hypothesize how animals might cognitively perceive their actions, studies of nonhuman play in relation to human play rely, in part, on assumptions that may or may not anthropomorphize other species. Still, some animal play behaviors are observably similar to humans’ actions, suggesting, as Sutton-Smith notes, an empirical link between play behaviors. Though he is less often cited in game studies scholarship than other scholars, such as Huizinga, his observations about the rhetorical relations between human and animal play are valuable because they nuance logocentric hierarchies that position animals as fundamentally less complex or less important than humans.

More recently, Brian Massumi’s What Animals Teach Us about Politics (2014) offers important insights on humans, animals, and play. While his work has not been as widely referred to in game studies as other theorists, Massumi’s theorization of play is worth noting because it is markedly in-line with the efforts of indistinction theorists. His formulations encourage readers to rethink humans’ relationship to difference and the human-animal divide. Massumi argues that if we consider the human as animal, we can develop an animal politics that integrates concepts such as play, sympathy, and creativity into understandings of nature. About play specifically, Massumi explains that during both human and animal play, multifaceted and complex understandings of

identity and difference supplant anthropological distinctions, placing humans and animals on a continuum. He explains,

in play, the human enters a zone of indiscernibility with the animal. When we humans say ‘this is play,’ we are assuming our animality. Play dramatizes the reciprocal participation of the human and the animal, from both sides. For when animals play, they are preparatorily enacting human capacities. (8)

These “human capacities” include language and reflexivity, which have been largely, if not exclusively, identified as human traits. Massumi challenges this presumption about language and reflexivity, arguing that play’s particular properties highlight how animal behavior and animal thought participate in both these practices. His formulations about animals and play offer a starting point for addressing how we might understand and study human play directed through animal characters in digital games as well as challenge the field’s anthroponormativity that assumes the player is only human (and in some cases a very specific kind of human). Still, while links have been made between play theory and animal studies as well as between game studies and play theory, connections linking game studies to animal studies (and vice versa) remain largely unexplored.

Animals in Games

This dissertation challenges the field’s tendencies towards anthropocentrism by addressing and attempting to repair the paucity of critical scholarship about nonhuman animal representations in games. The project is largely inspired by Wolfe and several ecocritical scholars who claim that the systematic discrimination against any kind of other (human or animal) will continue to occur if society’s speciesist discourses and practices remain overlooked and unexamined. The roles of nonhuman animal agents in games, I argue, reveal how particular game genres and their play styles communicate

ideologies that influence the continued marginalization of human and nonhuman animals. My analyses demonstrate that while some games remain reductive in their treatment of these issues, marginalizing nonhuman animals, others allow for nuanced engagements with animal ontology, otherness, and agency through challenges to anthropocentrism and anthroponormativity. I also show that many games simulate alternative biopolitical models through play with and as animals that encourage players to (re)examine institutional and individual practices that govern their interactions with social, cultural, and biological others. By attending more thoughtfully to animal representations in games, we might also identify how historical understandings of animals and “the animal” have fueled the design of game hardware as well as how game technologies influence humans’ relations with nonhuman animals and the animal category writ large.

Each chapter of the dissertation attends to distinct game genres and what they convey about human-animal relations. Chapters two and three examine game genres that cast (human) players as human characters and simulate their institutional and individual interactions with nonhuman species. In chapter two, I argue that life management simulation games often teach players to value financial profit and expansion, reducing animals to pure commodity objects while obscuring the grisly realities of animal captivity and animal husbandry. In chapter three, I show how many hunting simulations reify notions of a human-animal divide in order to support, and even idealize, depictions of uneven power dynamics between human hunters and their nonhuman animal targets. The former chapter refers to Irus Braverman’s theorization of animal care as power while the latter refers to James Serpell’s definitions of distancing

devices. In both chapters, I identify several games that attempt to remedy game mechanics and depictions that render nonhuman animals marginal. Notable among these games are Zoo Tycoon (2013) and The Oregon Trail (1985), which use innovative storytelling, game mechanics, and technologies to encourage players’ critical reflection on their engagements with nonhuman animals both in and beyond game spaces.

While the games examined in chapters two and three of the dissertation focus on institutional and individual practices in human-animal engagements, chapters four and five explore games that (re)imagine humans’ relation to the animal category. These games encourage players to play as (rather than with) digital animals and include many examples from the action-adventure and role-playing game (RPG) genres, including

Frogger (1981), Goat Simulator (2014), and Splatoon (2015). While digital simulations cannot fully replicate nonhuman experiences, they do offer a site for human designers and players to imagine and enact a variety of imagined nonhuman ontologies. Thus, I argue that playing as animals or as human-animal hybrids in games can be an exploration of identity, alterity, and affect in terms of ontological and phenomenological difference. To support this point, I draw on Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari’s work, as well as Donna Haraway’s and others’ extensions of their theories, to provide a framework for reading these moments of gameplay as “becomings” and “becoming- with.” When inhabiting an animal avatar, players attempt to understand and perform animal alterity through play, engaging with a specific representation of animality and the affective process of understanding one’s self as other than human, as also both animal and machine. I observe that these experiences can teach players to acknowledge and

appreciate biological others beyond the confines of the game world while also challenging notions of the player as predominantly, if not exclusively, human.

Figure 1-1. Samus meets the Etecoons. Nintendo Research and Development 1. Super Metroid. Nintendo, 1994.

Figure 1-2. Samus meets the Dachora. Nintendo Research and Development 1. Super Metroid. Nintendo, 1994.

CHAPTER 2 SIMULATIONS OF CAPTIVITY AND CARE

Orca 167 is Not Happy

Games that model institutions of animal care, such as zoo and farm simulators, illustrate how particular procedures and economies specify appropriate interactions between humans and other species. In actual zoos and farms, animal captivity and care demand varying degrees of investment in nonhuman animals’ well-being while simultaneously adhering to ideologies and dynamics that reify anthropocentrism. When nonhuman animals’ needs conflict with anthropocentric ideals, actual zoos and farms often resolve these issues through means that compromise either nonhuman species’ well-being or humans’ values. Games that simulate zoos and farms, however, deviate from these realities often by reducing human-animal conflicts to issues that can be resolved with apparent benefit to both parties. The affordances of play and players’ choices in many animal industry simulation games reveal little about the ethical and material struggles underpinning real-world institutional operations. Instead, these games usually intimate that actions supporting humans’ interests are almost always also in-line with nonhuman animals’ needs or vice versa.

Mixing game genres is perhaps one explanation for why and how animal industry simulations obfuscate real conflicts between humans and other animal species. Many games about zoos and farms combine play objectives and procedures from construction and management simulations (CMSs) with directives and rules from artificial life games—two subgenres of simulations whose designs are somewhat at odds with one another. Gameplay in CMSs focuses on an organized system’s construction and economies, asking players to manipulate resources in ways that encourage fiscal and

material development. In contrast, artificial life games model a manageable and unique organism population for which players tend to the biological processes and growth of its constituents (Adams 527–528, 573). Combining both genres in a single simulation game should create playable moments in which the institution’s requirements come in conflict with the biological needs of its captives, and some simulation games embrace this possibility in their designs. Still, the large majority of popular zoo and farm games continue to marginalize, reduce, and even erase this struggle to paint institutions of animal captivity as positive environments and experiences for all species. This chapter explores how representations in animal industry simulations both reify and subvert problematic understandings of animals and their captivity as well as how players enact, respond to, and circulate these game experiences.

By examining discussion threads that appear on Imgur1 and Reddit, online social media makes apparent how players receive and use games to understand actual and simulated zoo practices. The forum threads in figs. 2-1A and 2-2 begin with the same screenshot from the original version of Zoo Tycoon—a popular zoo simulator discussed later in this chapter. Fig. 2-1B depicts an exhibit from an anonymous player’s zoo, an orca tank that exceeds the game’s recommended ratio for whales to tank volume. At the top of the UI, the game prompts the player with a warning stating, “Orca 167 is not happy.” Orca 167 is the 167th killer whale purchased and placed in the exhibit, and it is

“unhappy” because the player has overcrowded the aquarium. Above the Zoo Tycoon

1 Imgur is a free image-hosting website that was designed by Reddit user Alan Schaff in 2009. The site, though it possesses its own online community, is often used by Reddit members as a location to store images and manage large surges of Internet traffic to them. Images posted to Reddit often appear on Imgur, and in such instances, a post has two comments sections, one on each website. Thus, two distinct sets of comments may emerge for a single post (Broderick).

screenshot is the original poster’s caption for the image, which states simply, “Suck it up

Orca 167” (Fig. 2-1C). Together, the post and caption satirize recent controversy in the

U.S. concerning the care and captivity of orcas at entertainment parks.

Posted in 2013, the Zoo Tycoon screenshot surfaces on the Internet the same year as the release of Blackfish, a documentary film directed by Gabriela

Cowperthwaite. The film investigates the history and practices of killer whale captivity at

SeaWorld locations owned by Anheuser-Busch. Through interviews with animal scientists and former SeaWorld staff, Blackfish reveals multiple instances of orca mistreatment in the commercially owned animal parks. Specifically, the film focuses on

Tilikum, SeaWorld’s infamous male orca, discussing his capture in the wild and the events that led up to his grisly 2010 attack on SeaWorld trainer Dawn Brancheau.

Blackfish suggests that Tilikum’s mismanagement and mistreatment in captivity prompted his aggressive behavior. Meanwhile, the Imgur and Reddit post parodies orca mistreatment at SeaWorld based on reports circulated by Blackfish and other mainstream media. The post and its caption draw attention to one of the most fiercely debated topics concerning orca captivity: tank space.

The Zoo Tycoon screenshot illustrates gameplay that hyperbolizes the procedures actual institutions use to keep an orca (or sometimes a few orcas) in captivity. Though the game allows players to hold over a hundred whales in a single tank, it is not an action that Zoo Tycoon encourages, as doing so often results in negative consequences for players’ zoos within the game world (e.g., animals become unhappy, zoo popularity declines, revenue decreases, etc.) While on average the number of orcas kept per tank in real United States parks is closer to two (American

Association of Zoos), the game allows players to simulate environments that dramatically exaggerate real world captivity regulations.2 Furthermore, the image caption mocks SeaWorld supporters who argue that orcas’ psychological and emotional states in captivity are subordinate, or even irrelevant, to the greater preservationist goals of the park. That Orca 167 must simply “suck it up” despite the dire circumstances of its captivity is a sardonic jab at humans’—more precisely SeaWorld staff’s and patrons’—willingness to overlook, if not outright ignore, orca well-being both within and outside of the game. In this post, Zoo Tycoon becomes a platform for critiquing contemporary perspectives about animal captivity and care.

While the main post uses game procedures to respond to orca captivity controversies, the Imgur and Reddit comments assess how poorly digital games simulate zoo and animal park operations. The comments, though mostly made in jest, underscore the importance of considering how simulation games encode ideologies about animal captivity and care. The “best”3 comments on Imgur and Reddit responding to the Zoo Tycoon post encourage readers to reflect on how the game both reifies and

2 The U.S. Code of Federal Regulations (CFR) lists several minimum tank measurements required for the captivity of orcas under its section on the Specifications for the Humane Handling, Care, Treatment, and Transportation of Marine Mammals (9 CFR § 3.104). Zoological organizations, such as the Alliance of Marine Mammal Parks and Aquariums (AMMPA) and the Association of Zoos and Aquariums (AZA), have additional requirements for orca tanks listed on their websites. Still, many animal advocates argue that captivity in tanks is detrimental to the well-being of orcas. These groups claim that tank environments bear little resemblance to the animal’s wild habitat, offer the animals little space, force otherwise unnatural social groupings, and cause stress due to chemicals in the water (Whale and Dolphin Conservation).

3 On both Imgur and Reddit, “best” comments are comments that have received the most positive responses from other users on the website based on an algorithm that accounts for number and speed of upvotes, down/up time ratios, etc. The best comment on a post typically appears at the top of the thread unless users select options that sort comments by other criteria, e.g. “new,” “top,” “hot,” etc. (Munroe).

subverts the problematic mentality that the original poster satirizes. On Imgur, the best comment is part of an exchange between two different site users (Fig. 2-1C). It reads, fallenturtles: They’ll be fine. Just assign another zookeeper to the tank. pwnstar: YOU MEAN MARINE SPECIALIST YOU FUCK. fallenturtles: I KNOW WHAT I WAS SAYING. IT'S FUNNY BECAUSE ZOOKEEPERS WON'T DO SHIT FOR AQUATIC ANIMALS AND THEIR EXHIBITS. FUCK YOU!

The exchange here, while good-humored, speaks to a few problems that Zoo Tycoon raises about animal captivity and its gamic representation. Zoo Tycoon’s gameplay perpetuates: (1) the belief that proper care from humans alleviates all captive animals’ distresses and (2) the idea that animal specialists—and the managing institution itself or other staff—are solely responsible for administering appropriate animal care. These notions about animal care in captivity reduce the complexity of actual animals’ needs and the institutions that manage them, reifying views that many animal specialists work against in their research and news media.

At the same time, the discussion threads also draw attention to Zoo Tycoon’s artifice and how simulation games may not—indeed, cannot—accurately represent zoo practices. Digital simulation games never perfectly capture the systems they model, for multiple reasons, chief among which are the conflicts between technological limitations, consumer expectations, market pressures, etc. The best comments from Reddit underscore Zoo Tycoon’s inability to model zoo operations precisely (Fig. 2-2). User nightrose0087 rewrites the game’s tagline to read, “Zoo tycoon: where animal abuse is expected.” The tagline acknowledges how the game’s inability to recreate zoo operations accurately results in the mistreatment of its digital animals. Animal abuse occurs (intentionally or not) as a regrettable side effect of Zoo Tycoon’s representational

shortcomings. Yet, the severity of animal abuse in the game never completely models abuses that occur in actual captivity and which result in animal suffering and deaths.

Rather, the effects of in-game animal abuse are often minimal—an animal is represented as “unhappy,” for example; the (simulated) material conditions that produce this “unhappiness” are trivialized and reframed as elements that hurt players’ game objectives more so than the digital animals themselves.

At the same time, the Reddit thread also highlights the revolutionary potential of inaccurate simulation design. Lord_NiteShade, another user, replies to nightrose0087 by writing, “Until the Trex escapes.” The response suggests that at least some of the game’s elements, such as the ability to keep and free dinosaurs in the zoo, allow players a subversive outlet for responding to animal abuse in Zoo Tycoon as well as in actual zoos and parks. Players can, at least notionally, use the game space to model captive animal vengeance by letting carnivorous animals devour zoo visitors, or to illustrate in extremis the problems of SeaWorld’s orca-keeping practices. The many unrealistic practices in the game offer players the option to explore how they respond to animal captivity and care in ways that may run counter to dominant narratives about captivity in the real-world. To further examine how contemporary games reify and subvert conceptions and practices of animal captivity and care, this chapter examines the Zoo Tycoon game series and other zoo simulators closely.

The Digital Zoo

The first Zoo Tycoon game was published by Microsoft in 2001 for both PC and macOS. Designed and developed by Blue Fang Games, Zoo Tycoon follows in the long line of popular CMSs released in the late 1990s and early 2000s, including MicroProse’s

Sid Meier’s Railroad Tycoon (1990) and Chris Sawyer’s Rollercoaster Tycoon (1999).

Like with other CMSs, players of Zoo Tycoon control a fictional business that they manage and develop. At the same time, players must also monitor and care for a captive animal population’s biological growth and development. Zoo Tycoon challenges players to accomplish the goals of a CMS and an artificial life simulation simultaneously, managing their business’s requirements and their animals’ needs. Players build, expand, and upgrade their zoos by purchasing animals, creating suitable living environments for them and allocating staff and resources for animal care and maintenance. To be successful, players’ zoos must accrue income by providing a pleasing environment and experience for zoo visitors that includes appropriate animal housing, food and drink stands, picnic areas, and sanitary facilities. In the game, zoos amass higher revenue if players keep both their animals and visitors happy. These procedures remain consistent throughout the later games in the Zoo Tycoon series.

In simulating zoo operations, the original Zoo Tycoon attempts to teach players about nonhuman animals, their habitats, and current ecological crises. A few years after its initial release, the game received numerous awards recognizing its value as a pedagogical tool for children.4 Zoo Tycoon teaches players general knowledge about a variety of species, as well as offers players information about animal conservation issues. Specifically, the game educates players through species descriptions made accessible by a UI button that appears when players select animals to purchase for their zoos. While these descriptions offer facts and data about nonhuman animals and the environments they come from, it is difficult to say whether many players put the game

4 Zoo Tycoon: Complete Collection has received the following awards: Parents’ Choice Foundation Gold Award (2003), Scholastic Parent & Child Teacher’s Pick (2004), The Children’s Software Revue All Star Award (2004), and the AIAS Computer Family Title of the Year Interactive Achievement Award (2004).

on pause to access and read these descriptions carefully. The efficacy of the textual descriptions in Zoo Tycoon as instructive material about animal care and captivity pales in comparison to other, more contemporary zoo simulators. Games, such as World of

Zoo (2009) or Zoo Rampage (2014), make education about animals either an unavoidable, non-diegetic aspect of the game (e.g., animal facts and statistics delivered via a loading screen) or a diegetic aspect of gameplay (e.g., unlocking National

Geographic fact cards to gain access to new animals) so that players must confront the research and conservation efforts that drive contemporary zoo operations directly.

Moreover, other aspects of Zoo Tycoon’s gameplay—play perspective, UI design, operator acts, etc.—undermine the ecofriendly intentions of species’ descriptions in several different ways.

Communications scholars Andy Opel and Jason Smith highlight many of Zoo

Tycoon’s features that destabilize its notional conservationist and ecologically- conscious efforts. In their article, “ZooTycoon™: Capitalism, Nature, and the Pursuit of

Happiness,” Opel and Smith perform a close reading of the simulation game that draws, in part, on Susan Davis’s Spectacular Nature (1997).5 They believe that the game’s reduction and commodification of animals operates in a manner similar to practices affecting live animals in entertainment parks, such as SeaWorld, rather than those occurring in zoological parks. They note that “real” zoos are traditionally “supported with tax dollars and research” (109) rather than commercial funding exclusively. Additionally,

5 Davis’s book analyzes how Anheuser-Busch’s SeaWorld uses commercial entertainment to shape public views on ecological issues. In the text, she argues that Sea World portrays a view of nature built around customers’ concerns and anxieties about the environment, family, and education. Davis identifies the many contradictions in SeaWorld’s attempts to present a positive public image, specifically the corporation’s goal of manufacturing enjoyable experiences by monitoring audiences and manipulating animals.

they claim that “Like SeaWorld, ZooTycoon™ simulates the public space of a research and educational institution within a private pay-to-enter park…where profit is the sole measure of success” (110). The distinction that Opel and Smith make between privately and publicly funded animal captivity lies in institutional differences in how captive animals are perceived, managed, and treated. Often, private ventures view and use animals as means to an end—typically for profit or human entertainment. Because zoos in Zoo Tycoon operate much like privately owned animal parks, Opel and Smith argue that the game treats animals as marginal subjects, reducing them to both labor and product (113–15).

Opel and Smith also critique several elements of Zoo Tycoon that mislead players about zoo operations and make troubling arguments about human-animal relations. For example, they analyze how players select and place animals in zoo exhibits, observing that in the game “animals magically appear without the slightest reference…to the processes involved in capturing and keeping them alive in captivity”

(Opel and Smith 112). Zoo Tycoon’s menu of animal species diminishes the procedures zoos and parks use to obtain and sustain their captives, obscuring the scientific research efforts, medical procedures, time, and technologies needed to secure and maintain healthy animal bodies. The game implies that wild animals simply appear when needed and are captured without human labor, suffering (of the individual animal, its group, or its species), material impacts, or adverse consequences to local ecologies.

Opel and Smith also examine the implications of framing animal and customer happiness as requirements for players to achieve financial success in the game. They explain that “the notion that animal ‘happiness’ can be known and achieved in the

confines of captivity is problematic at best” (113), pointing to the game’s flattening of animals’ psychological and emotional complexities.6 Zoo Tycoon overlooks several realities of animal capture and care, allowing players to ignore real effects captivity has on humans, nonhuman animals, and ecologies.

Closely examining gameplay in the original version of Zoo Tycoon reveals how the game inculcates players in procedures that make disconcerting assumptions about how humans should care for and interact with nonhuman animals. Opel and Smith conclude,

the overall premise of ZooTycoon™ encourages human expansion, monopolization of space, and creation of a capitalist place. It subjugates wild animals as menial laborers for our own entertainment and suggests that manipulating the environment any way possible to achieve this is acceptable. Also, inherent in all of the themes presented here, is the encouragement, suggestion, instruction, and indoctrination of the process of commodity production. ZooTycoon™ does more than just edify human consumption of the environment and enlist wildlife in the production process, it says that it is profitable—and fun! (117)

Opel and Smith argue that Zoo Tycoon illustrates conflicts that occur when capitalist ventures and conservationist efforts collide in privately-owned animal parks. The game’s interface and procedures uncritically support human ecodominance and repeatedly marginalize animals as both laborers and products (113–115). At the same time, Zoo

Tycoon’s simulation is both so far reduced (eliding many of the most common material consequences of captivity) and removed from public zoos’ routine procedures of labor and care that the game’s capital-driven goals for gameplay muddle its educational messages about human-animal relations.

6 Research has shown that live nonhuman animals in captivity are prone to several psychopathologies and behavioral disorders (DeMello 105).

Published over a decade ago, Opel and Smith’s work demonstrates how Zoo

Tycoon delivers knowledge about animal captivity practices and human-animal relations in problematic ways. Since then, scholars have paid relatively little attention to how the franchise and other games simulating zoos have evolved from the original game.

Following Zoo Tycoon’s success, several significant expansions and sequels, as well as new games and technological platforms, have changed the ways players interact with digital animals in zoo simulations and how these simulations direct players’ understandings of animal captivity writ large. The newest edition of Zoo Tycoon (2013) makes a few of these changes evident.

Ways of Looking

Developed by Frontier Developments, the third and latest installment of Zoo

Tycoon (2013) is available for the Xbox One console. The game combines facets of the first Zoo Tycoon with game features that fundamentally challenge how animals and nature were originally simulated in the franchise. Gameplay elements, such as “Zoo

View,” Kinect controls, and in-game Community Challenges, attempt to amend the reductive representation of zoo operations found in the earliest version of the game as well as foster human-animal interactions that are sensitive to living animal populations outside of the game world. Exploring Zoo Tycoon’s new design features highlights several ways that innovative game technologies offer potentially positive gamic representations of captivity and human-animal relations.

For example, Zoo View and the Kinect allow players to interact with Zoo Tycoon from a perspective that immerses them in, rather than distances them from, the experience of keeping and caring for captive animals. In the original Zoo Tycoon, players engage with the game world from a three-fourths overhead perspective (Fig. 2-

3) where isometric animals and zoo visitors appear distant, diminutive, and depersonalized (Opel and Smith 144). The new Zoo Tycoon offers this removed, god- like view of gameplay, referred to as “Tycoon Mode” (Fig. 2-4), along with Zoo View, a third-person mode of play where players navigate their zoo using a human avatar (Fig.

2-5). In addition to the third-person vantage point, Zoo View also offers players their avatar’s first-person perspective whenever players direct their avatars to access exhibits, interact with animals, or take photographs (Fig. 2-6). In first-person, players’ can feed and play with zoo animals using Microsoft’s Kinect, a motion sensing input device that enables users to control and interact with their console through gestures and spoken commands. Using the game’s Kinect in Zoo View is optional; however, the device remains the default setting for game controls whenever applicable.

Zoo View and the Kinect in Zoo Tycoon facilitate engagements with the game’s digital animals that encourage players to consider nonhuman embodiment and ontology in ways previously unexplored by the game’s predecessors. Whereas in the original game players delegate the labor of caring for animals onto a zookeeper, in the later version, players interact with their zoos as both manager and zookeeper by identifying with their avatars. These roles require face-to-face interactions between the players’ avatar and other simulated species. Furthermore, the visual aesthetics of the digital animals themselves appear as more realistic renderings of their living counterparts, occupying the game space much differently from the original game’s isometric creatures

(Fig. 2-6). Here, notional embodiment in the game world by way of the avatar and visual realism allows players to confront nonhuman animals in ways that highlight living species’ physiological attributes, including: size, gestures, physical needs, and their

potentiality for affective states. The zookeeper avatar operates as a reference point for considering the various ways human bodies and experience relate to those of nonhuman animals, live or simulated, because of resemblance to the body of human players. The human avatar also highlights how digital animals serve as ambassadors for actual beings beyond the game, the player included. Though the structure of representation here is not quite the same as an avatar standing in for a human player, digital animals that look “real” evoke players’ knowledge of living animals, offering animals a presence despite their physical absence. Zoo View, then, extends to players the possibility of engaging with animal embodiment and ontology in ways that can be self-reflexive by acknowledging human and nonhuman species’ similarities and differences.

Zoo View further highlights the relationship between human and nonhuman bodies through the Kinect’s kinesthetic controls. Interaction stations (Fig. 2-7) located along exhibit walls use the Kinect to emphasize the links between animal bodies and animal care. When players direct their zookeepers to walk up to an interaction station, the game enters first-person perspective allowing players to interact with a single animal in the exhibit. For example, at a treat station, players can trigger the “treat feeding interaction” where the game directs players to have their avatar grab fruits and hand feed them to an herbivore in the exhibit (e.g., an elephant, a giraffe, etc.) Using the

Kinect, players physically gesture as though they are grabbing and passing the animal a piece of fruit, going through the motions of feeding the digital creature. Game commands delivered through the Kinect conceptualize bodies and care differently from inputs relayed through handheld game controllers. Xbox One handheld controllers

require minimal finger motions for performing actions, while the Kinect enfolds a large portion of players’ bodies and the space around them into the game’s interface. When using the Kinect, players may feel more physically responsible for their zoo animals than they would playing the original Zoo Tycoon because their bodily performances of animal care impact the bodies within the digital world as they might animals outside the game.

Additionally, some zookeeper stations encourage players to consider their own embodiment alongside other species’—real or simulated—in hopes of fostering human identification with nonhuman animals. In Zoo Tycoon, exhibits with sensory enrichment stations allow players to use the “sensory enrichment interaction” to play games with their captive animals through a fingerprint-smudged glass (Fig. 2-8). Perhaps not coincidentally, smudged fingerprints on exhibit glass—a marker of humans’ presence as well as an erasure of human identity—appear at the site where the game attempts most to blur distinctions between human and nonhuman animals. In these sensory enrichment mini-games, players enter the first-person perspective and come face-to- face with a captive animal. Once engaged with the glass, players can perform a prescribed set of gestures for the Kinect that the digital animal will then mirror. For example, in front of the Kinect, raising one’s arm up with a flat palm at the lion sensory enrichment station causes the human avatar to put its hand up, flat against the station’s glass. Then, the exhibit’s lion follows suit, raising its paw and placing it on the glass as well. The mirroring of gestures reflects players’ own animality. At the same time, the

Kinect uses an image to prompt players to raise their arms, which in turn causes the human avatar to use its own raised arm to encourage the captive animal to do the

same. The parallels between the Kinect-player interaction and the zookeeper-animal one, intimates that humans are like other animals in that both can be coached to mimic behaviors. Players might also consider that other animals’ actions, like their own, have particular motivations.

Zoo Tycoon makes similarities between humans and other species even more apparent when the Kinect registers facial expressions during sensory enrichment interactions. While playing with an animal, players can zoom in closer to the glass wall and use their facial expressions in the same way as their bodily gestures. In these moments, the game prescribes a facial expression for players to mimic, registers programmed markers on players’ faces through the Kinect, and then sends them to the game so that the animal can copy the expression. As this occurs, the game overlays a live video feed of players making these faces. The overlaid portrait is faint, and appears to the left of the animals’ face, not quite behind or in front of the smudges on the glass.

By positioning the human player’s portrait alongside the animal’s face, Zoo Tycoon encourages a side-by-side comparison between captive nonhuman species and humans playing with the Kinect. The similarities between player and animal expressions reiterate what the gestures suggest about ontology; however, the experience also draws attention to the mechanisms of surveillance and gazing that structure zoo experiences and Kinect gameplay.

When players encounter their own image in Zoo Tycoon, the game draws attention to the Kinect as an optic device, watching and responding to players’ actions.

By superimposing players’ faces not quite behind or in front of the exhibit’s glass, the

Kinect reveals that its surveillance bears a structural resemblance to what philosopher

Ralph Acampora calls the “zoöpticon.” Now, however, players are both the viewers and, like zoo animals, subjects to be viewed. The zoöpticon, as Acampora describes it, is “a kind of panopticon turned inside out” (79). Drawing on Michel Foucault’s concept of panopticism as a framework for analyzing the zoo experience, Acampora argues that in zoos,

The very structure of the human-animal encounter is disrupted, and the interaction that is sought—encountering the animals—becomes impossibility as the “real” animals disappear and the conditions for seeing are undermined. Not only can we as spectators not truly see the animals; but we cannot be seen by them. We are just as invisible—at least in terms of being encountered and approached as the animals we are—as the animals we expect to see (but cannot find) in the zoo. (71)

When viewing zoo animals, spectators do not see animals, but rather creatures reduced to spectacle. At the same time, the animals do not acknowledge viewers as animals comparable to themselves; a connection forged based on shared ontology remains elusive to the encounter (Berger 36–37). The relation between the Kinect and the player invokes this specific structure of zoo viewership, and the game attempts to resolve live animals’ “absence” through digital animals’ responsiveness. In Zoo Tycoon, the machine becomes the idealized animal in the zoöpticon, designed to both recognize and respond to humans as animate animals. Only in moments when the Kinect cannot accurately detect players’ bodies—when players “disappear” from view—does the illusion of a responsive animal encounter unravel, illuminating the artifice and ineffectiveness of both the game. Thus, sensory enrichment interactions encourage players to consider animal captivity in terms of bodies being watched and displayed, in addition to their presentation as bodies that must be managed and cared for responsibly. Through the Kinect’s kinesthetic and panoptic qualities, Zoo Tycoon

highlights the management of nonhuman and human bodies, as well as gazes, in captivity.

Microsoft’s Zoo Tycoon community challenges are another game feature that reimagines how play represents and effects nonhuman animals. These in-game, multiplayer community challenges establish that digital animals in simulation games can operate as ambassadors for their living counterparts. For these events, Microsoft partnered with the Association of Zoos and Aquariums (AZA) to raise money for the preservation of endangered animals. About a month before each challenge began,

Microsoft asked players to vote on social media websites, such as Facebook and

Twitter, for their favorite of three challenges to complete within a month’s time. Once voting ended, players could participate in the challenge by performing the required actions in their game, such as releasing a specified number of animals from their zoos to reach a set, cumulative total. When players completed a community challenge,

Microsoft donated $10,000 to the designated AZA-affiliated non-profit organization or program. For example, the game’s first community challenge saw 10,000 players vote to release a total of 1,000 Sumatran tigers from their digital zoos, and in response to the completion of the challenge, Microsoft donated $10,000 to the Tiger Species Survival

Program (Xbox Wire Staff). Microsoft and the AZA also published a few videos on

YouTube called “Developer Diaries” that explained how donation recipients, including the Tiger Species Survival Program (“Zoo Tycoon Community Challenge”), the Polar

Bear Species Survival Program (“Zoo Tycoon: Community Challenge April 2014”),

Fauna & Flora International (“Zoo Tycoon: Community Challenge May 2014”), and Blue-

throated Maca Conservation program (“Zoo Tycoon: Community Challenge June

2014”), spent their Microsoft donation.

Though they no longer occur, the Zoo Tycoon community challenges offered some potentially positive, real outcomes for how players think about digital animals in games and their relation to living animals. The challenges educated players about current ecological crises and existing programs that aim to alleviate these issues.

Rather than presenting this information only as a supplement to the game, the community challenge model allowed players to actively, actually respond to information about species conservation through gamic acts. Community challenges made players responsible for their participation in the game, the player community, and the ecological community simultaneously. Because challenges could not be completed without collaboration, the game also suggests that there are no individual solutions to ecological crises such as species conservation and habitat loss. Rather, community, if not global, efforts provide more viable solutions and forms of relief. Thus, completing community challenges and seeing their impacts in and outside of the game demonstrates to players that digital animals should matter because their management and care can affect living creatures. In other words, actions in games can have material consequences beyond the digital world. This link established between the simulated and the actual, the digital and the living, offers a potentially revolutionary model for considering the ethical ramifications of viewing gamic representations as representatives for marginalized groups. This structure becomes particularly important when game designers and producers are keenly aware of the ways that digital models reduce their subjects along with other issues driving a specific group’s marginalization.

Community challenges, despite their positive impacts, also pose drawbacks for

Microsoft and the AZA’s conservation efforts. Community voting on challenges forced players to choose which of three challenges they would prefer to complete; two challenges thus will be unanswered. Unanswered community challenges do not receive funding if players do not vote for them, leaving less popular species survival and conservation programs without a donation. At the same time, the game asks players which program they value most based largely on their personal preferences. The community challenge voting process establishes that a program only has value if players find it interesting, easy, etc., ignoring what value the program may have from an ecological perspective and reifying anthropocentric perspectives on wildlife conservation. Challenge design also assumes that players understand community challenges as serious opportunities to enact positive change for living animals. While meant to mobilize Zoo Tycoon players to save endangered species, the in-game achievements awarded for participating in community challenges also attract players who may only care for completing and collecting game trophies and not about the impacts of their gameplay on real animal lives. Thus, while the community challenges’ voting and awards systems may spur players to action, they also potentially detract from, or at least are a distraction from, a more general conservationist message that

Zoo Tycoon claims to promote.

Though the community challenges, Zoo View, and the Kinect offer players alternative ways of thinking about wild animals and captivity, in many respects, the new

Zoo Tycoon still perpetuates many of the problematic aspects of the original game identified by Opel and Smith. For example, the continued inclusion of Tycoon Mode in

the game carries on the franchise’s capitalist-driven and anthropocentric ways of considering animal captivity. The game frequently reminds players to “keep [their] animals happy by meeting their needs! Happy animals mean more guests, and more guests mean more money!” The final emphasis here on financial profits reinforces ideologies that maintain revenue as a zoo’s best measure of success. Similarly, Zoo

Tycoon’s concentration on zoo statistics that measure finances, fame level, guest rating, and whether guest numbers are increasing or decreasing continue Zoo Tycoon’s profit- driven approach to gameplay and captivity.

Alternative Captivities

Although profit-driven models of play seem to dominate the zoo simulator market, spawning series similar to Zoo Tycoon, such as Zoo Empire (2004) and Wildlife Park

(2003), a few games deviate from the Zoo Tycoon formula. Specifically, World of Zoo

(2009) by Blue Fang Games and Zoo Rampage (2014) by ViWo Games—both of which are not explicitly CMSs—offer alternative models of zoo operations and animal captivity that do not measure players’ success in terms of revenue. World of Zoo asks players to cultivate personal, “hands on” relationships with their zoo animals, while Zoo Rampage allows players to inhabit animals’ bodies and enact their escapes from zoo enclosures.

By de-emphasizing the for-profit model of zoo management, both games encourage players to consider animal ontologies, care, and captivity in ways that are distinct from their hegemonic representations as labor and product. World of Zoo and Zoo Rampage fundamentally challenge prevailing game narratives of how zoos function; however, they also perpetuate (mis)understandings about how animals feel and behave in captivity.

In World of Zoo, “animal happiness” measures players’ success, intimating that captive animals’ well-being takes precedence over other aspects of zoo operations,

such as finances, conservation programs, and human entertainment. Players enter

World of Zoo in the first-person perspective as zookeepers, performing the duties of an animal caretaker rather than of a business tycoon or an operations director. The game urges players to “earn the trust and love of [their] animals” by making them “happy”

(World of Zoo). Animals in the game are made happy when players feed them, play with them, or improve their exhibits using the gloved-shaped cursor. When happy, animals produce several little, red hearts, filling up the heart meter located in the upper, left corner of the graphical user interface (GUI) as seen in Fig. 2-9. Players receive golden tokens for their efforts when the heart meter is filled. Tokens can be used to purchase food, tools, and other animals—resources that, in turn, can be used to generate more animal happiness. In the game, there are no zoo visitors for players to please or for whom zoo animals must perform; there are only zoo exhibits and their captives. Animal happiness, then, becomes the labor, profit, and currency of gameplay.

As in Zoo Tycoon, representations of animal happiness in World of Zoo are reductive of live animals’ experiences in actual captivity. Humans can never know for certain if captive animals feel happiness, given obvious differences in animal psychology and behavior and the circumstances of confinement. World of Zoo simplifies the complexity of how animals affectively respond to their enclosures by designing animals that only experience varying degrees of happiness. Moreover, this happiness is measured and represented using iconic and anthropocentric signifiers, such as the heart icon, with the primary purpose of making human players happy. Whereas Zoo

Tycoon animals can feel “not happy,” World of Zoo avoids this possibility entirely largely because the game targets a very young player-base and must therefore represent

animal conditions, and the basis of human-nonhuman interaction, in simplified terms.

While animals do not become unhappy or hostile, they can become dirty and ill. To combat these conditions, World of Zoo includes mini-games where players must clean or heal the animals in an exhibit as quickly as possible. If they complete these tasks in the allotted time, players also receive animal happiness points and tokens.

Though the animals in World of Zoo have a narrow set of emotional responses to captivity, they do have desires that they communicate to players. Animal desires appear in the game as thought bubbles containing an image of an item that would make the animal happy (Fig. 2-10). Players can click the item image to procure the object and drop it into the game world. While this abstraction attempts to service efficiency by simplifying real-world processes—as many gamic representations often do—here the seamlessness and immediacy with which players can respond to animals’ desires elide the actual labor and cost of procuring the food and items necessary for animal care. The reduction of animal care to basic transactions conceals the complexities of actual human-animal interactions, particularly as they are directed by zoos’ rules and regulations. The game’s processes suggest that animals’ needs center on objects and not emotional or intellectual engagements with other animals, including perhaps the zookeepers, like the enrichment activities and items seen in Zoo Tycoon. Moreover, the game simplifies animals’ desires and players’ responses to a visual code between species—and one that is meaningful only to the human interlocutor—rather than representing interspecies communication in terms of embodied or verbal language.7

7 The distinction between language and code, here, is that “language does not simply reflect fixed, universal concepts in nature but is composed of relations based on difference” (Selber 175). Code, on the other hand, is always fixed.

The game reduces the complex roles that subjectivity and social situations play in defining language. Where Wittgenstein might say, “If a lion could speak, we could not understand him” (205), World of Zoo proposes instead that if a lion should want, we could understand him completely—and, crucially, in an unambiguous code that would have no meaning to real-world correlates of the digital animal.

Despite the simplicity of animals’ happiness, desire, and communication in World of Zoo, the game offers a developed system for players to create and interact with their zoo animals. Players can customize their animals’ personalities and appearances in the

“Animal Creator” (Fig. 2-11). Personalities, such as “hungry,” “playful,” and “sleepy” determine how animals interact with their exhibit and with players. For all species, players build on a basic model, changing the animals’ colors, patterns, and body parts.

These choices, though often unrealistic in relation to actual animal phenotypes, demonstrate the fluidity of animal categories allowing players to understand terms such as “giraffe” and “panda” more broadly. The options for animals’ physical customization also demonstrate zoos’ emphasis on display and gazing because the game encourages players to build animals they find aesthetically pleasing. Moreover, to access additional customization features, players must collect in-game National Geographic cards that unlock these animal attributes. The cards themselves offer educational information about animal species and conservation, linking the visual appearances of the simulated zoo animals to learning about live ones.

Once players customize and place an animal in its exhibit, they can play with it in ways that encourage the zoöptic gaze, similar to Zoo Tycoon’s sensory enrichment interactions. In World of Zoo, players can beckon animals for petting or ask them to

retrieve hidden collectibles from within their exhibit. When these events occur, animals break the fourth wall of the game acknowledging the player by moving beyond the black border frames of the screen (Fig. 2-12). In this moment, players experience acknowledgement from the nonhuman animal that is often lacking in encounters with live animals in actual zoos.8 The breaking of the fourth wall offers the visibility of the zoöpticon, where the animal sees and recognizes the human for its own animality, but also combines with it the imaginary of animal affection. Moving beyond recognition, the game intimates that animals feel positive emotions for their caretaker, exchanging affection for the labor players put into caring for their animals. Here, captivity is cast as a variant of companionable domesticity, suggesting that the effects of both modes of relation between human and nonhuman are similar despite their distinct contexts and creatures. By framing human-animal relations in captivity as an exchange between affection and care, World of Zoo overlooks many of the negative outcomes that might occur in such arrangements, not just for nonhuman animals, but also for human agents, such as the mauling or killing of zookeepers and trainers by their captives.

In contrast to both World of Zoo and Zoo Tycoon, Zoo Rampage (2014) offers an alternative perspective on animal agency, ontology, and captivity. The game, published by independent developers ViWo Games, explores zoos from the captive’s, rather than captors’ perspective. The game’s description asks players: “Did you ever wonder how it was like to be on the other side of the fence?” (ViWo Games). Though asked

8 In “Why Look at Animals?” (1977), Berger addresses this desire for acknowledgement between human and animal, writing that “The zoo cannot but disappoint. The public purpose of zoos is to offer visitors the opportunity of looking at animals. Yet nowhere in a zoo can a stranger encounter the look of an animal…That look between animal and man…has long been extinguished. Looking at each animal, the unaccompanied zoo visitor is alone. As for the crowds, they belong to a species which has at last been isolated” (37).

rhetorically, ViWo Games’s question positions Zoo Rampage as a thought experiment at variance with a market populated with zoo games that take animals’ compliance and contentment in captivity for granted. The game explores what it might be like to be a zoo animal, particularly one wholly enraged with its zoo environment. At the start of the game, players choose to enter one of several different play modes: Africa, Jungle,

Arctic, No Escape, Outbreak, Soccer, and Free Fish. In each scenario, players view the game from a third-person, overhead perspective, while controlling an animal avatar (Fig.

2-13). The species of the animal avatar and its attacks vary based on players’ preferences and the game’s settings. Using their avatar, players must destroy as many structures on the screen as possible to collect enough points to move on to the next level.

Zoo Rampage satirizes conventional zoo simulators through its graphical design.

The game’s overhead perspective—a vantage point commonly used in CMSs to allows players a broad view of their zoos’ development—mimics the original Zoo Tycoon

(2001), evoking thus its construction and management processes. The games’ GUI and mechanics, however, subvert conventions of zoo CMSs by explicitly encouraging players to destroy rather than build the institution. Zoo Rampage’s GUI is relatively simple compared to other zoo games, including only two features: (1) a rectangle in the upper-left corner of the screen that displays players’ destruction points and (2) a count- down timer in a rectangular box at the top-center of the screen (Fig. 2-13). Though collecting points is the object of the game, the value of points awarded for destroyed objects varies greatly from object to object. The game’s scoring mechanisms suggest

that while points are important for moving to the game’s next level, the value of gameplay lies more so in the zoo destruction experience.

Similarly, the game’s mechanics also subvert players’ preconceptions about control and power in zoo spaces. Zoo simulators rarely permit players to select and control a nonhuman animal avatar; Zoo Rampage does, decentering the human as the main subject of gameplay. Animal avatars in this particular game are surprisingly violent, especially relative to animals in other zoo games that may consume other animals (including, rarely, humans), but seldom destroy property and infrastructure.

Even conventionally unaggressive creatures, such as penguins, are operable as rampaging beasts that destroy entire kiosks with unique attacks triggered by players.

This feature of gameplay intimates that all creatures regardless of behavioral and physiological differences react poorly to captivity. While the game reduces the unique responses that distinct species may have to captivity, Zoo Rampage is one of the few, if not the only, game to allow players to act out captivity’s detrimental effects on nonhuman animal well-being, reflected in violence and destruction that run counter to dominant narratives in the zoo simulation genre.

Additionally, the tone and environment of players’ rampages also speaks to animals’ negative responses to captivity. The levels’ soundtracks include sirens filtered into frenetic hard rock music, offering players a chaotic auditory experience that matches the game’s visuals. While the music plays, the player-animal knocks over trees, causes buildings to collapse, and initiates mini-explosions. Animals can also inflict violence on humans at the zoo, and while none of the visitors ever perishes, the ragdoll physics of these bodies intimate the animals’ aggressive response to the institutional

practices that kept them behind exhibit walls. Moreover, if players are not careful, human zookeepers in the game will Taser their avatar, temporarily paralyzing the animal and preventing the player-animal from causing more damage. This momentary loss of players’ control over the animal avatar suggests that captivity operates largely as a set of restrictive processes placed on animal bodies and their movement, rather than as procedures implemented for public education or species conservation. Thus, Zoo

Rampage offers players an experience that may allow them to envision captivity as an anxiety-inducing, pathological state, and perhaps consider zoological institutions’ impacts from nonhuman animals’ perspectives.

The Farmer’s Menagerie

Like zoo simulation games, a majority of farm simulation games send mixed messages about institutional practices and human-animal relations. In games simulating animal farming, players assume the role of an agrarian farmer, purchasing, breeding, and caring for animals that will increase their farms’ monetary value. Like most zoo simulations, many farm games also emphasize animal care and happiness as significant factors that determine players’ success. Often, players must frequently feed, groom, and provide appropriate housing for their livestock to maintain the animals in a happy condition. Games about farming typically include procedures and actions that encourage the acquisition and display of multiple animal species in addition to their proper care and management. Players receive rewards, usually in-game currency or new animals, for developing and tending to their livestock collections. Thus, farm simulators, like zoo games, represent human-animal relations through practices of animal care and management.

One significant distinction between farm simulations and zoo simulations is the role of player education in these games. While most zoo games ostensibly aim to teach players about wild animals, their social orders, their natural habitats, and relevant conservation efforts, many farm games offer little educational information about contemporary livestock care and management practices. Instead of teaching players about domesticated animal species and their living environments, farm simulations often obscure grim realities of modern industrial livestock farming, opting instead for representations that model idealized combinations of early agrarianism and animal menageries. While the trajectory of zoo simulators has been to complicate the ways humans imagine other species and their relations to nonhumans, livestock agriculture simulations typically work to occlude actual industry practices from players, especially those that inflict violence on animals or result in premature animal death. The latter omission largely stems from a confluence of the games’ intended use by young players and its “cute” aesthetic.

While many farm simulation games currently exist as social network games or mobile applications, many of these titles—including Happy Farm (2008) and Farmville

(2009)—draw inspiration from gameplay in the Harvest Moon series (Nutt). The first game released in the franchise was published in North America by Natsume for the

SNES, Satellaview, and Virtual Console. Following the game’s debut in 1996, twenty-six different console titles have been released in the main series over the last nineteen years. One of the more recent Harvest Moon games, Story of Seasons (2015) for the

Nintendo 3DS, possesses many of the gameplay qualities particular to the series and

also exemplifies how most farm simulations represent livestock agricultural practices.9

In Story of Seasons, players take on the role of a would-be farmer who moves to a settlement called Oak Tree Town to become successful. Among the many game activities in which players may participate, including fishing, tending crops, courting

NPCs, etc., one of the most significant to players’ livelihoods as farmers is caring for their livestock. Players acquire farm animals by either purchasing them from NPC vendors, receiving them as gifts, or by breeding the animals they already own. The characterization of the animals in Story of Seasons, as well as the actions players must take to keep them happy and healthy, reflects how many farm games opt for nostalgic and idyllic representations of animal agriculture.

Story of Seasons and similar farm games appeal to players living in post-agrarian societies, in part, because the models’ simplicity and emphasis on care omit impacts of industrial, factory farming processes on live animals. To remain financially viable ventures, contemporary animal farms typically aim to increase production yields by reducing living space and resources allocated to the animals and minimizing human involvement. Often, these goals raise issues concerning animal welfare and environmental impacts (Hartung 30–31). For example, many industries raise livestock in confining cages or pens because these spaces offer the economic benefits of maximum space efficiency. The animals, however, have little to no room in which to exercise or

9 Unlike other games in the Harvest Moon franchise, Story of Seasons does not include “Harvest Moon” in its English title because of intellectual property conflicts between game publishers. Natsume owns the rights to the Harvest Moon series, but Xseed Games published Story of Seasons for its Western distribution. Story of Seasons launched in Japan under the title Bokujo Monogatari: Tsunagaru Shintechi (or Farm Story: Connect to a New World) keeping the franchise’s original title structure. Despite its distinct moniker, Story of Seasons was developed by the Harvest Moon series’ longtime producer, Yoshifumi Hashimoto, artist, Igusa Matsuyama, and their experienced teams who have worked extensively on nearly all of the Harvest Moon titles to date (Moriarty).

socialize; often, they are unable to move; cages or pens may be overcrowded, dirty, or generally ill-fitted to provide for an animal’s biological needs. Livestock in modern industrial farms (CAFOs, “Concentrated Animal Feeding Operations”) may also be subject to inhumane practices designed to streamline production, in which they are de- beaked, de-horned, branded, castrated, or mulesed10 as commodities (Humane Society of the United States). Though modern industrial farming practices—“factory farming”— represent by far the principal mode of animal agriculture in the developed world, do not appear in many simulation games. Instead, farming simulation games focus on agrarian practices as an idealized model for cultivating balanced relationships between humans, other animals, and the environment.

Responding to the negative attributes of large-scale, factory farming, gamic depictions of agrarian animal care make players solely and directly responsible for, and capable of sustating, their livestock’s happiness and well-being. By choosing individual over corporate farm ownership for their simulations, designers implicitly privilege the former model of agriculture as inherently more sensitive to farming’s impacts on animals and the environment. Thus, farm games have players use either first-person actions or third-person control over a human avatar to groom, feed, and pet their livestock, similar to zookeepers in some zoo simulations. Players house their livestock in barns, coops, pastures, or pens that often remain immaculate and that provide enough space and amenities for their inhabitants (Fig. 2-14). Unless players neglect them completely, farm animals in most games rarely, if ever, become ill, die (including slaughtered for food),

10 This term means “designating or relating to an operation to reduce the incidence of blowfly strike in sheep by removing folds of skin from the crotch, which is the area most likely to be affected” (“mules, n.”).

escape their enclosures, or damage players’ crops. With these gameplay parameters, farm simulations romanticize, or at the very least sanitize, livestock agriculture as mutually beneficial exchanges between humans and animals without negative consequence.

Most farm simulations construct human-animal relations as utopic exchanges of human care and affection for animal goods and services, reifying conceptions of animals as labor and product for human use with minimal, or no, ill effects on the bodies from which products are derived. For example, Story of Seasons includes a variety of animals that players can own, including cows, chickens, sheep, dogs, cats, and horses.

If players take the correct actions to treat their animals kindly and care for them appropriately, the digital animals respond by producing either items players can sell or services that facilitate the production of more items. Livestock produce goods, such as milk, eggs, and wool, and other animals (through animal husbandry) which the player can sell. Other domesticated species provide services for players: dogs herd sheep, cats retrieve items for players (fish, lumber, ores, gold, etc.), and horses provide transportation. The processes and training necessary for generating animal goods and services in the game reduces material impacts and animal responses to actual practices. The game excludes all depictions of animal suffering in and resistance to milking, breeding, sheering, etc., and simplifies production to a one-to-one ratio of human to domesticated animal. For example, paying in-game currency to breed a cow always results in a calf and never a miscarriage. Production losses remain relatively rare, if they occur at all. The production of goods and the rendering of services for human players that care for livestock suggest that human-animal relations should

always be understood in terms of productive and profitable exchanges. Moreover, some games encourage players to operate under these assumptions through mini-games, such as livestock festival competitions, where animals are judged based on their happiness levels and players receive awards for their effective animal care practices. In farm simulations then, humans must always relate to nonhuman species through care that is exchanged for materials, services, or happiness—all of which are profitable enough to outweigh the costs of care to the human and nonhuman animal participants in this economic system.

Livestock and pets are not the only types of animals in games such as Story of

Seasons. Players often receive “exotic” or fantasy creatures, such as polar bears, elephants, monkeys, unicorns, dragons, etc., as gifts from vendors or as rewards for achievements. In many cases, these animals offer players goods in exchange for being cared for (fed, groomed, etc.), reifying the notion that human-animal relations operate as exchanges of goods, happily given by the captive animals. In Story of Seasons, exotic animals are not kept in players’ barns, but rather in an area of the game known as the “Safari.” The Safari itself is a relatively undeveloped or “wild” plot of land separated from surrounding farm land by fences. The space functions as a menagerie, collecting and showcasing players’ exotic animals; however, it lacks cages and exhibits to sort them. Instead, animals in the Safari roam freely and without predatory behaviors.

Players can visit the Safari and walk amongst their animal collections while also bringing their other animals along. Livestock animals that players bring to the Safari become happier and less stressed.

In keeping with its idyllic and romanticized depiction of livestock agriculture, Story of Seasons paints the Safari as a utopian space for human-animal relations. In the

Safari, livestock, pets, and exotic creatures can cohabitate while all the negative aspects of real zoos and farms have been removed. Here, players can encounter all categories of animals and interact with them without the physical barriers of institutionalized captivity. The Safari’s open spaces are meant to remedy the players’ use of animals for labor, production, and spectacle insofar as it offers the animals a place to experience being “wild”—and therefore happiness—particularly as players’ farms continue to grow. And yet, while other animals fit perfectly well and become happy in the Safari, players’ farmers never quite belong to the space, and must inevitably return their human avatars home to the farm to continue their gameplay. In keeping humans from permanently residing in the Safari with their animals, perhaps the game suggests that humans’ reliance on material goods and services produced by nonhuman species is its own form of isolated captivity—one in which escape is only ever temporary because all animals belong—are at home, at ease, in their natural state—in captivity.

Play and Pastoral Power

In casting human-animal relations as productive exchanges that result from human care, zoo and farm simulations notably rely on elements of pastoral power to model animal captivity and livestock agriculture. In Zooland (2013), Irus Braverman draws on Foucault’s concept of pastoral power to explain how caring for actual captive nonhuman species enacts humans’ power over them. Her research illuminates the ways that the institution of the zoo exerts pastoral power over both human (zoo staff and visitors) and nonhuman animals to manage the complex interdependency between

power and care necessary for the institutions’ operation. Braverman also explains that pastoral power operates through several technologies including those that: naturalize, classify, name, identify, record, register, regulate, and reproduce zoo animals. Her arguments about pastoral power and its deployment in zoos are also relevant to considerations of how pastoral power operates in other animal care institutions, such as farms, and relationships in which animal care is integral to daily procedures.

The many technological processes of pastoral power are evident in the zoo and farm simulations examined in this chapter. When the human avatars of players perform diegetic game acts to name and purchase their animals, construct their housing, regulate their feedings and cleanings, and breed them, they enact pastoral power over their nonhuman animal captives. Processes of pastoral power are also apparent in the games’ actions that label and classify nonhuman animals, providing detailed descriptions about each species, and offering statistics about the animals’ well-being. In addition to these types of practices, Braverman claims that pastoral power requires

zoos [to] make detailed decisions about the minutia of each individual animal's life: from its conception through its naming and everyday care to its death. At the same time, they must also care for the totality of the animals—for the flock. We thus arrive at the essential paradox of pastoral power: the inherent tension between caring for the individual and caring for the flock. (189–91)

Her argument highlights the conflict between providing the best care for individual animals versus the best care for a larger group of animals—be it a group in one exhibit, the entirety of the zoo’s population, or all the members of a specific species, captive and wild. Most simulations of zoos and farms, however, alleviate the tension Braverman describes by representing benefits to the individual as benefits to the flock and vice versa. Some games, such as World of Zoo, ignore this specific problem of pastoral

power entirely by omitting vital institutional elements—visitors, capital, animal unhappiness, etc.—that would otherwise create tension. Still, other games find the particulars of pastoral power to be fundamentally flawed, modeling the deconstruction of zoological institutions through their physical destruction, as in Zoo Rampage. In any case, the attempts many games make to represent or reimagine pastoral power reveal ideological and cultural discomfort with the way live animals are cared for in captivity.

Thus, because pastoral power technologies are an integral part of many institutions that manage nonhuman animals, designers of digital games about zoos and farms must determine how to simulate institutional exertions of pastoral power. Zoo and farm simulation games, like the institutions they model, rely on some version of pastoral power to inculcate players in ideologies and procedures that understand the purposes of these institutions as well as human relations to their animal captives, actively misrepresenting the realities of most actual animals’ captivity. At the same time, however, these games also challenge real-world zoological and agricultural practices through procedural rhetoric and gamic actions that reimagine how these institutions operate and function. What gamic representations of pastoral power reveal are the contentious ways we understand other animals and the relations humans forge with them under the conditions of institutionalized practices. Through design and play, zoo and farm simulations offer important insights into our cultural conceptions of animal captivity and care.

Figure 2-1. A screenshot of Zoo Tycoon (2001) posted to the free image-hosting site Imgur by an anonymous user along with some of its “best” comments. A) A screenshot of the Zoo Tycoon image posted along with its top comments thread, B) a close up of the screenshot posted, and C) a close up of the top comments thread.

Figure 2-2. A screenshot of Zoo Tycoon (2001) posted to Reddit by an anonymous user along with some of its “best” comments.

Figure 2-3. The three-fourths overhead perspective of Zoo Tycoon (2001). Blue Fang Games. Zoo Tycoon. Microsoft, 2001.

Figure 2-4. Tycoon Mode. Frontier Developments. Zoo Tycoon. Microsoft Studios, 2013.

Figure 2-5. Zoo View. Frontier Developments. Zoo Tycoon. Microsoft Studios, 2013.

Figure 2-6. The first-person perspective in Zoo Tycoon (2013). Frontier Developments. Zoo Tycoon. Microsoft Studios, 2013.

Figure 2-7. Various forms of Interaction Stations. Frontier Developments. Zoo Tycoon. Microsoft Studios, 2013.

Figure 2-8. Human handprints visible on exhibit glass. Frontier Developments. Zoo Tycoon. Microsoft Studios, 2013.

Figure 2-9. A happy snow leopard. Blue Fang Games. World of Zoo. THQ, 2009.

Figure 2-10. A panda expressing its desire for a toy. Blue Fang Games. World of Zoo. THQ, 2009.

Figure 2-11. Animal Creator mode. Blue Fang Games. World of Zoo. THQ, 2009.

Figure 2-12. A player pets a giraffe. Blue Fang Games. World of Zoo. THQ, 2009.

Figure 2-13. Three players in the Arctic level of Zoo Ramapage. ViWo Games. Zoo Rampage. ViWo Games, 2014.

Figure 2-14. The barn in which players’ cows are kept. Marvelous AQL. Story of Seasons. Xseed Games, 2015.

CHAPTER 3 SIMULATIONS OF DISTANCE AND DISTINCTION

Off the Beaten Trail

Since the 1980s, social studies teachers in elementary and middle schools across the United States have used The Oregon Trail to teach generations of students about 19th century American pioneer life. The game’s developers, Don Rawitsch, Bill

Heinemann, and Paul Dillenberger, working with the Minnesota Educational Computing

Consortium (MECC), released The Oregon Trail on MECC’s time-sharing network in

1974. The game quickly garnered several thousands of players monthly, making it one of the network’s most popular programs. In the decades that followed, publishers and developers who acquired rights to the software published different versions of the game for a variety of platforms, including the Apple II, DOS, Windows, Macintosh, Nintendo

3DS and Wii, Android, etc. The game inspired several spinoffs such as The Amazon

Trail (1994), The Yukon Trail (1994), and Africa Trail (1997). By 2011, the The Oregon

Trail series had sold over 65 million copies with popular publications, such as Time

(Fitzpatrick, et al.) and The Atlantic (Rosenberg), lauding the game as a major success and a cultural icon (Campbell).

The Oregon Trail has received much acclaim for its unusual narrative and gameplay. In the games, players assume the role of a wagon leader in the year 1848 and are tasked with managing a group of settlers as they trek across perilous terrain from Independence, Missouri to Oregon’s Willamette Valley. During their journey, players make decisions that affect their party’s survivability and their final score. These choices include determining which supplies to purchase, when to rest, how to ford rivers, and when to hunt for food near major American landmarks. Members of the party

may fall ill and perish from a variety of accidents and ailments such as drowning, exhaustion, snakebite, cholera, dysentery, measles, or typhoid. At the end of the games, players’ scores are determined by awarding points for any remaining party members, possessions, and cash on hand, modified by the players’ initial starting funds and chosen profession. Many of these aspects of gameplay have remained consistent across the numerous versions of The Oregon Trail with few exceptions (notably hunting). The game’s mechanics, iconicity, and educational value coupled with growing interests in game studies has made The Oregon Trail a recent subject for substantial scholarly criticism.

Studies of The Oregon Trail games have predominantly focused on the games’ social and cultural implications, with little, if any, emphasis on ecological representations within the series. For example, in “On the Road to Cultural Bias: A Critique of The

Oregon Trail CD-ROM” (1997), Bill Bigelow critiques the game for its stereotypical gender roles and its notable absence of Native American and African American characters. He also claims that the game fails to address historical violence between humans that actually occurred on the Trail. In a similar vein, Katharine Slater writes in

“Who Gets to Die of Dysentery? Ideology, Geography, and The Oregon Trail” (2017) that representations of place, space, and time in the series reify colonialist perspectives despite notional efforts to accommodate players of any race or gender. In examining three editions of The Oregon Trail, Slater finds that the games’ directive towards progress within a specific timeframe reinforces values of white male supremacy and nineteenth-century manifest destiny. These and similar scholarly works about The

Oregon Trail examine the games’ representations of humans and human ideals to

highlight their shortcomings as educational models for student-players. At the same time, they also illustrate the narrow and anthropocentric focus of scholarship about the game thus far. The Oregon Trail games, however, richly grapple with humans’ relations to nonhuman animals and natural environments—themes that have been overlooked in literature about the series. This gap in the scholarship is particularly noticeable regarding the games’ iconic and widely popular simulations of animal hunting that, I argue, require rigorous and nuanced engagement in light of recent work in animal studies.

Because The Oregon Trail games are highly popular educational artifacts, we must ask several important questions about how these games and the medium teach players specific ideologies and ecologies. To clarify, we should consider how these games and others have educated several generations of players about appropriate relations between humans and certain nonhuman animals encountered in typical gameplay. Alongside the significant studies that address marginalized cultures in The

Oregon Trail, analysis of the games’ many hunting simulations is important for thinking about how game design—player perspectives, aesthetics, mechanics, hardware, etc.— supports specific ideas about the value and treatment of both human and nonhuman animal life. These questions continue the broader line of inquiry established in previous chapters about that nature of simulating human-animal relationships in video games, asking us to consider how genre conventions argue for specific kinds of interspecies interactions. While the last chapter delved deeply into games simulating animal captivity and care predominantly from the third-person perspective, this chapter addresses interspecies interactions in games about hunting designed in the first-person

perspective. Through examining games such as The Oregon Trail, Duck Hunt, and others, we can see how specific features of game design facilitate practices of distancing and distinction that perpetually (re)negotiate the concept of a human-animal divide.

Deer and Distancing

Hunting is defined as the practice of pursing or tracking animals with the intent to trap or kill them (“hunting, n.”). Historically, hunting is hypothesized to predate the emergence of Homo sapiens. Anthropological evidence suggests that early hominids also displayed systematic hunting behaviors during the Lower to Middle Paleolithic era.

Still, the notion of hunting as a fundamental force in shaping hominid and human behavioral development remains contested among scholars.1 In our contemporary moment, however, hunting serves a variety of purposes across cultures and its methods are constantly changing with humans’ shifting ecological values and the advent of new technologies. Broadly, hunting is typically performed to procure food and other usable animal products, to control predator or pest animal populations, or to provide a form of recreation or sport. In some cultures, hunting is also a ritualized practice that carries deep religious or spiritual significance. Many communities draw clear distinctions between lawful hunting and illegal hunting, such as poaching and other forms of violence against nonhuman animals that can cause extreme animal suffering or negative effects on the natural environment. Even lawful hunting, however, can have severe detrimental effects on animal populations when improperly managed, resulting in

1 See Gaudzinski (2004) and Rabinovich, et al. (2008) for details.

animal endangerment, extirpation, or extinction. For the most part, this chapter focuses on representations of lawful hunting practices and their simulated effects in video games created by American, European, and Japanese developers.

To identify how mechanisms of game design encourage specific ways of understanding hunting practices and violence towards animals, James Serpell’s In the

Company of Animals (1986) provides a useful framework that outlines several devices that humans use to psychologically distance themselves from nonhuman animals and the animal category writ large. Sepell’s text draws on Maccoby’s The Sacred

Executioner (1982)2 and its explanations of “distancing devices” (150–170), applying these broadly to illustrate how humans rationalize uneven, and sometimes violent, interspecies interactions. Serpell explains that sometimes people choose to distance themselves from the “morally dubious consequences of animal exploitation and slaughter” (151) and notes that people caring for domesticated species, such as farmers and husbandsmen, rely on distancing devices to negotiate the (un)ethical implications of their practices. However, “owing to the aggressive, expansionist nature of many agricultural economies, these techniques have also been applied to wild animals and to the natural world in general” (151), in part, by individuals who hunt animals.

Serpell describes four commonly used distancing devices, observing that the list of devices he provides is by no means comprehensive and acknowledging that there are likely several other methods by which humans perpetuate notions of a human- animal divide. The four distancing devices Serpell identifies, however, are “provided primarily to illustrate how the shift from traditional hunting to progressively more and

2 Maccoby uses distancing devices to explain practices of human sacrifice.

more intensive systems of animal exploitation has been accompanied by the evolution of increasingly sophisticated methods of evading guilt” (169). The distancing devices

Serpell identifies are detachment, concealment, misrepresentation, and shifting the blame. Using Serpell’s explanation of distancing devices as a framework for reading aspects of game design can illuminate how distancing practices are used in games to facilitate specific kinds of interspecies interactions, and by extension, specific kinds of human interactions. We might also consider how some video games offer nuanced responses to or critiques of how distancing practices may be implemented in game design.

The Oregon Trail series is an important starting point for considering how video games make use of distancing devices because it offers some of the earliest simulations of hunting found in computer games. The hunting simulations in The

Oregon Trail series serve a specific purpose in the games’ narratives and illustrate shifting perspectives (both literally and metaphorically) towards nonhuman animals and hunting as a practice. These depictions have also informed how contemporary video games about hunting are designed and received in American culture. In The Oregon

Trail games, players must hunt to supplement their party’s initial supply of food rations.

By selecting the “hunt” option, players can use guns and bullets they purchase during their journey to kill animals, including bears, bison, deer, elk, rabbits, and squirrels. In recent versions of the game, these digital creatures vary in their size, speed, and food yield with the smaller animals (rabbits and squirrels) moving very quickly and yielding little meat and the larger ones (bears and bison) moving slower and substantial quantities of meat. During the hunting excursion, wild animals appear on the screen and

players have a short period of time to kill them before they disappear. After killing the wild animals, players can carry a limited amount of meat back to their wagon, up to 100 or 200 pounds, depending on the version of the game.

The mechanics of hunting in The Oregon Trail make specific arguments about the value of animals and their deaths. In the games, players must restock food rations through hunting to support their party members’ survival. In this way, the game suggests that hunting was a practice conducted primarily out of dietary necessity.

Notably, the early versions of the game have no “forage” option that would provide players with a non-meat alternative for feeding their parties, thus emphasizing hunting as a necessity in American pioneers’ lives. The game also identifies what kinds of animals are appropriate to eat (e.g., rabbits, deer, bears, bison, etc.) and which are not

(i.e., creatures, such as oxen or snakes, that appear in the game outside of its hunting mode and, as a result, cannot be hunted). This division between edible and inedible animals reifies speciesism, the notion that certain species’ livelihoods are more valuable than others. Moreover, early versions of The Oregon Trail include few limitations on the quantity of animals that players can hunt. Wildlife was represented as an infinitely renewable resource—a perspective that later changed in more recent versions of the game to accommodate changing environmental perspectives. In later iterations of the series, over-hunting game reduces the number of animals that appear in subsequent hunting scenarios, resulting in “scarcity.” By implementing animal scarcity into the game, the developers of The Oregon Trail games discourage players from overhunting, arguably depicting thus the negative ecological effects of overhunting on wildlife through population decline. This brief reading of gameplay in The Oregon Trail series illustrates

a few of the ideologies that the games offer regarding animals and their value to humans. By analyzing the games’ hunting simulations more closely, however, we can determine how specific design elements encourage psychological distancing that supports uneven and violent human-animal interactions, albeit simulated.

Differences in how hunting is represented in The Oregon Trail series demonstrate the many ways distancing might be encouraged by game design and how it fundamentally shapes animal depictions. For example, the game’s original version from 1971, a text-based game played on a Teletype machine, requires players to quickly and accurately type “BANG” using an electromechanical typewriter to successfully kill game for food (Fig. 3-1). When the action is performed correctly, the keyboard communicates with the computer game through a phone line and the game prints out the following response on paper: “RIGHT BETWEEN THE EYES---YOU GOT

A BIG ONE!!!! WATCH YOUR CALORIES TONIGHT!!” This text-based simulation of hunting notably obfuscates the object of the hunt (an animal) through its language. It is unclear in the game’s text what animal has been shot, if it suffered, if it will be used for its inedible resources (fur, hide, bone, etc.), and how it will be prepared for consumption. These missing details keep players detached from both their target and the event through concealment, one of Serpell’s distancing devices. Additionally, the action of typing out the shot as a word is, in practice, playful role-playing that is noticeably dissimilar from the act of pulling a gun’s trigger—a process that is conventionally mapped to a single key or button in most contemporary shooting games.

The incongruity between the game’s mechanical input and the operation of actual hunting tools is a form of misrepresentation that might further distance players from the

violence of their digital actions. In effect, the Teletype version of the game does not provide players with visuals for their actions, reducing animal death to a form of typing practice. Thus, concealment and misrepresentation (both distancing devices) are used to rationalize and sanitize the simulated hunting act for student-players.

In contrast to the Teletype game, the first Apple II version of The Oregon Trail

(1980) demonstrates distancing through a misrepresentation of the animal as mechanical process. In the 1980 game, hunting is depicted graphically from the first- person perspective instead of through text. During the game’s hunting mode, an unchanging image of a running deer travels slowly from the left edge of the screen towards the right edge, repeating itself each time the deer disappears from the right side of the screen (Fig. 3-2). Pressing any key during this sequence generates an image of eight bullets that move slowly from the bottom edge of the screen to the top. To kill the deer, players must time their pressing of a key so that the deer and the bullets align in the screen’s center. Players cannot determine the number or direction of bullets shot, while the static deer image perpetually scrolls in front of the player, mimicking carnival- style shooting games in which animal facsimiles continually loop on a mechanical conveyor belt. These design choices are a product of both authorial intent and the limitations of the technologies used to create the game. Still, whether intentional or not, the procedural elements of the deer’s design distances players from the violence of hunting it through a misrepresentation of the animal as machine. The deer’s mechanomorphism3 reifies its own artifice (especially when compared to hunting

3 This concept is taken from Eileen Crist’s Images of Animals (2000) in which she defines “mechanomorphism” as “rendering behavior in a language that likens animals to machines” (85). While Crist focuses on the effects of technical language and causal explanation in depicting animals as machine-like, her concept has wide applicability for other forms of representation, such as computer

simulations that strive for the real or hyperreal), suggesting that the object of players’ violence is exactly that: an object. This distinction is crucial considering later iterations of The Oregon Trail and other hunting games in which designers purposefully strive to simulate some form of an imagined animal or animality.

The first full-graphics version of The Oregon Trail (1985) and its second iteration,

The Oregon Trail II (1995), illustrate how a different approach to the design of digital hunting can still encourage distancing without relying entirely on concealment or misrepresentation. In both games, hunting is depicted from an overhead third-person perspective (Fig. 3-3). During this encounter, the black background on the computer screen is populated with scattered graphics of trees, grass, and rocks intended to serve as markers of the environments’ geographies (Bouchard). The player is represented by a human-shaped avatar carrying a gun. The hunter avatar can move and shoot bullets in eight different directions but cannot pass through the graphics of the landscape.

During the hunting scenario, animated animal NPCs appear at different points of the screen’s edges, briefly running across the background at different angles before disappearing from the screen at another or sometimes the same edge from which they emerged. In the few seconds that these animals appear, players must position the avatar so that its rifle aims and shoots at their quarry to secure a kill. A successful kill is indicated when the animal sprite turns upside down.

Incorporating an overhead, third-person perspective into the hunting scenario allows players to “shift the blame” of animal violence onto a third party, participating in a

graphics and procedures, that may make “animals appear mindless” or suggest that their “inner life” is drastically inconsequential.

form of distancing. Serpell describes shifting the blame as the notion that an individual is not solely responsible for animal suffering. Rather, various groups of people, institutions, and even systems are complicit in reifying uneven power dynamics, and so, individuals do not believe themselves to be solely responsible. Serpell notes, “In a sense, everyone involved is guilty, but no one is obliged to shoulder the full burden of responsibility” (165). In the 1985 and 1995 versions of The Oregon Trail, the avatar and its depiction through a third-person (rather than a first-person) viewpoint provide a means through which players might shift blame. As both a representation of the player and an entity unto itself existing in the game world, avatars are mechanisms uniquely positioned between the diegetic act of hunting and the non-diegetic act of play such that players can reason some burden of guilt be placed on the character and not the actual human controlling it. One might argue that because the avatar is both me and not me, that the blame for causing an animal to suffer or to die is both mine and not mine to bare. This logic might also extend to other influences on gameplay including the game’s designers, developers, publishers, and technologies that shape players’ experiences.

Game mechanisms that emphasize distancing through shifting blame are important to the design of hunting games because distancing through concealment and misrepresentation can impede the creation of more realistic, complex, and nuanced animal characters and player interactions with those characters. For example, the animals designed for the full-graphics versions of The Oregon Trail are much more dynamic than their predecessors because their designers aimed for more realistic animal representations. Given the affordances of more advanced computer technologies, the designers of The Oregon Trail (1985) could decide how animal

characters would appear and behave in the game in addition to the human avatar. R.

Phillip Bouchard, one of the game’s lead designers, explains that the team spent a significant amount of time considering which animal species to include and where players would encounter them on the trail. The design process raised questions such as

“What are the algorithms for the animal behavior?” and similar thought experiments about animals that had not previously been applied in the series (Bouchard). Bouchard recalls that he had originally prepared a list of eighteen species to include in the game, but the complications of designing more dynamic animals shortened the list to eleven and then eventually to six—the designers selecting for quality over quantity.4 He explains that the limited memory of the Apple II could only support the hunter avatar’s animations along with the necessary three-phase animation graphics for six types of animals. Switching to the third-person perspective for the hunting simulation afforded the games’ developers the opportunity to consider the complexities of nonhuman animal design alongside the development of a human avatar while also implementing another form of distancing device in the hunting simulation.

In comparison to previous editions, recent iterations of The Oregon Trail encourage players to identify more strongly as the hunter character by using the first- person perspective (Fig. 3-4). These games draw on conventions found in contemporary first-person shooter (FPS) games rather than attempting to build the hunting simulation from scratch. The FPS genre originates from games in the mid-70s, such as Maze War (an exploration game) and Spasim (a space flight simulator), and

4 Raccoons, foxes, coyotes, moose, and pronghorns are a few examples of the animals that did not end up in the final version of The Oregon Trail (1985).

eventually found prominence in the 80s and 90s through action and shooting games where players fight and kill humans or human-like NPCs, e.g., Wolfenstein 3D, Doom, etc. FPS shooters are defined through their use of a subjective (rather than objective) perspective in gameplay along with a visual signifier for the player’s weapon, often depicted in the foreground of the frame as a movable and controllable crosshair— notably different from the relatively static bullets and viewpoint in the 1980 version of

The Oregon Trail. The FPS genre draws on subjective camera techniques of cinema, which Alexander Galloway connects to Carol Clover’s “predatory” vision or “a sadistic way of seeing characterized by aggressive action, forward movement, and onscreen violence” (50). Galloway also explains, “In games the first-person perspective…is commonly used to achieve an intuitive sense of affective motion…games use the subjective shot to create identification…games use the subjective shot to facilitate an active subject position that enables and facilitates the gamic apparatus” (69). The first- person perspective in recent versions of The Oregon Trail accomplishes both, characterizing the players’ vision as predatory and encouraging identification with the position of a hunter. This identification with the role of hunter-predator reinforces distancing between human and animal in the game by delineating between the human hunter, the agent looking and inflicting violence, and the hunted, objects to be looked at and destroyed. The subjective first-person perspective is a staple in most contemporary hunting simulations because of its fundamental role in distinguishing between predator and prey, hunter and game.

Ducks, Dogs, and Design

Hunting simulations developed during and after the proliferation of FPS games in the 80s and 90s typically rely on genre conventions that distance human players from

identifying or empathizing with their animal targets or on graphics that misrepresent or conceal the results of players’ violent gamic acts. As briefly discussed, one of the defining characteristics of FPS games is the use of the first-person perspective. From this vantage point, players are cast as a shooter while NPCs, and sometimes additional players, are designated as targets. In FPS games, players are typically equipped with a ranged weapon and ammunition that they must learn to aim and shoot using the game’s hardware controls and interface. Some FPS games provide players with an arsenal of weapons that vary in range, size, and destructive power. Many of the conventions described here are evident in FPS games broadly, including survival games, stealth games, team-based shooters, and carnival games. What sets hunting simulations apart from other subgenres of FPS games are the significant differences in their narratives, graphics, and gamic actions that cast players as explicitly human (rather than as nonhuman or as a human-animal hybrid) and their targets are clearly identified as nonhuman animals (as opposed to humans, sub-humans, and other variations of humanoids). Moreover, hunting games require that players shoot to kill nonhuman animals and deviating from this procedure—especially choosing not to participate in animal violence—often results in gameplay that either comes to a halt or that concludes with some form of a “Game Over.”

Nintendo’s Duck Hunt (1985), an early two-dimensional hunting FPS released in the mid-80s for the Nintendo Entertainment System (NES), illustrates how specific design choices can create distancing that reifies uneven power dynamics between

species in a hunting game. The game includes three distinct modes: Game A5, Game B, and Game C. Games A and B focus on duck hunting, while in the third mode players shoot clay pigeons for target practice. Gameplay occurs in rounds, and during each round, players have attempts or “shots” to hit targets that appear on the screen, receiving points for each successful shot landed. To advance from one round to the next, players must successfully shoot a minimum number of targets. The game’s difficulty increases with each round, resulting in faster moving targets and a greater number of successful shots needed to progress. If players do not meet the minimum number of successful shots in a round, the game ends with a “Game Over” screen.

Duck Hunt contains a total of 99 rounds. After completing Round 99, players advance to

Round 0, an automatic kill screen where targets appear haphazardly or do not appear at all. Analysis of the user interface of Duck Hunt reveals how choices in interface design can operate as a form of distancing for players. Players’ detachment from the duck targets during play results from a combination of the first-person perspective

(functioning in a similar way to the first-person in contemporary editions of The Oregon

Trail) and specific aesthetic and procedural elements of the game’s hardware.

For example, the controller used to play the original Duck Hunt game on cathode ray tube (CRT) displays6 facilitates distancing practices by encouraging actual physical distance between players and their game (both the game on the television screen and

5 In Game A, a single flying duck will appear on the screen that can be controlled by a second player using the NES controller. Here, the second player plays as animal—a concept discussed at length in the next chapter.

6 The light gun was designed specifically for use with CRT displays. It does not operate with flat panel displays (LCDs, HDTVs, etc.) because these technologies often exhibit a degree of display lag that interferes with the light guns’ operation.

by proxy the duck targets) during play. The photosensitive gun controller, called the

NES Zapper, is an orange and grey gun-shaped electronic device used with the NES as a game controller (Fig. 3-5). Pressing the Zapper’s trigger during play causes the television screen to go black for a single frame, followed by another frame in which valid targets are turned into white boxes while the rest of the screen remains black. The

Zapper determines if targets on the screen are hit by detecting the change in lighting on the screen from low to bright, or from black to white, where the Zapper is pointed. After the targets have been illuminated, the game returns to its multicolored graphical interface (Diskin 31–32). The entire process that takes place when “shooting” the

Zapper is almost imperceptible to human eyes, and the changing frames can be mistaken for a simulated muzzle flash. While the Zapper operates through photosensitivity, its handheld apparatus is meant to closely mimic real-world gun design, so much so that Nintendo added orange to the Zapper’s original grey color scheme to reduce the risk of someone confusing the controller with an actual weapon

(Diskin 32). The Zapper’s structural similarity to an actual gun encourages players to play at a distance—or a distance as far as its power cord allows—even though the

Zapper’s photosensitivity can operate very near the CRT display. This physical distance can contribute to the detachment already established by the game’s first-person perspective. Serpell explains the relation between distance and detachment, observing that

the amount of effort needed to maintain detachment increases the closer—in every sense of the word—the animal is to people. Thus, it is psychologically easier to shoot a rabbit at a distance than to club it senseless with a stick. (152)

With Duck Hunt and other FPS games, a similar logic might be applied where games about shooting require physical space between players and the screen to distance players from the digital violence they commit. Through enforcing a form of distance between players and the game machine, hardware design in hunting simulations foster a form of detachment between human players, their gamic actions, and their targets that parallels distance and detachment in actual hunting.

Duck Hunt also distances players from the violence of (simulated) hunting through aesthetics that conceal the effects of violence. The distancing device of concealment in the game works in many ways that operate within Serpell’s framework.

He describes concealment as “the principle that what the eye doesn’t see the heart doesn’t grieve over” (158), suggesting that the ethical quandaries raised by violence against animals are less likely to cause concern if obscured by mediating factors. Some of these factors include the language used to describe animals, which Serpell calls

“verbal concealment,” referring to the use of terms such as “beef,” “pork,” or “veal” to overlook the actual animals that they represent. Serpell also notes that “There is also concealment in numbers” (159), referencing the use of large-scale numbers (e.g., flocks, herds, etc.) to obscure the individual animal that is the victim of suffering or violence as a minority within a larger group. In Duck Hunt, graphical design choices made, in part, to attract a general audience, conceal much of the violence of hunting, converting duck bodies into points. When ducks are shot in the game, point values appear where their airborne bodies are shot, drawing attention away from the shot bird to the game’s trope of play progress measured through the accumulation of points (Fig.

3-6). Similarly, the tall grass depicted in the foreground of the game hides fallen ducks

from players’ view. These graphical design choices draw attention away from, if not conceal, effects of violence in the game with visuals that erase animal suffering as a possible consequence of hunting.

In addition to graphical measures for concealment, games in which players hunt animals sometimes rely on procedural methods to obscure the effects of animal violence in their simulations. One such method relies on software processes that continuously generate and multiply new targets, falling within the same realm of

Serpell’s concealment in numbers. In Duck Hunt and similar shooting games, the number of game animals perpetually increases as players advance through more difficult stages or levels. This process notably runs contrary to actual hunting practices which are often regulated and justified by the need to decrease booming animal populations when their natural predators have been previously eliminated, or in which human incursion limits the area and resources available to the hunted animals. Instead, such computational processes simulate ever-increasing populations of animals, which suggests that animal bodies are unlimited and renewable resources as well as objects of violence and player satisfaction. The plethora of digitally simulated game animals to kill repeatedly suggests that violence against an individual animal has little consequence for the larger animal population or the ecosystem—that is, to be perpetually renewed, destroyed, and renewed again.

The ways an FPS such as Duck Hunt facilitates players’ detachment from its animal characters and conceals the realities of violence against animals are linked to the game’s overall misrepresentation of human-animal interactions. While Duck Hunt is most obviously a caricature of hunting, acknowledging the game’s misrepresentation of

actual animal behaviors and the effects of violence against animal bodies is important because the game sets a precedence for the misrepresentation of animals in more recently released hunting games. To clarify the use of “misrepresentation,” we return to

Serpell who describes the process as: “Another popular method of justifying the harmful exploitation of other creatures…by deliberately or unconsciously distorting the facts about them so that their suffering and death seems necessary or deserved” (158).

These distortions that seemingly justify, or at the very least abstract away, violence against animals have been briefly addressed in terms of the graphical and procedural design of Duck Hunt with regards to the ducks. There are, however, other forms of misrepresentation that video games rely on to alter how players confront and engage with nonhuman animals.

According to Serpell, anthropomorphism is another significant method for misrepresenting nonhuman animals, and this practice is also evident in Duck Hunt. The hunting dog in the game demonstrates how anthropomorphism can cultivate antagonistic relations between human and nonhuman animals that disseminate throughout popular culture. The dog accompanies players in Game A and Game B, provoking ducks from the grass and then retrieving their corpses when they are shot.

The dog, however, is also programmed to laugh at players—its expression very near to that of humans—whenever they fail to shoot any of the ducks on screen (Fig. 3-7). By thus anthropomorphizing the hunting dog, the game’s designers use its laughing image to signify to players’ that their shots were unsuccessful. Codifying failure through the anthropomorphized response of this nonhuman animal has bred much antipathy towards the hunting dog among Duck Hunt players. This is perhaps most evident in how

the character has been referenced in other violent video games, playing the role of a melee brawler in Nintendo’s Super Smash Bros. for Nintendo 3DS / Wii U (2014) or that of a homicidal maniac in Stress Level Zero’s Duck Season (2017).

Hyperreal Hunts

Since the release of Duck Hunt, FPS games about hunting have used several alternative methods for distancing players from their play acts of violence against digital animals. These game elements are evident in many “realistic” hunting simulation series that boast more accurate and detailed representations than their cartoonish predecessors. One of the more popular and successful franchises that fall within this category is Cabela’s Big Game Hunter series, which is produced by American retailer

Cabela’s, a corporation well-known for its outdoor lifestyle products. Partnering with

American game publisher Activision and Slovakian developer Cauldron, Cabela’s has created a particularly niche set of video games that focuses on Western big game trophy hunting and that targets players who are familiar with contemporary hunting practices, technologies, competitions, and legislation.

The Cabela’s hunting games share many characteristics of traditional FPS games, and like Duck Hunt and some versions of The Oregon Trail, they rely on genre conventions that enable the player to find distance from the uneven human-animal power dynamics simulated by the games. Cabela’s games are constructed in the subjective first-person perspective, establishing players as predatory figures while distinguishing them from other animal NPCs. For the Wii U and arcade platforms, the

Cabela’s games also support functionality with gun-shaped controllers that reinforce psychological distancing by putting physical space between the player and the game.

As in other hunting games, concealment as a distancing device is facilitated in the

Cabela’s games through computational processes that allow for unlimited quantities of animals to hunt. Despite the similarities that the Cabela’s series shares with the games described earlier in this chapter, the Cabela’s games also bring nuance to the genre in important ways, specifically through the alternative elements that they use to distance players. Cabela's Big Game Hunter: Pro Hunts (2014), for example, makes use of hunting culture, boss fights, and x-ray imagery to further distance players from the embodied violence of simulated hunting.

Pro Hunts draws heavily on contemporary American trophy hunting culture and its well-known personalities, in order to normalize violent interspecies interactions. In the game’s single-player campaign, players trek across North America with four competitive hunting experts: Wade Middleton, Jim Shockey, and Ralph and Vicki

Cianciarulo. These professional hunters appear in the game as digitally animated NPC likenesses of their actual selves, and they instruct players in several hunting techniques that use rifles, bows, shotguns, and other ranged weapons legally used in actual trophy hunting. The game’s overt references to the rules, competitions, and competitors of professional trophy hunting immerse players in hunting culture and encourage them to view the practice as a sport where targets and the methods used to eliminate them are reduced to the accumulation of points and achievements. The simulated hunting experts are at once both a mechanism for teaching players the game’s mechanics and a way to reify the notion that the hunter-player is not alone in or solely responsible for the uneven power dynamics of hunting within and beyond the game world. In effect, the game consistently reminds players that there are other hunters, actual hunters, who kill actual animals under legally sanctioned conditions. This fact suggests that players’ gameplay

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is at once both a part of (in practice) and not a part of (in its digital artifice) a larger system that has institutionalized specific forms of hunting.

Additionally, Pro Hunts pairs anthropomorphism with boss fight mechanics to further distance players from the violent acts they commit in the game. It is not unusual for trophy hunters, Serpell observes, to give specific animal targets names and to anthropomorphize their behaviors. Pro Hunts takes this practice a step further by featuring named animals in the game that operate as bosses. Traditionally, bosses in games are NPCs that are much more difficult to fight than other enemies and often require players to use specific mechanisms, items, and tactics to defeat them. In Pro

Hunts, the animal bosses must be hunted using certain methods and weapons that will unlock the next hunting area. The game bosses are: Hogzilla (a boar), Pincushion (a white-tailed deer), Double Shovel (a caribou), Radar (a moose), Airplane (a pronghorn),

The Grey Ghost (a mule deer), King (a Roosevelt elk), and Scarface (a grizzly bear).

These names (re)write the targets as something other than animal, supporting the violence players must enact against them. Naming the animals both anthropomorphizes and objectifies them. Through the former, the game characterizes these creatures using negative human qualities, e.g., “mean,” “monster,” etc., that for some may justify the animals’ pain and death. Through the latter, naming several of the animals after specific objects reduces them to their coveted parts (usually their antlers). At the same time, the boss fight mechanism further distances players from the hunting act by drawing on a specific form of procedural rhetoric that rewards players for destroying an enemy. By killing these animal bosses, players demonstrate their mastery of the game and are awarded more game content to play. Suturing boss fight mechanics to the violence of

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hunting allows players a way to detach themselves from the actions of shooting and killing simulated creatures by rationalizing such acts as a necessary part of gameplay through their procedural structure.

Procedurally misrepresenting animal violence in the game to accommodate distancing is further supported by some of the graphical design choices in the Cabela’s games. Pro Hunts and other games in the series are well-known for their attempts to simulate animals as closely as possible to their real-world referents. Not only do the animal NPCs ostensibly operate as actual animals would—charging if surprised or threatened by players’ movements—but the games also strive to capture the animals’ physical appearances accurately. To make the animals seem even more realistic, the

Cabela’s games use “kill visuals” that are intended to create some sense of the hyperreal. These kill visuals appear in the game after players attempt to destroy an animal target using a weapon. The screen then displays a moving X-ray image along with a stat sheet that depict the effects of the players’ actions on animal bodies in detail

(Fig. 3-8). This imagery visualizes the damage done to an animal by bullets, arrows, and other hunting tools, showing how they pierce bones and organs in slow motion. The game also provides statistics regarding the time, speed, energy, and distance at which the hunting projectiles travel. The kill visuals in the Cabela’s game depict the animal

NPCs as bodies with organs—a stark contrast from most games where human and nonhuman animal bodies are often revealed to be hollow when jostled, bugged, or glitched. Historically, “X rays were believed to be a sort of superphotography that could prove the existence of immaterial substances, the materiality of things heretofore

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unseen” (Van Dijck 17). In a similar vein, Pro Hunts relies on the X-ray kill visuals to make the digital violence appear more real by making visible “unseen” damage.

At the same time, the rhetorics of the kill visuals act as a distancing device despite illustrating the effects of players’ digital violence. The X-ray quality of the kill visuals draws on the cultural history of X-ray images and films, particularly their use in screening certain kinds of bodies. Lisa Cartwright, a scholar of English and visual studies argues that in X-ray imaging,

without question, knowledge and authority are exerted through the surveillant techniques of disease management; however, certain bodies are systematically excluded from this gaze. One’s identity is defined, in part, in terms of one’s position within or on the margins of a social body composed through a visual apparatus that operates in terms of both what it will not image and what it will. (146)

Cartwright suggests that X-ray imaging can illuminate dynamics of power and definitions of identity by exposing which bodies are and are not suitable for surveillance by the technology. In Pro Hunts, it is always the bodies of nonhuman animals that are depicted transparently in the kill visuals and never the bodies of the player’s avatar or other human characters. The motion X-ray serves as a visual marker for what is nonhuman, while the player-avatar is inscribed with the knowledge and authority to view the animal’s transparency.

This visual and procedural distinction affords players detachment from the animal category in several ways. First, the human-animal divide is further reified by the games’ audio commentary that pairs with the kill visuals. The audio often confirms players’ kills through lines such as “Straight through the heart. This one will drop before figuring out what hit it,” and similar comments, affirming the players’ violent acts and humanity with the notion that they have the power over nonhuman creatures to both see and deliver

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death without suffering. Second, the kill visuals visually abstract animals’ pain and death through their transparency and framing. Often the animals’ expressions are unreadable because they are hidden by the x-ray image, a feature of the UI, turned away from the player, or located beyond the screen because the kill visuals focus on projectile trajectories. Privileging ballistics over animals’ exterior and expressive qualities renders it difficult for players to grasp the potential non-physical effects of their violent actions or to find empathy for their quarry. Thus, the expression of violent power in the game is rendered as a principal of mere physics, not as a lapse in mutuality or compassion. This latter point is particularly important for the chapters that follow as there are several games and game genres that explicitly attempt to foster empathy for nonhuman animals through play.

Fishing for Alternatives

Broadly speaking, hunting games construct psychological distance for players to simulate approximations of actual hunting. Serpell’s distancing devices, including detachment, concealment, misrepresentation, and shifting the blame, have served as a guide here for categorizing the effects of specific design choices in games that exemplify the conventions of the genre. Games such as The Oregon Trail, Duck Hunt, and Cabela’s Big Game Hunter: Pro Hunts, among others, demonstrate how the various rhetorical modes of video games attempt to persuade players against an understanding of hunting (simulated or not) as a practice in uneven and violent interspecies interactions. Instead, gamic elements, including graphics, interfaces, and procedures, in hunting simulations often conceal or misrepresent nonhuman animals and violence directed towards them, reifying notions of a human-animal divide and distancing players from viewing themselves as members of the animal category.

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It is important to note that this chapter has focused exclusively on FPS hunting simulations because of the genre’s massive popularity in international game markets and broader cultural significance. There are, however, other genres of games in which distancing from nonhuman animals is similarly an integral part of the structures of play.

For example, fishing simulations rely on similar game elements to downplay animal death and suffering or to suggest that some animals cannot feel pain at all. Fishing simulations, however, remain relatively marginal in the larger game market with only a few niche franchises, such as Natsume’s Reel Fishing (1996-2015) and the Rapala

Fishing (2006-2010) games, available for play on major consoles. One possible explanation for this disparity is that hunting games more easily represent aggression against a creature that is anatomically and behaviorally similar to human animals. Thus, hunting games simulate arbitrary exercises of power in terms that are meaningful to the powerful (human players) versus how representations of the exercise of power might work, perhaps less evidently, in a fishing simulation. In many other games, fishing often appears as a brief side quest where players use only a fishing pole and bait to score a sizable catch.7 The position that fishing occupies as a mini-game within larger games is indicative of how representations of interspecies interactions between humans and aquatic life are often reduced or marginalized compared to representations of terrestrial species interactions with few exceptions.8 An exploration of aquatic animals and fishing in video games requires a deep and thorough investigation, particularly considering

7 This is especially the case in fantasy games including iconic and popular titles such as Nintendo’s The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time (1998), Blizzard Entertainment’s World of Warcraft (2004), and Capcom’s Monster Hunter: World (2018).

8 Some notable exceptions include Digital Confectioners’ Depth (2014) and Giant Squid Studios’ Abzû (2016).

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recent shifts in ecocriticism towards studying representations and discourses about blue ecologies.9

Beyond fishing and hunting simulations, we might also consider how other video game genres rely on the specific conventions analyzed here to (dis)encourage psychological distance from violence. For example, how do the designs of game graphics, interfaces, and procedures in related FPS genres compare to those discussed in this chapter? What parallels exist between games in which nonhuman animals are the targets and games in which the targets are explicitly some form of human? These questions and similar inquiries warrant further investigation considering Wolfe, Spiegel,

Dhont et al., and others’ research establishing links between speciesism and the marginalization of certain groups of humans in specific cultural practices and media representations. By determining what common characteristics games share in the ways they attempt to distance players, we might find alternatives approaches to game design that acknowledge and challenge the potentially unethical elements of gamic representations. In the chapters that follow, I examine several games in which the design of narratives, graphics, interfaces, and procedures work against distancing in nuanced attempts to bridge the human-animal divide.

9 Called “blue ecocriticism,” this field of inquiry challenges the primacy of green (or terrestrial) ecologies in ecocritical study. Blue ecocriticism is exemplified in works such as Dan Brayton’s Shakespeare’s Ocean (2012).

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Figure 3-1. Hunting simulation. MECC. The Oregon Trail. MECC, 1971.

Figure 3-2. Hunting simulation. MECC. The Oregon Trail. MECC, 1980.

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Figure 3-3. Hunting simulation. MECC. The Oregon Trail. MECC, 1985.

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Figure 3-4. Hunting simulation. SVG Distribution. The Oregon Trail. Crave Entertainment, 2011.

A B

Figure 3-5. NES Zappers. A) original color and B) recolored. “User:Evan- Amos/VOGM/NES.” Vanamo Online Game Museum, 16 Sept. 2017, commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/User:Evan-Amos/VOGM/NES, Accessed 4 Jun. 2018.

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Figure 3-6. A player shoots a duck for points. Another duck escapes. Nintendo Research and Development 1. Duck Hunt. Nintendo, 1985.

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Figure 3-7. The hunting dog laughing. Nintendo Research and Development 1. Duck Hunt. Nintendo, 1985.

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Figure 3-8. A pronghorn shot through the heart. Cauldron. Cabela’s Big Game Hunter: Pro Hunts. Activision, 2014.

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CHAPTER 4 ANIMAL AVATARS

A Menagerie of Becomings

Departing from the simulation games analyzed in the previous chapters, I now turn to animal avatars in digital games with roleplaying elements. Many games with roleplaying qualities center on animal characters that players identify with, inhabit, and control. Studying games designed around animal avatars offers important insights about how game designers and players conceive of animals’ otherness and human identity.

Through play conducted using a nonhuman animal avatar, players explore what they and game designers imagine animals to be like.1 Moreover, regardless of their species, status, or relation to humans, animal avatars constitute an intentionally scripted and coded meditation on identity and otherness that can recognize and value nonhuman animal ontologies. Returning to one of the questions posed earlier in this project, then, this chapter explores the distinction between playing as (rather than with) a simulated, nonhuman animal character. In controlling an animal avatar, players explore identity, alterity, and experience in terms of ontological and phenomenological differences between their human selves and the simulated animal. These play experiences can have both positive and negative implications for how humans relate to other species in and beyond game spaces.

1 On imagining nonhuman species’ subjectivity, American philosopher Thomas Nagel explains, “We cannot form more than a schematic conception of what it is like. For example, we may ascribe general types of experience on the basis of the animal’s structure and behavior…But we believe that these experiences have in each case a specific subjective character, which it is beyond our ability to conceive” (439). Nagel’s observations are applicable to the design of nonhuman animal avatars in digital games. These simulated creatures can only depict experiences that game developers imagine other animals might have based on their behaviors, physiology, or cultural stereotypes. There will always be qualities particular to living animals’ subjectivities—including those of human subjectivities—that will escape gamic representation.

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In computer games, avatars are graphical representations that stand-in for players and afford them limited interactions with digital environments. While play conducted using an avatar might appear uncomplicated, the relationship between players and their avatars is deeply complex. Several game and media studies scholars have proposed theories for understanding this complexity by turning to different frameworks that account for player identity, experience, and affect. For example, Bob

Rehak offers a psychoanalytic reading of video game avatars that observes how these representations occupy players’ concepts of both self and other (106). Rehak notes that by controlling the motions and actions of their avatars through interfaces, players recognize the avatar as a representation of or a part of themselves—a claim also supported by Andreas Gregersen and Torben Grodal in their research demonstrating how players perceive avatars and interfaces as augmentations of their embodiment. At the same time, ruptures in gameplay that demonstrate the avatar’s material alterity

(e.g., diegetic and nondiegetic moments in which the avatar does not recognize or respond to players’ inputs) highlight the digital representation as distinctly other. This cycling between self and other is an integral part of avatar gameplay, Rehak claims, and allows video games to serve as an experimental space where players might “toy with subjectivity, play with being” (106–107).

Because, as Rehak suggests, digital games provide an opportunity to explore ontology in its various and fractured iterations, game scholars have recently turned to

Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari’s concept of “becoming” as a framework for understanding gameplay and theorizing how video games facilitate alternative understandings of human ontology. In Mondo Nano, Colin Milburn describes game

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avatars as both a metaphysical and technological concept akin to “becoming- molecular.” The avatar acts as “a rendering or incarnation of personal agency at the limits of materiality, at the nanoscale level of matter” (240)—a process that Milburn refers to as “nanomorphosis,” which allows players to (re)think themselves at the material level. Meanwhile, Souvik Mukherjee describes gameplay as an assemblage formed between human players and game machines. Building on Alexander Galloway’s descriptions of video games as action-oriented media, he argues that when in assemblage with game machines (through avatars, interfaces, etc.), players undergo becoming as they recognize how their actions do and do not act in accordance with the machine’s programming. Similarly, Colin Cremin claims that video games facilitate becoming when players identify themselves, their avatars, and the avatar’s algorithmic limitations as parts of an assemblage that enables play. These scholars attend primarily to the avatar and how it allows players to explore alternative human-machine ontologies through game qualities that implicate the players’ sense of being.

Animal avatars, however, complicate this relationship further by suturing players’ identifications with avatars to cultural conceptions of human-animal relationships and nonhuman animal ontology. The player-avatar complex reinforces understandings of humans as both like and not like other animals, offering players a means to simultaneously self-identify with and distance themselves from an imagined nonhuman alterity. Additionally, animal studies and media studies scholar Tom Tyler argues that animal avatars in digital games have the capacity to highlight and appreciate the often- overlooked otherness of nonhuman species. He explains that some games encourage players to explore animal alterity through avatars, even though these avatars may not

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represent their living counterparts exactly (in biology, behavior, etc.) Thus, play performed through specific animal avatars can reify, complicate, or subvert players’ understandings of and identification with the animal category.

Pairing Tyler’s research on animals in games with recent game scholarship drawing on Deleuze and Guattari’s works requires that we (re)consider becoming in games beyond its material implications for humans and machines. There is value in examining how nonhuman animal avatars facilitate becomings—and more specifically becoming-animals—because they can often serve as nuanced and productive sites for bridging notions of a human-animal divide. To understand how player-avatar relations foster becoming-animals, however, it is necessary to review Deleuze and Guattari’s definition of affect. In A Thousand Plateaus (1987), Deleuze and Guattari state that,

“affects are becomings” (256), and they define “affect” as a “prepersonal intensity corresponding to the passage from one experiential state of the body to another and implying an augmentation or diminution in that body’s capacity to act” (xvi). Affect, then, is the experience of bodily transformation(s) that suggest that the body’s ability to perform has been altered. Consequently, Deleuze and Guattari define affection as

“each such state considered as an encounter between the affected body and a second, affecting, body (with body taken in its broadest possible sense to include ‘mental’ or ideal bodies)” (xvi). Affection occurs when one’s changed body confronts a second body, actual or imagined, to which the first’s state is compared. Like the second, affecting body in Deleuze and Guattari’s definition of “affection,” avatars represent imagined and idealized forms of players’ bodies. Game designers typically optimize avatars for navigating and interacting with the game world as well as for player control,

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making them suitable vehicles for experiencing affect through play. Players’ physical bodies, then, become the affected body during gameplay. Players’ embodied experiences are temporarily changed by game hardware and software, which function as cybernetic extensions that augment players’ ability to act—at least, within and according to the physics of a particular digital world. The shift between players’ experiences of their own bodies and the experience of their body through an avatar is affect. Affection occurs when players compare their physical reality to their embodiment within a game world.

Because using an avatar elicits affect and affection for players, examining animal avatars through Deleuze and Guattari’s framework for becoming reveals how digital games can offer alternative perspectives for considering human-animal relations.

Animal studies scholars Steve Baker and Kathy Rudy discuss affect and affection, specifically as they pertain to becoming-animals in art and narratives (respectively).

Both claim that affect and affection encourage deeper understandings of animals’ otherness and promote animal advocacy. In The Postmodern Animal (2000), Baker provides a brief definition of becoming-animal, describing the process as “a human being’s creative opportunity to think themselves other-than-in-identity” (125). He claims that becoming-animal in postmodern art decenters the human from its subject position allowing for other possible configurations of the self. Similarly, Rudy proposes that affect producing narratives suggest “we are creatures bound to each other by the fluidity of habits, language, and culture. In this frame, there is no sense of self that precedes this construction” (191). Drawing on Deleuze and Guattari, she explains how affect and affection reveal the importance of viewing human culture within a larger framework that

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incorporates and values nonhuman animals. Like postmodern art and narratives, digital games may foster affection through becoming-animal to help players acknowledge, value, and empathize with other animal species.

The specific qualities of becoming-animal that Deleuze and Guattari outline are evident in player-avatar relations. Deleuze and Guattari explain that to become something other is to avoid the pitfalls of a bivalent classification system that would suggest that bodies are either one thing or an imitation. Instead, “becoming” offers a gradient model of being that accounts for undefined, liminal possibilities (238). These particular qualities of becoming work well with Rehak’s description of avatars because players’ relations with these digital constructs remain in flux, encapsulating some degree of both self and other. Deleuze and Guattari also note that becomings proceed through “assemblages,” which they describe as any number of “things” or “pieces of things” gathered into a single context that can produce any number of “effects.” An assemblage is a structure, but not a static one; it has moving parts and these parts move in relation to one another. In digital games, parts of a human body (the player) and an animal body (the avatar) comprise the becoming-animal assemblage. For example, players’ hands and their manipulation of game buttons and control sticks are mapped to sites of animal avatars’ body—jaws, claws, paws, etc.—and their movements produce action (as effect) within the game world. Elaborating on Deleuze and Guattari’s work, Baker explains assemblages such that in becoming-animal

“separate bodies enter into alliances in order to do things, but are not undone by it”

(133, emphasis in the original). His explanation reads similar to Rehak’s writing on avatars, which states that “Both limited and freed by difference from the player, [avatars]

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can accomplish more than the player alone” (106). In games, corporeal bodies and digital bodies require each other to accomplish tasks within digital worlds. Again, there are parallels between the structure of becoming and that of the player-avatar complex.

Games with nonhuman animal avatars, such as Konami’s Frogger2 (1981),

Krillbite’s The Plan3 (2013), and Might and Delight’s Shelter4 (2013), exemplify how human bodies and avatar bodies enter into an assemblage to facilitate becoming- animal. In each of these games, players navigate the digital world as a representation of a nonhuman animal species. These avatars’ exhibit animal-like qualities evident not only in their visual similarity to actual animals, but also in the ways their specific movements are codified by the game. Players are encouraged to inhabit the mindset of these creatures through game goals and directives that encourage actions resembling actual animals’ behaviors, e.g. traveling to one’s natural habit, foraging for food, protecting cubs, etc. Deleuze and Guattari’s definition of bodies helps clarify how avatar movement captures what designers and players imagine animal being to be like. They write that

a body is defined only by a longitude and a latitude: in others words the sum total of the material elements belonging to it under given relations of movement and rest, speed and slowness (longitude); the sum total of the intensive affects it is capable of at a given power or degree of potential (latitude). Nothing but affects and local movements, differential speeds. (260, emphasis in the original)

2 Frogger is a popular 2D arcade game where players navigate frogs one-by-one from the bottom of the screen upwards across a busy road frequented by moving vehicles and a hazardous river to reach their homes.

3 In The Plan, a vertical, 2D side-scroller, players explore the skies by directing the flight of a fly.

4 Shelter, an independently developed action-adventure game, follows the life of a mother badger as she cares for and protects her young cubs. Players control a mother badger, guiding her through the forest in search of food and shelter from predators while her NPC offspring follow.

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Bodies, then, can be thought of in terms of movements and speeds in relation to an environment as well as through the affects produced by those movements. Brian

Massumi elaborates on Deleuze and Guattari, noting that “to think the body in movement thus means accepting the paradox that there is an incorporeal dimension of the body. Of it, but not it. Real, material, but incorporeal” (5). Gameplay in Frogger, The

Plan, Shelter, and similar games, captures these particular aspects of moving bodies in assemblage. Human players’ bodies and avatar bodies remain intact though they are linked longitudinally. If the player moves the joystick upward or presses the up-arrow key, the frog leaps ahead, the fly flies upward, and the badger walks forward. The disjunction in the game between these movements and the bodies performing them demonstrates the type of paradoxical incorporeality that Massumi describes. The frog, fly, and badger bodies are corporeal within the digital game environments, and yet their motions come from an incorporeal source: players who reside beyond—and yet who are incorporated in their own way—the game world. In effect, the human player-animal avatar construction simulates becoming by producing an encounter between material and incorporeal bodies. Here, players remain separate and yet also a part of the animal’s incorporeality.

In Frogger, The Plan, and Shelter, animal avatars cultivate becoming-animals that help players engage with human-animal being. Within these games, players navigate a nonhuman animal body through the game space, enacting two principles

Deleuze and Guattari observe as necessary to becoming-animal. These two elements are “contagion through the animal as pack” and “pact with the anomalous as exceptional being” (246). According to Deleuze and Guattari, “We do not become

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animal without a fascination for the pack, for multiplicity” (239–240). The pack quality is necessary to becoming animal, and it manifests in different games in a variety of ways.

In Frogger, for example, the pack is the number of frogs or flies (also commonly referred to as “lives”) the player possesses to progress through the game (Figs. 5-1). An animal avatar’s pack may also include NPCs that accompany the active avatar, such as the badger offspring in Shelter (Fig. 5-2). For any of these animal multitudes, the one animal that players interact with and whose actions the players’ inputs determine—the active animal avatar—is the anomalous that facilitates becoming. Deleuze and Guattari explain that

in any event the pack has a borderline, and an anomalous position, whenever in a given space an animal is on the line or in the act of drawing the line in relation to which all the other members of the pack will fall into one of two halves, left or right: a peripheral position, such that it is impossible to tell if the anomalous is still in the band, already outside the band, or at the shifting boundary of the band. (245)

The anomalous animal, then, rides the line between the pack and what lies outside of it: the human. For human players, the animal avatars in Frogger, The Plan, and Shelter belong to a pack that includes their games’ digitally coded creatures, but also the living animals they represent outside of the game. The animal avatars act as borderline figures because they respond to players in ways unlike any other animal of the pack.

Animal avatars draw players toward the pack’s qualities—motivations, movements, etc.—through affect even though complete assimilation into the animal pack remains impossible.

By reading Frogger, The Plan, and Shelter as becoming-animals, the games reveal two ways that humans relate to and understand animals. First, these games encourage players to view animal lives as significant through affection that fosters

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identification with, investment in, and empathy for nonhuman animal others. The experience of becoming-animal in Frogger, The Plan, and Shelter appears to challenge conceptions of wild animals as wholly other to humans, and therefore inferior, expendable, or insignificant. While becoming-animal through play teaches players to value nonhuman animals’ otherness, the games’ narratives about animals’ lives render animals as living agencies insignificant because the animals proceed towards inconsequential and repeatable deaths. In each of these games, players move the animal along a linear path until the animal avatar dies, ending gameplay. Game developers naturalize these deaths by framing them within ecological or existentialist narratives during cut scenes. These cut scenes force players to relinquish their control over the avatar and distinguish between the games’ play and the global narrative of the game. In Shelter, the game’s ending reveals that though the mother badger is caught by a bird of prey and fed to its chicks, her litter will continue to survive in the wild and thus to repeat the badger lifecycle. In The Plan, the journey of the fly upwards through the heavens is undercut by its death from the zap of a light bulb, particularly as the shot of the sequence zooms further and further away from the avatar, distancing players from the avatar with which they had previously come to identify closely (Fig. 4-3). Frogger mixes both of these narrative strategies as each frog that dies is rendered trivial by both its methods of dying (i.e., car, truck, water, or predators) and by the frog lives which remain at ready to take its place. The ludonarrative dissonance between these games’ narratives (which render animals insignificant) and their gameplay (which casts animals as significant others, with their own forms of agency) leaves players with a conflicted view of animals.

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Additionally, the animal avatars in Frogger, The Plan, and Shelter also encourage players to consider the place of wild animals in the contemporary moment.

These games suggest that humanmade and natural spaces occupy offer no safe refuge for the animal. In each game world, to be a wild animal is to be under constant threat of danger from some aware or unaware agent of the environment. The avatar may be consumed by predators, hit by moving vehicles, drowned, etc., events that players avoid only to reach an end where the avatar must invariably expire if the game is to end. Put another way, representations of animals in games will always be subject to the practical requirements of human designers and players. Without safe spaces where animals might reside, the games negate possibilities of a place specifically for animals, and through this negation, encourage players to consider what a utopic space that values and protects animal life might look like. The affect produced by playing through the animal avatars examined here teaches players to consider human agency from a vantage point that acknowledges particular nonhuman animal perspectives.

Bugged Programs, Broken Goats, and Botched Taxidermy

While many animal avatars highlight the significance of animals’ alterity, others challenge anthropocentrism and speciesism by subverting players’ knowledge of animals. Returning to Steve Baker’s The Postmodern Animal can provide a theoretical framework for understanding how becoming-animal in games can create these challenges. Baker’s work explores the different ways postmodern art engages with human-animal relations and produces becoming-animals. Baker defines becoming- animal, describing the process as “a human being’s creative opportunity to think themselves other-than-in-identity” (125). He claims that becoming-animal decenters the human from its subject position allowing for other possible configurations of the self.

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One way that postmodern art fosters becoming-animals is through what Baker refers to as “botched taxidermy”—a concept that has several observable implications for animal design in games and can help us understand how nonhuman animal avatars complicate the human-animal dialectic. Botched taxidermy differs significantly from actual taxidermy in form and in practice. Many of the artworks Baker offers as examples of botched taxidermy hardly use animal corpses, if at all, mixing organic pieces with inorganic materials. Baker explains,

some of the animals [the artists] incorporate are living, others are not; it doesn’t seem to be a crucial distinction…but across these works, regardless of ethical stance, materials count, materials create knowledge, or at least encourage open and imaginative thought. (61, emphasis in the original)

The animal in Baker’s conception of botched taxidermy is built, formed, and molded from amalgams of mixed media, some of which may have no obvious relation to the animal figure outside of facilitating its composition. Baker further elucidates that botched taxidermy are “those instances of recent art practice where things again appear to have gone wrong with the animal, as it were, but where it still holds together” (56, emphasis in the original). The animal subject appears both whole and fractured, mirroring, Baker notes, the identity of humans in the postmodern era and their knowledge of other species because the taxidermies are neither like what audiences know nor like what they do not know about animals (73–74).

While the botched taxidermy pieces Baker examines are exclusively sculptures, installations, and artists’ performances, botched taxidermy also provides an applicable framework for examining some animal avatars because of their specific aims and themes. About botched taxidermy, Baker claims that “it is the figure of the animal—that new botched thing which is somehow still recognizably animal, or at least not wholly and

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complacently human—which forces both artist and viewer from their intelligence, their expertise, and their defensive self-concern” (76). To further understand how botched taxidermy disrupts humans’ ideas about animals, Baker offers five distinct themes under which examples of the art practice might be categorized: mixed or “wrong” materials, hybrid forms, messy confrontations, taxidermic form reworked, and tattiness (56–60).

Employing a number of these themes, some animal avatars’ designs perform the work of botched taxidermy, challenging players’ preconceived notions about animals. As discussed previously, avatars already operate as hybrid forms, or assemblages, comprised of human players, game hardware, and game software, mixing organic and inorganic materials in order to function. And yet, the design of the avatars analyzed in the first section of this chapter do not quite embrace the botched quality of the digital animal, opting instead for game visuals, controls, and mechanics that reach for an imagined, or even idealized, conception of what actual animals are like. To better understand how animal avatars operate as botched taxidermy, this section of the chapter examines how particular avatars engage with “wrong” materials, messy confrontations, tattiness, and hybrid forms.5

The animal avatars in the popular action game, Goat Simulator (2014) operate in several ways that exhibit qualities of Baker’s botched taxidermy. Created by Coffee

Stain Studios, Goat Simulator is an open-ended game where players explore urban and

5 One botched taxidermy theme, “taxidermic form reworked,” is not discussed in this analysis because of its specific material requirements. According to Baker, art pieces that engage with this theme repurpose materials and procedures used in actual taxidermy practices. He offers Bruce Nauman’s Untitled (Two Wolves, Two Deer) (1989) as the sole example in this category. Nauman’s work incorporates several polyurethane foam forms (typically used for stitching and gluing animal skins) that he purchased from a taxidermy shop. Because digital games currently do not repurpose or rework taxidermy materials, it is difficult to offer a game example that engages this botched taxidermy theme.

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natural environments using a goat avatar. The game parodies many open-world, third- person AAA6 game series that are traditionally oriented around human avatars and affairs such as Grand Theft Auto (1997-2013) or The Elder Scrolls (1994-2017). Goat

Simulator critiques these games’ anthropocentric designs in a variety of ways. For example, the game relies on a taxonomy for its avatars that operates on caprine-centric

(rather than anthropocentric) descriptions. These alternative goat avatars, which include the “feather goat” (ostrich), “giant goat” (sperm whale), and “tall goat” (giraffe), among others, propose a taxonomy of species that takes goat being (or some caricature of it) as its foundational unit (Figs. 4-4 and 4-5). Armin Ibrisagic, the game’s creator and lead developer, describes Goat Simulator as “an old school skating game, except instead of being a skater, you’re a goat, and instead of doing tricks, you wreck stuff” (qtd. in Tach).

He observes that

Goat Simulator is a small, broken and stupid game. It was made in a couple of weeks so don’t expect a game in the size and scope of GTA with goats. In fact, you’re better off not expecting anything at all actually. To be completely honest, it would be best if you’d spend your $10 on a hula hoop, a pile of bricks, or maybe a real-life goat. (qtd. in Tach)

Ibrisagic’s descriptions of Goat Simulator reveal how the game’s “broken”—or botched—quality is a fundamental part of both its design and gameplay, particularly where the mechanics of its goat avatars are concerned. The game’s developers only patch game-crashing software bugs. Other game glitches, especially those affecting the physics engine, are left intact because their comical results are part of Goat Simulator’s appeal (Farokhmanesh, “The Stupid, Ridiculous Fun of Goat Simulator”). The game’s

6 In the digital game industry, AAA (pronounced “triple A”) refers to those games with the largest development budgets, levels of promotion, or the highest ratings by professional reviewers. AAA titles are high quality games that are commercially and/or critically successful.

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physics engine allows players to make their goats run, jump, and contort at unexpected and impossible angles, as well as lick and drag objects around the game world (Figs. 4-

5 and 4-6). Even though the game avatars resemble live goats, they move through the digital environment in ways that do not match actual goat physiology and kinesiology. In essence, the goat avatar “holds together” as a complete animal, but its quirky motion suggests that something has “gone wrong” with the creature. Like Baker’s botched taxidermy, the goats in Goat Simulator goats appear unwieldy and fractured. Their unstable artifice calls attention to human players’ anthropomorphic modeling of game agency, even in a game in which a goat is the pinnacle species of the game world.

The disjuncture between the avatar’s visual model and its physics-defying motions demonstrates the “wrong” materials theme of botched taxidermy, which challenges humans’ understandings of goats and other animals’ bodies. According to

Baker, botched taxidermy pieces embody the public’s fractured and inexpert postmodern knowledge of animals because they are neither like what audiences know nor like what they do not know about animals (73–74). With regards to materiality, botched taxidermy lures audiences into a familiarity with the animal through its putatively “normal” or “natural” form, and then, on closer inspection (play), subverts their expectations and knowledge of the specific creature by using unexpected materials to create the animal. The Goat Simulator goats satirize human knowledge about embodiment and animal alterity (both within and outside of games) through several modes and mechanics that present digital technology (specifically computer coding) as the “wrong” material for simulating animal bodies and experience. Programming bugs that cause the goat avatar to jump and bounce abnormally high, for example, confound

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players’ expectations for the goat avatars’ movements and responses to the environment. The same can be said for the goats’ sticky tongues and their grappling capabilities as well as the goat avatars’ abilities to head-butt heavy objects, such as furniture, several feet into the air. By operating against players’ expectations—which are based on a combination of players’ experiences with actual goats, other animals, and other animal representations in other games—the game draws attention to its own artifice and the medium’s particular shortcomings in simulating nonhuman experience accurately. Goat Simulator’s allowance of unexpected game behaviors reveals a kind of radicalized (animal) alterity that is unbound from players, designers, and the machine itself.

Tied to the game’s demonstrations of digital technology as the “wrong” materials for depicting animal embodiment is the tattiness of Goat Simulator’s avatars, which caution against forming ill-conceived understandings of animals. Baker notes that tatty postmodern animal artworks “render the animal abrasively visible” (62) through its poor quality or shabbiness, and he links this abrasive visibility of the animal subject to

Deleuze and Guattari’s “body without organs.” Baker interprets Deleuze and Guattari’s body without organs as follows:

the verb which Deleuze and Guattari use to indicate the dangers of an insufficiently cautious construction of the imaginatively rethought body, which they famously term the ‘body without organs’, is rater: to go wrong, backfire, mess up, spoil, botch or bungle. The translation of A Thousand Plateaus gives it as ‘to botch’: ‘you can botch it’ (vous pouvez la rater). (63, emphasis in the original)

While Deleuze and Guattari’s theorization of the body without organs refers to several distinct forms of (re)imagining the body, here, Baker’s interpretation alludes specifically to animal bodies in art that purposefully evoke haphazard construction. These

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malformed and tatty animal representations encourage audiences to consider how poorly we understand and represent nonhuman animals. In computer games, this reading suggests that purposeful (mis)calculations in design can illustrate for players the pitfalls of using digital technologies as media for representing and understanding the animal category in its species-specific instances and more generally.

In Goat Simulator, the botched taxidermy’s tattiness is apparent in the goat avatars’ responses to the game’s physics. Particularly, slow-motion controls and ragdoll mode demonstrate the ostensibly poor quality of the animal avatars’ programming.

While slow-motion decreases the speed of the animal avatars motions, ragdoll mode allows the game’s physics to render the goat avatar a limp model that bounces twice as high off the game’s trampolines, steam vents, and similar objects. When using slow- motion controls or ragdoll mode, particularly when bouncing, the goat avatars’ graphics render the animals ungainly, their appendages contorting at strange angles that suggest the animal has no bones. Moreover, the graphics often glitch in these instances rendering certain parts of the goats invisible and then visible again, distorting their shape (Fig. 4-6). These moments of tattiness in Goat Simulator reaffirm problems with assuming digital games can offer accurate depictions of animal bodies and being.

Coupled with the games “wrong” materials theme, tattiness highlights how inexpert and poorly developed knowledge about animal being renders representations and attempts at understanding other species ineffective.

In addition to “wrong” materials and tattiness, Goat Simulator’s challenges to anthropocentrism and speciesism come in the form of “messy” confrontations simulated between humans and animals. Baker’s description of “messy” confrontations in The

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Postmodern Animal offers one specific example, Joseph Beuys’s Coyote: I Like

America and America Likes Me (1974). In this week-long performance art piece, Beuys, draped in felt cloth, enacts a mostly improvised encounter with a living coyote in a space strewn with debris including more felt, straw, ripped newspapers, etc. In Beuys’s piece, “messy” is understood to encapsulate the disarray of the space and the confrontation between human and animal within this three-dimensional space.

Players enter into two forms of human-animal confrontations when playing Goat

Simulator. The first is the confrontation between the human player and the animal avatar. This particular confrontation is messy, in Baker’s sense of the term, because of the game’s bugs and crashes during operation, which disrupt the player’s becoming- animal. The second form of messy confrontation takes place between the player-goat and human NPCs in the game. The player-goat engagements with human NPCs are limited to knocking the humans about and dragging them places with their grapple tongue (Fig. 4-5). The unpredictable quality of these interactions suggests an inhuman agency to the avatars that challenges the anthroponormativity of typical game character design. These engagements appear “messy” because the games graphics and physics render both human and goat bodies contorting in awkward and impossible angles.

Moreover, these interactions often have impacts on other objects in the environment, typically destroying items within a certain radius of the goat avatar and human NPC.

The messiness of the goat-human encounters in Goat Simulator do, however, have significant and rewarding impacts in the game for players who choose to pursue them. In an interview with game news site Polygon, Ibrisagic observes that “Goats have always been a known and common sacrificial animal. Even the origin of the word

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scapegoat comes from ancient sacrifices” (qtd. in Farokhmanesh, “The Theism of Goat

Simulator: The Surprising Metaphysics of the Year’s Goofiest Game”). Specifically,

Ibrisagic refers to the game’s overt allusions to both Heaven and Hell and how they recall the role of nonhuman animals—particularly goats—in religious practices. His comments explain why Goat Simulator features a large pentagram on the floor of an area within the game world (Fig. 4-7). Using their goat avatars’ tongues, players can drag human NPCs in the game to the pentagram. Sacrificing five human NPCs unlocks the Demon Goat achievement and skin for players. The pentagram allows humans, rather than goats, to serve as sacrificial animal, and the inversion of roles here subverts hierarchies between humans and other animals. The messy confrontation between goat and human yields a rethinking of the (often hierarchical) relations between human and animal bodies. Similarly, Goat Simulator’s players receive an award for destroying

Goathenge, a circle of tall stones in the game located near Hell (Fig. 4-8). Destruction, here, is also a “messy” process Ibrisagic explains that the location represents “the backwards and old ways of humankind that need to be destroyed for progress to be made” (qtd. in Farokhmanesh, “The Theism of Goat Simulator”). By participating in messy confrontations, such as sacrificing humans and destroying their icons, players’, as goats, perform the symbolic act of retaliating against and destroying a long history of human dominance and animal mistreatment.

Finally, the botched taxidermy in Goat Simulator also offers a becoming that— similar to previously mentioned games—facilitates players’ experience of humanness and nonhuman otherness through Deluze and Guattari’s anomalous animal. On the general subject of human-goat relations in the game, Ibrisagic explains that “When it

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comes to other humans, you are always the onlooker, always staring from a distance, never part of the group. Always alone” (qtd. in Farokhmanesh, “The Theism of Goat

Simulator”). His comments suggest that gameplay as a goat offers players an experience of being both distanced from a group with which one commonly identifies and marginalized within society. Animal avatars in Goat Simulator, then, operate as anomalous figures that draw players to, if not across, the borderline between the human and animal. It is no coincidence that Goat Simulator’s environments are largely urban spaces occupied by human subjects and filled with objects designed for and by humans. The anthropocentrism of the game world makes for an even starker contrast between the anomalous animal’s subject position and the world that it inhabits, particularly when compared to Shelter and similar games that take place in predominantly “natural” or “wild” environments. Thus, to be a human playing at being a goat is to be subjected to the effects of a botched simulation—it is becoming broken, stupid, and pointless.

Evolutionary Anomalies

Evolution simulators offer another model of botched taxidermy that challenges players’ knowledge and hierarchical thinking about nonhuman animal species by drawing specifically on hybrid forms. To do so, these digital games deviate from

Darwinian and other contemporary theories of evolution that describe the process as one occurring over millions of years, under specific circumstances, and among large breeding populations (Hall and Hallgrimsson 1–61). Instead, games about evolution often depict evolution as a process that alters the physiology of a single or few organisms over their life spans—a procedure more accurately described as metamorphosis. Thus, like the games discussed previously in this chapter, games about

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zoological “evolution” feature animal avatars controlled by players. The games, however, encourage players to drastically change their avatar’s physical qualities as gameplay progresses, evolving many of the animal’s parts in response to new rules, environments, or enemies introduced with each level or stage. The animal avatar in evolution games operates as a botched taxidermy that takes hybridity and metamorphosis as its defining characters.

Almanic’s E.V.O.: Search for Eden (EVO), released for the SNES in 1993, offers one example of an evolving animal avatar that operates as a botched taxidermy. The side-scrolling action game’s narrative spans a period of over a billion years in only a few hours, guiding players through five distinct geological eras in Earth’s history. Though the plot of EVO plot consists of an elaborate, fantastical creation myth and takes many historical liberties with time frames and their inhabitants,7 the games’ three overarching rules adhere to a simplified understanding of evolution. Players begin the game in an ocean as a fictional species of fish where they learn from a jellyfish creature the following game rules: “fight for survival and food; only move forward, never back; and evolve and become strong.” In keeping with these procedures, players must fight, kill, and consume other species in the game, progressing to the next area of the world by

7 Players assume the role of a lifeform created by Gaia, the spiritual embodiment of the earth. Among all of the lifeforms Gaia has created, there is a competition to become her partner and to live with her in the Garden of Eden. To win this competition, a creature must become the best lifeform in existence through evolution. Players discover, however, that a mysterious external force is interfering with natural evolutionary processes through crystals that transform creatures into unusually powerful beings. Towards the end of EVO, players learn that an entity named Bolbox has been controlling the planet’s life forms, pitting them against players’ characters. Bolbox, the game’s final boss, is a single-celled organism that consumed several crystals to grow incredibly large and menacing. Bolbox believes that he is the first human and deserves to become Gaia’s partner in Eden. Once players defeat Bolbox, they are granted the gift of intelligence and join Gaia in Eden. Players also learn that a civilization of Martians planted the crystals on Earth, misguidedly hoping to speed up evolution on their neighboring planet. Realizing the dangers of using the crystals, the Martians resolve to no longer meddle in Earth’s affairs and to wait until life on the plant becomes more advanced.

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moving forward (toward the right-hand side of the screen). The act of killing other species, usually by biting, ramming, jumping, or kicking them, leaves behind meat that awards players “evolution points” when the meat is consumed by the avatar. Players can spend evolution points to upgrade specific sections of the avatar’s body (“jaws,”

“horns,” “body,” “neck,” “tail,” “dorsal fin,” and “back of the head.”) The more beneficial an upgrade is to the avatar’s body, the more evolution points it costs.

When playing EVO, upgrading sections of the avatar’s body make it appear botched through its evident fracturing into parts. Rather than becoming a single identifiable species, players have the option to mix and match parts from different fictional creatures, with different functionalities, that closely resemble physiological developments found in live animals. For example, early in the game, players can

“evolve” their fish avatar to have the lobe fins of a coelacanth (“Coelafish Fin”), the esca of an anglerfish (“Angler’s Horn”), and the dorsal fin of a sailfish (“Sailing Dorsal Fin”) concurrently, provided that players have the required number of evolution points to purchase these parts. In such instances, the avatar still holds its overall animal form, while also visually representing the physiological diversity of animal life both in and outside of the game world (Figs. 4-9, 4-10, and 4-11). The patchwork, Frankenstein-like animal avatar follows Baker’s notes on botched taxidermy where “the postmodern animal appears as an image of difference, an image of thinking difficultly and differently”

(54). The constantly changing creature encourages players to consider an alternative understanding of both animal bodies and animal categories. The evolving fish, for example, raises questions (rather than offers answers) about how humans define “fish” and its various types, particularly based on anatomy and physiology. Moreover, playing

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as the hybrid animal also challenges how players understand the functions of animal parts, particularly because of their many variants.

EVO’s depiction of evolution as hybrid forms developed through economic exchanges of body parts challenges speciesist and anthropocentric hierarchies that situate humans as a superior species. In the game, when players destroy animal bodies in exchange for evolution points and “more fit” physical features, they learn that human traits are not always the desired or better choice. An animal’s evolutionary “fitness” in

EVO is defined by the statistics that physical traits contribute to the whole of the animal avatar, such as strength, defense, attack power, health, etc. The more points a physical trait contributes to a specific statistic the more beneficial it is for players to add it to their avatar’s body. The point-value system for the animal avatar’s traits encourages players to use nonhuman physical characteristics because they offer specific advantages in relation to the mechanics of the game world. These advantages are designed into the world based on human imaginings of the relevance and advantages of animal traits in a comparable “real” world. For example, “Fierce Jaws” provide the most attack power out of all the jaw options, while “Cat Like Jaws,” though not very powerful, do allow players to pursue the evolutionary path towards becoming a human male.8 In addition to Cat

Like Jaws, players also require the “Rabbit Body” to become a human male, a caveat of the game that further problematizes notions that human embodiment is distant and distinct from other species. Moreover, because each animal part in the game is designed with its own benefits and drawbacks, it is possible for players to complete the

8 Because EVO’s plot adheres to a strict heteronormative narrative where the main character becomes Gaia’s partner, the playable character is always male and players do not have the option to play as a female.

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game as a reptile, bird, or nonhuman mammal, further unseating humans as the apex of evolution. Because players can outfit their avatar with various animal parts interchangeably, the gameplay in EVO challenges hierarchical understandings of animal evolution that situate humans as physiologically superior to other species.

Despite the possibilities EVO offers for rethinking definitions of the human and the animal, the game reifies speciesist views that privilege predatory animals, vertebrates, and terrestrial life over other forms of creatures. Players cannot win EVO as a fish or amphibian though they play as both animal types in the game’s early stages. Moreover, players cannot play as insects in the game though they make up a large sum of its NPCs, especially as enemies to be destroyed. These aspects of the game suggest that only mammals, birds, and reptiles are suitable examples of evolutionary success, while creatures like fish, amphibians, and insects are not; in part, because of their early development in the evolutionary tree, but also in their distance from general, conventional attributes that are often associated with the human form, the implicit pinnacle of the evolutionary process. Design preferences towards the success of avatar species that are closely related to humans reveal speciesism, if not anthropocentrism, at the heart of gameplay in EVO.

Beginning the game with a fish avatar also supports EVO’s preference for species that are more human-like. EVO’s depiction of evolution begins with an early vertebrate, intimating early in the game that there is something particularly exceptional about the vertebrate lineage of evolution, perhaps because it includes humans as one of its many products. For comparison, consider Spore (2008) which begins its simulation of evolution with a single-celled organism that players control. The design of

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Spore, encourages players to consider many more possible outcomes of evolution as potentially viable advanced life. In this way, Spore pushes against models like EVO that are somewhat more speciesist in their focus on vertebrates. Unlike EVO, however,

Spore’s concluding stages—which are based on human cultural evolution, rather than biological evolution9—reify the notion that something human or human-like must be the apex of evolutionary success. In either case, speciesism and anthropocentrism drives game design in ways that challenge only some, and not all, relations humans have to other species, and implicitly support the notion of human (or human-like) exceptionalism. EVO, Spore, and other evolution games can problematically reify notions of superiority and dominance based on physiology that are used to distance humans from other animals, vertebrates from invertebrates, predators from prey, and terrestrial from aquatic species.

Another evolution simulation game, Cubivore (2002) for the Nintendo

GameCube, further demonstrates how botched taxidermy can subvert popular understandings of animals and evolution by coupling hybrid forms with tattiness.

Released in 2002, Cubivore invites players to control a creature called a “cubivore,” helping it climb to the top of the ecological food chain via “evolution.” Cubivores are organisms made of cubes and three dimensional square tiles (Figs. 4-12). To evolve, players can breed their cubivore avatar with a cubivore NPC, producing a new generation of “offspring” to be used as the active avatar. The new offspring will possess a mutation that becomes visually represented as a square tile added to the cubivore’s

9 These stages include the Tribal Stage, Civilization Stage, and Space Stage (where space exploration occurs).

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body. The goal of the game is to acquire at least 100 mutations on a single cubivore so that the avatar possesses the necessary statistics to defeat the Killer Cubivore, the largest predator in the game and also its final boss. Unlike in EVO or Spore, the animal avatar in Cubivore only slightly resembles various living species, and the addition of mutations to the avatars’ bodies makes them appear tatty. Here, tattiness becomes obvious later in the game as the avatar looks less like an animal and more like an ungainly amalgam of tiles. The tattiness of the cubivore avatar draws attention to the problems of using digital games to represent animal embodiment (similar to Goat

Simulator) and their metamorphoses.

Despite variations amongst evolution simulations, many of these games depict narrative worlds that, like the games discussed in the previous sections, offer little or no safe haven for the animal. Gameplay in most evolution simulations suggests that being a nonhuman animal is insufficient for surviving in natural environments, despite offering a variety of animal parts or mutations to play with. Though human characters are notably absent from most evolution simulations, some aspect commonly associated with humans exclusively—intelligence, culture, or ecodominance, for example—often guides the player-avatars’ progress towards evolutionary superiority. If not the human, a particular conception of the ideal creature—one that is a predatory and terrestrial vertebrate—governs players’ actions in the game, discouraging experimentation with alternative forms if the object is to succeed or win with little resistance. Thus, many evolution simulations suggest that the animal must perpetually become human or more human-like to outperform its competition and dominate others in a dangerous world.

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A Jungle Utopia

Beyond the conventional action-adventure RPGs previously examined in this chapter, Tokyo Jungle (2012), a video game developed for the PlayStation 3, offers a relatively unique gameplay experience that challenges anthropocentric and anthroponormative perspectives. Tokyo Jungle is an animal survival action game that takes place in a post-apocalyptic world, ten years after modern humans have ceased to exist on the planet.10 Transformed into a wasteland, Tokyo’s urban landscape teems with a variety of wildlife ranging from dogs to dinosaurs. Players can play as several different species and explore the game world using two distinct modes: Story and

Survival. In the former mode, players explore several animals’ narratives, including a

Pomeranian, sika deer, beagle, tosa, lion, hyena, etc., with each story revealing more information about what has become of humans. The latter game mode allows players to choose any species to play and complete survival challenges—hunting, breeding, or fighting for territory. Survival challenges yield survival points, allowing players to unlock additional animal avatars and to compete in the online leaderboards.

The game’s tutorial presents players with a narrative world that has forsaken animal categories determined by human ideals. Zoo animals, livestock, pets, and even extinct species of fauna coexist within post-apocalyptic Tokyo, living unfettered from the institutions, spaces, and times to which they would typically be physically or ideologically bound. The game demonstrates that by disbanding these distinctions between animal groups, new categories might be established without falling into species

10 With the release of the game’s third downloadable content bundle, players can purchase and play as two distinct hominid characters: a Peking Man and a human office worker.

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hierarchies. For example, within the game’s narrative universe, all animals fall into one of two camps based on their diets: “predators” or “grazers.” Unlike games, such as EVO and similar simulations that privilege predators as exemplary subjects of survival and evolution, the tutorial in Tokyo Jungle explains in plain terms that predators and grazers have equal opportunity to survive and thrive despite their physiological (statistics for life, hunger, and stamina) and behavioral differences (operator actions). Regardless of the category players choose to inhabit, the actions their avatars can perform remain consistent across species and include: hiding in tall grasses or biting (R1 button), eating

(Circle button), claw (Square button), evading attacks (right control stick), and mating

(Circle button, but only in designated areas). This reduction of each animal’s alterity to a core set of actions homogenizes the game’s avatars, eliminating distinctions that might make one animal more desirable or more effective than another. At the same time, this approach to design ignores unique qualities specific to each animal’s ontology and risks players misunderstanding all nonhuman animals as essentially slight variations on the same model. It is also important to note the game’s absence of aquatic animals— mammals or fish—which, as in many other game worlds, marginalizes their importance for (re)considering humans’ relation to nonhuman animal life. Despite these oversights, the game’s design attempts to link the absence of humans in the world with the absence of traditional distinctions between animal groups, suggesting an alternative system for understanding animals that is removed from the anthropocentric definitions and conditions of their being.

Despite doing away with specific conceptions of animals in Story mode, the mechanics of Tokyo Jungle’s Survival mode inscribe anthropocentrism and speciesism

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into its narrative world. For example, completing challenges in survival mode unlocks new animal avatars to play with and awards survival points. Survival points can be used to purchase additional animal avatars beyond the Pomeranian and sika deer with which the player initially begins the game. Large animals with higher statistics in life, hunger, and stamina (e.g., lions, elephants, ostriches, etc.) and extinct animals (e.g., mammoth,

Deinonychus, Dilophosaurus) cost more survival points to unlock than small and medium-sized species. Additionally, exotic species (e.g., kangaroos, pandas, homo erectus, etc.) and small species with unique skins (e.g., black and white Pomeranians) can only be purchased with actual money from the PlayStation Network. Thus, Tokyo

Jungle’s non-diegetic system for unlocking and purchasing new species maintains a hierarchy amongst the games’ animals that subverts its narrative premise by assigning unequal values to different species. Similarly, the game’s online leaderboards allow players to compare their survival skills against one another. These leaderboards extend the games hierarchy beyond the narrative world, putting players in competition with one another based on survival points.

Tokyo Jungle, however, does rely on a version of Deleuze and Guattari’s notions of a pack and an anomalous animal to help facilitate player affect and empathy for its characters in both of its game modes. As in Shelter, players control an animal avatar

(the anomalous), and several of its offspring (the pack). The players’ gamic actions, however, partially determine the stats of their litter, and unlike in Shelter, if the parent avatar dies in combat, players can take up one of their character’s offspring as their new avatar. During the game, players may play through several generations of animal avatars. Through this mechanism, players participate in becoming-animals that differ

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significantly from those outlined previously in the chapter. While many games intentionally or unintentionally render animals’ lives as unimportant through ecological and existentialist narratives, the multigenerational story of Tokyo Jungle supports a dynamic that renders animals’ lives and those of their offspring as significant. Growing the pack through breeding and facilitating its survival through eating and fighting become critical elements of play if players hope to finish the game successfully. This particular mechanic of the game encourages an understanding of the player-animal that is, in part, defined through a shared kinship with other nonhuman animals. Thus, gameplay in Tokyo Jungle supports not only players’ becoming-animal, but also their becoming-with animal kin—a concept discussed in depth in the chapter that follows.

In addition to the game’s mechanics, the posthuman narrative presented in Story mode provides a unique context for players to explore the animal category in relation to concepts of the human and technology. During Story mode, players experience the imagined lives of several animals. The game’s narrative begins with a Pomeranian learning to survive without domesticity, and with each chapter or two, players change the species of their avatar. Story mode’s other animal avatars include a Sika deer, beagle, Tosa Inu, spotted hyena, lions, and a pair of robotic dogs. Animals that are cast as enemies in one chapter usually become playable avatars in another Story mode chapter or in Survival mode, so that no species appears entirely villainous. Though humans have disappeared, the items they have left behind have an impact on the narrative world, acting as power-ups for the game’s avatars or as archives of information about humanity’s disappearance. Each game chapter brings players a step closer to discovering the fate of humans in post-apocalyptic Tokyo. The final two

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chapters of Tokyo Jungle’s story mode are particularly noteworthy because the avatar is not an “organic” animal. Instead, players play as a robotic dog, called ERC-003 that has spent part of its time in Tokyo living amongst wolves.

Through ERC-003’s narrative, players discover what has become of Earth’s human population and players are challenged to reflect on their understanding of the human. ERC-003, having no memory of humankind’s plans, learns from another robotic dog, ERC-X,11 what has happened to Tokyo’s human population. Facing a severe shortage of natural resources, humans from the year 2215 have attempted to travel backwards in time to the game’s present moment where resources are more abundant.

Humans living in the present moment of the game world were transported to 2215 as a side effect of the time travel attempt. ERC-003 and ERC-X were programmed by humans in the future to operate the transporter that would complete the future population’s migration to the present. ERC-X explains to ERC-003 that they must complete their mission, which will result in the extermination of Tokyo’s nonhuman animals because humans have no need for them. Once all is revealed to ERC-003, players are prompted to make a choice about completing the robot dog’s mission. If they select “YES,” ERC-003 enters the storage unit and the game ends. Selecting “NO,” however, initiates the following dialogue sequence:

ERC-003: They have no right to live if they intend to indiscriminately slaughter animals.

ERC-X: Without man, who will repair and maintain us? We’ll eventually cease to operate.

11 ERC-X bares a strong resemblance to AIBO, another SONY product.

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ERC-003: I don’t care! I’m a wolf, not a machine! I’m going to live and die with my family!

During this dialogue, ERC-003 disavows its machinic attributes and its reliance on humans, through identifying with the animal category. This misidentification enacts a form of botched taxidermy in which the robot embodies the “wrong” materials despite its alliance with organic lifeforms—a strange hybridity that comes very close to Haraway’s cyborg and similar posthuman figures. In effect, the “NO” option is aligned with posthuman ideals: a refusal of anthropocentricism (fulfilling humankind’s mission at the expense of other species) and a more inclusive notion of personhood that incorporates nonhuman animals and technologies.12 Regardless of players’ intentions when selecting the “NO” option, the game makes quite clear that this is the option intended to challenge the primacy and privilege of humans. Moreover, the game’s design rewards players’ selection of the “NO” option over the “YES” option by providing additional gameplay content. While players who select the “YES” option immediately end the game with a cut scene, the “NO” option triggers an alternative game ending. This ending includes an extensive boss fight that players engage in between the ERC-003 and ERC-X, a race against the clock to guide ERC-003 out of the time travel facility before its doors lock permanently, and a cut scene in which ERC-003 breaks down (Fig. 4-13).13 Through the additional gameplay, Tokyo Jungle suggests that players who select “NO” are making

12 This narrow description of posthumanism is specific to the works of Donna Haraway (see Manifestly Haraway) and Cary Wolfe (see What is Posthumanism?). Some posthumanist scholars (e.g. Katherine Hayles) focus exclusively on technology as a way to challenge ideas about “the human.”

13 ERC-003 represents a cyborgian union between machine (as game technology and in its representation as robot) and animal (via the player’s inputs and its self-proclaimed wolfishness). As in many narratives, the cyborg opens the path to a utopian future but there is no place for its hybrid identity within the new world order (Haraway, Manifestly Haraway). True to form, the cyborg ERC-003 must die.

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the correct decision because it is the choice that offers a more complete version of the game. Thus, the game encourages and supports ideals that value, rather than dismiss, nonhuman animals.

Technologies of Becoming

In the games discussed throughout this chapter, playing as an animal through an avatar operates as a becoming other in identity. By performing as an imagined nonhuman species, players who think critically about gameplay may learn to value and appreciate nonhuman animal perspectives. In some instances, the animal avatar functions as botched taxidermy, allowing players to engage with themes, such as mixed or “wrong” materials, hybrid forms, messy confrontations, and tattiness, which pose challenges to anthropocentrism and anthoponormativity. As becomings and botched taxidermy, play through an animal avatar can foster alternative ways to conceive of embodiment and agency that are fundamentally different from one’s own, as well as trouble problematic hierarchies that inform these ideas.

Recent developments in game technology continue the trends in animal avatar design described here. Virtual reality (VR), for example, offers innovative interfaces for facilitating nuanced couplings between human players and distinct concepts of the animal. SOMNIACS’s installation, Birdly, demonstrates this point by combining an

Oculus development kit with a full-motion virtual reality rig to offer participants a simulation of “the experience of a bird in flight” (SOMNIACS) (Fig. 4-15). Though Birdly is not available in mass markets, its creators distinguish it from the plethora of digital games in which one might control and inhabit an animal body. SOMNIANCS’s developers explain that, with Birdly, participants “do not control a machine with joysticks, a mouse or thousands of buttons,” instead, participants “intuitively embody a

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bird, the Red Kite” (SOMNIACS). Essentially, the VR helmet, along with the player- facing fan, simulates the Red Kite’s environment for players while they strap into Birdly’s rig face-down, their flapping arms controlling the machine’s wing-like panels. The hardware and software constituting Birdly highlights how game technologies are not only being developed with human-animal relations in mind, but with attention to incorporating players’ full bodies into simulated experiences of alterity.

Beyond digital games created by and for human players, the relatively new field of animal-computer interaction (ACI) has made significant contributions in studying technology designed for, with, and by nonhuman animals. ACI builds on research in human-computer interaction to better understand interactions between animals

(including humans) and computer technologies within particular social contexts. Central to the work in this field are the goals laid out in the ACI Manifesto, which are to enhance animals' quality of life, assist animals in the functions humans have assigned them, and support human-animal relationships (Mancini). Research in ACI has led to several digital games designed for both human and nonhuman players, including pigs, dogs, and cats.14 These and similar games incorporate multispecies design principles with species-specific interfaces to fundamentally challenge the notion that the player is always already and only human.

14 See Purrfect Crime (Trindade, et al.), a game for humans and domesticated cats.

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Figure 4-1. A player attempts to cross the street with two extra frog lives located in the lower left corner of the screen. Konami. Frogger. Sega-Gremlin, 1981.

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Figure 4-2. The large mother badger avatar followed by her smaller NPC cubs. Might and Delight. Shelter. Might and Delight, 2013.

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Figure 4-3. The avatar from The Plan at A) the beginning of the game and B) at the end of the game. Krillbite Studio. The Plan. Krillbite Studio, 2013.

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Figure 4-4. The “feather goat” (ostrich) and “giant goat” (sperm whale). Coffee Stain Studios. Goat Simulator. Coffee Stain Studios, 2014.

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Figure 4-5. A “tall goat” uses its grappling tongue to latch onto a human. Coffee Stain Studios. Goat Simulator. Coffee Stain Studios, 2014.

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Figure 4-6. Examples of bugged game physics. Coffee Stain Studios. Goat Simulator. Coffee Stain Studios, 2014.

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Figure 4-7. A player sacrifices human NPCs to appease the “Devil Goat.” Coffee Stain Studios. Goat Simulator. Coffee Stain Studios, 2014.

Figure 4-8. A player at “Goathenge.” Coffee Stain Studios. Goat Simulator. Coffee Stain Studios, 2014.

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Figure 4-9. One version of a fish avatar. Almanic. E.V.O.: Search for Eden. Enix, 1993.

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Figure 4-10. One version of a reptile avatar. Almanic. E.V.O.: Search for Eden. Enix, 1993.

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Figure 4-11. One version of a mammal avatar. Almanic. E.V.O.: Search for Eden. Enix, 1993.

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Figure 4-12. Two different cubivores. Saru Brunei and Intelligent Systems. Cubivore. Atlus Co., 2002.

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Figure 4-13. The final cutscene of Tokyo Jungle. Crispy’s and Sony Computer Entertainment Japan Studio. Tokyo Jungle. Sony Computer Entertainment, 2012.

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CHAPTER 5 INKLINGS OF THE IN-BETWEEN

Kinship in the Chthulucene

In response to ecological crises in the Anthropocene, Donna Haraway offers a new label for this epoch of Earth’s history in which humans are finding alternative ways of engaging with nonhuman species. The “Chthulucene,” as she calls it, is a conceptual

(re)worlding that challenges anthropocentrism while pushing for practices that acknowledge humans’ embeddedness in complex ecologies and shared histories with nonhuman life. Haraway explains that her term “Chthulucene” is derived from rich mythologies of earth and animal goddesses as well as snake-haired monstresses and their beastly brethren, each of which “entangles the more-than-human, other-than- human, inhuman, and human-as-humus” (101).1 These entanglements, she proposes, decenter “the human” from perspectives on our material and historical relations to one another and the rest of life on the planet. Haraway’s Chthulucene challenges narratives of the Anthropocene that situate humans as the only species of importance shaping the planet and its future. The term reframes our understanding of humanity within a broader system of multispecies coexistence and ecojustice. Haraway’s concept of the

Chthulucene urges readers to imagine and practice recuperative measures in response to ecological issues affecting the global community rather than waiting for technological fixes to emerge or settling on the planet’s inevitable destruction (3).

1 Haraway explains that “Chthulucene” resists links to H.P. Lovecraft’s Cthulhu monster in its spelling. The term is inspired by figures such as “Naga, Gaia, Tangora (burst from water-full Papa), Terra, Haniyasu-hime, Spider Woman, Pachamama, Oya, Gorgo, Raven A’akuluujjusi, and many many more” (101).

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The rich tapestry of narratives and ontologies Haraway weaves together to describe the Chthulucene demonstrates the central argument of her latest book, Staying with the Trouble (2016): as we face large-scale ecological threats, including climate change, pollution, habitat destruction, and mass extinctions, the tools we use to understand life on Earth and to find solutions matter, perhaps more so now than ever.

She claims, “It matters which stories tell stories, which concepts think concepts.

Mathematically, visually, and narratively, it matters which figures figure figures, which systems systematize systems” (101). Haraway advocates that readers reflect critically on the methods used to understand and narrativize effects of humans on the planet and to find viable means of recuperating from ecological devastation. She also encourages readers to explore alternative ways of conceptualizing humans’ relations to nonhuman species in order to find “response-ability,” proposing “making kin” as one particularly powerful option for doing so.2

Responding to Haraway’s call to reflect critically on “which stories tell stories” and

“which systems systematize systems,” this final chapter addresses how a specific gameplay trope encourages players to make kin of nonhuman species. Haraway’s book notes that games are fundamental in producing the types of reworldings necessary for changing our ecological practices, citing string figures (some of the oldest games in human history) as well as the game Never Alone (2014), as models for making kin.

From here, we might examine how particular video game tropes and genres support kinship making through innovative design and play. As outlined in the previous chapter,

2 Haraway defines “response-ability” as “collective knowing and doing, an ecology of practices” (34). The term refers to both our responsibility to the multispecies global community and our ability to respond to problems affecting the global ecology.

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game and media scholars already claim that video games offer unique experiences of alternative ontologies manifested as actions exerted by players through interfaces and avatars. Building on this notion, I argue that the experiences of imagined, alternative ontologies offered by games can urge players to nurture an understanding of their own ontology as fundamentally connected to the ontologies of nonhuman animals.

Moreover, specific modes of play advance the idea that recognizing these links between human and nonhuman animal being (recognizing kinship) might help us find ways to respond to ecological issues more effectively. As Haraway notes, “Perhaps it is precisely in the realm of play, outside the dictates of teleology, settled categories, and function, that serious worldliness and recuperation become possible” (23–24).

In the sections that follow, I focus on games about improbable hybrid creatures, such as werewolves and squid kids, and how their avatars and narratives encourage notions of human-animal kinship that are closely in-line with Haraway’s theories. Hybrid avatars are of interest here as their interfaces and play mechanics deviate significantly from more conventional game designs examined in previous chapters of the dissertation. Additionally, such games do more than simply imagine and represent what a tight coupling of human-animal kinship might look like. Rather, these games and their human-animal characters also simulate environments and ontologies through which kinship might be enacted toward multispecies response-ability for the recuperation of a global ecology (real and imagined).

Becoming-with and the Tentacular

As discussed in the previous chapter, media scholars have adopted Deleuze and

Guattari’s concept of “becoming” to theorize how video games facilitate alternative understandings of human ontology. These theorizations, however, primarily consider

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how becoming structures human players’ embodied and cognitive engagements with game machines. Relatively little scholarship in the field connects theories of gameplay and becoming to the cultural and historical trappings of games’ representations or seeks to understand how becoming in games might offer alternative models of humans’ entanglements in social and biological ecologies.3 To address these points, the previous chapter united theories of gamic becoming with the works of scholars such as Tom

Tyler and others to demonstrate how video games might facilitate players’ “becoming- animal” in ways that challenge anthroponormative perspectives.

Haraway’s ruminations on games in Staying with the Trouble further complicate our understanding of how video games model alternative ontologies by demonstrating how games facilitate “becoming-with.” Haraway’s concept of becoming-with is deeply tied to her notions of “making kin” and “the tentacular” in her writings. She offers these terms to help formulate a conceptual (re)worlding that challenges anthropocentric discourses and practices while responding to contemporary ecological crises. In contrast to becoming, becoming-with is a process that acknowledges alternative ontologies while also reinventing notions about kinship, or the relations between all life on Earth and their interwoven histories. Becoming-with defines members of a kinship through the material and semiotic properties that establish a connection between them

(12–13). The process presupposes that there are no individual subjects or objects without reference to some form of established kinship and that such partnerships necessarily cultivate multispecies response-ability in the face of ecological trouble.

3 Debra Ferreday’s “Becoming Deer: Nonhuman Drag and Online Utopias” (2011) offers one example of this kind of scholarship.

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Haraway defines “response-ability” as “collective knowing and doing, an ecology of practices” (34). The term refers to both our responsibility to the multispecies global community and to our ability to respond to problems affecting the global ecology.

Regarding games specifically, Haraway claims that the medium can offer alternative ontological models through players’ becoming-with in (re)formulated kinships that might productively change ecological practices. She cites Never Alone as one example of how video games might simulate experiences that demonstrate human entanglement within larger ecological systems. Haraway describes this specific form of entanglement as the tentacular. She explains,

the tentacular are not disembodied figures; they are cnidarians, spiders, fingery beings like humans and raccoons, squid, jellyfish, neural extravaganzas, fibrous entities, flagellated beings, myofibril braids, matted and felted microbial and fungal tangles, probing creepers, swelling roots reaching and climbing tendrilled ones. The tentacular are also nets and networks, IT critters, in and out of clouds. Tentacularity is about life lived along lines—and such a wealth of lines—not at points, not in spheres. (32)

Tentacularity, here, describes the processes of becoming-with and making kin in Never

Alone that results from connecting animal species and technologies in complex systems during both gameplay and the game’s production. Kinship in this independently developed, two-dimensional puzzle-platformer is forged not only between the Iñupiaq girl and fox avatars—their collaborative mechanics at once defining and uniting the two in their quest—but it is also found in their connections to the game’s spirit helpers, algorithms, hardware, and players, uniting these components together in an intricate assemblage of becoming-with that finds and exacts a response to the detrimental global conditions outlined in the game’s narrative. Moreover, Haraway notes that the many groups—including game designers, visual artists, indigenous storytellers, and community activists—who collaborated on the game’s production are also deeply

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entangled in these kinship formations. For those involved with the production of Never

Alone, the game’s technoculture fosters a response-ability toward troubling discourses about humans’ relation to the environment and indigenous cultural practices (86–89).

Thus, the experience of Never Alone is tentacular, acknowledging the historical, cultural, and material contexts in which players, developers, animals, and machines are enmeshed.

While Haraway’s reading of Never Alone demonstrates the value of video games for reimagining relations between humans and nonhumans in the face of ecological crisis, her analysis remains brief and narrowly focused on the game’s narrative and production (this is understandable given the scope of Staying with the Trouble). To fully grasp how video games may broadly redefine humans through kinship making, however, we must also consider the role of game aesthetics, play mechanics, and interface design in the players’ experience of becoming-with. As the game theorists previously discussed make clear, these elements of games fundamentally shape player engagements with the medium and are inextricably linked to their storytelling and production. Moreover, game aesthetics, play mechanics, and interface design (in conjunction with storytelling) demand that players take specific actions and inhabit distinct roles during play, enabling players to not only think alternative kinships, but also enact making them.

To demonstrate these points, I examine the aesthetics, gameplay, interfaces, and narratives of several video games that address formulations of animal kinships and

“the tentacular” in ways that deviate from those described in chapters three and four.

Specifically, I examine avatars that are narratively positioned as simultaneously both

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human (or humanoid) and (nonhuman) animal. Though the designs for each of these games vastly differ from Never Alone, they each take up subjects of ecological disaster, extinction, and multispecies relations that are representative of the problems facing life on Earth in the Anthropocene. Through gameplay, they encourage players’ becoming- with, fostering multispecies response-ability by challenging conventional understandings of human-animal relations.

The Werewolf Warrior and the Twilight Princess

Since the late 1980s, werewolves and similar hybrid figures have featured prominently in digital games as characters to be vanquished, befriended, or controlled by players. Werewolves in games appear in a variety of narrative (action, horror, fantasy, science fiction) and procedural (role-playing, first-person shooter, point-and- click adventure, simulation) genres. Yet, despite the plethora of gamic werewolves, little research has examined how these figures function generally in the medium and how they may configure relations between human and nonhuman animals. Scholars who attend to nonhuman and posthuman representations in games often mention werewolves as a point for comparison. For example, Debra Ferreday’s “Becoming Deer:

Nonhuman Drag and Online Utopias” (2011) and Eva Zekany’s “‘A Horrible Interspecies

Awkwardness Thing’: (Non)Human Desire in the Mass Effect Universe” (2015) refer to werewolves and their queer and monstrous characteristics, but ultimately focus critical analysis on other nonhuman characters. This section attends to the werewolf avatar in a game that marks a unique turning point in the way gamic werewolves are designed.

Specifically, I examine The Legend of Zelda: Twilight Princess (2006) because the game significantly diverges from earlier werewolf representations that emphasize masculine power and violence. The game imagines lycanthropy as a process of

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becoming through which human players may learn to value, appreciate, and identify with nonhuman animals. The werewolf in this digital game also encourages players to acknowledge tight couplings and kinships between human and nonhuman animals experientially.

Werewolf avatars in games of the late 1980s and early 1990s exhibit a narrow range of qualities that reflect popular historic, literary, and filmic conceptions of lycanthropy. Games that feature werewolf protagonists often draw on associations between werewolves and the fierce warrior archetype—a coupling that is perceived to date as far back as human prehistory. As Phillip A. Bernhardt-House explains, what most, if not all, Western-European and Indo-European werewolf traditions share is

the usage of a canine or lupine image as both metaphor and totem for a group of people…who are semi-outcasts within their societies, who live as hunter-gatherers and occasionally serve in an auxiliary (or in some cases first-line) warrior capacity, able to bring about an ecstatic battle frenzy. (160)

While werewolf warrior depictions were metaphorical initially, later werewolf depictions, some as early as the fifth century BCE, literalize the human-to-wolf transformation as a physical metamorphosis. The literal transformation from human to wolf and back is often depicted in cinema and television, as in George Waggner’s The Wolf Man (1941), John

Landis’ An American Werewolf in London (1981), Joe Dante’s The Howling (1981),

John Fawcett’s Ginger Snaps (2000), and Neil Marshall’s Dog Soldiers (2002), to name a few of the best-known films in this genre. At the same time, folk tales and similar narratives, as well as film and television, about werewolf protagonists, or “sympathetic” werewolves, began to and have continued to do so well into our contemporary moment

(Bernhardt-House 162).

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Digital games with werewolf protagonists not only typically literalize the coupling between berserker and beast, but also proceduralize this form of embodiment for players. That is, many games depict lycanthropy using actions and processes (in addition to other expressive modes) that foster the player-character’s becoming- werewolf, similar to the gamic becomings described in the previous chapter. In Altered

Beast (1988) and Werewolf: The Last Warrior (1990), for example, players begin the game with their avatars in human form. Game mechanics, however, encourage players to transform their characters into muscular, bipedal human-wolf hybrids through power- ups that allow them to defeat enemies and overcome other obstacles in the game.

Lycanthropy, however, only occurs in these games if the player-character completes specific actions that unlock their ability to transform. For example, in Altered Beast, the player-character must defeat three-headed wolf creatures and collect the spirit orbs they release. Once three orbs have been acquired, the avatar transforms into a were-beast4 with powerful attacks and abilities that give the player-character a better chance at defeating each round’s boss. Similarly, in Werewolf: The Last Warrior, the player- character must collect a red “W” to become a werewolf or fill their “anger” meter with collectible items to become a “super werewolf.” The first form gives the main character a longer-range melee attack and the ability to climb walls, while the latter increases the character’s jumping height. In both examples, the game strongly encourages embracing lycanthropy as a means for players to complete the game.

4 In Altered Beast, the protagonist transforms into a different were-beast for each round of the game. The transformations are as follows: round 1, werewolf; round 2, weredragon; round 3, werebear; round 4, weretiger; and round 5, gold werewolf.

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In making lycanthropy an integral step in game mastery, Altered Beast,

Werewolf: The Last Warrior, and similar games teach players to value animality for its associations with masculine power and violence. Winning the game by becoming a werewolf reinforces stereotypes of nonhuman predators, specifically wolves, as inherently violent creatures. At the same time, controlling the werewolf suggests to players that animals and animality can be managed by humans (both players and the games’ protagonists) and that they serve as means to anthropocentric ends (rescuing a damsel, humanity, etc.). Notably, while both male and female werewolf warriors appear in history, literature, and film, gamic werewolves predating the turn of the twenty-first century are invariably male. These depictions continue trends that obscure, if not erase, female werewolves in both literature and cinema (Priest 3). Only recently have games been published featuring female werewolf protagonists, such as Scientifically Proven’s

Blood of the Werewolf (2013). Still, the rhetoric and design principles of games from the late 1980s and 1990s continue to influence the medium in more recent games such as

Bloody Roar: Primal Fury (2002), World of Warcraft: Cataclysm (2010), and others that depict werewolves and other human-animal hybrids as aggressive warriors.

Published in 2006, Nintendo’s The Legend of Zelda: Twilight Princess departs from these trends in gamic werewolf depictions. The game was released for both the

GameCube and the Wii consoles initially and was re-released in 2016 as a high- definition port for the Wii U. Twilight Princess is a fantasy, action-adventure game focused on combat, exploration, puzzle solving, and item collection. The game is the thirteenth installment of The Legend of Zelda series, and like its predecessors, follows the protagonist, Link, on his quest to save the kingdom of Hyrule. In Twilight Princess,

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players control Link from the third-person perspective using a controller. To complete the game, players must navigate and fight through nine dungeons—sequestered areas containing enemies, items, puzzles, and a boss. Dungeons in Twilight Princess are located within a large overworld (called “Hyrule”) that Link must traverse by foot, on horseback, and through teleportation. Throughout the series, Link appears as an androgynous young man or boy of fair complexion with blonde hair and blue eyes equipped with a sword, shield, and iconic green tunic. Twilight Princess deviates from its forerunners in that Link transforms into a wolf to defend Hyrule from a parallel dimension called the “Twilight Realm.”

Unlike lycanthropy in Altered Beast and Werewolf: The Last Warrior, Link’s initial transformation into a wolf is presented as an unavoidable and undesirable occurrence that only later proves to be invaluable for saving Hyrule. The narrative draws on folk tales and horror tropes that depict lycanthropy as a magical curse. The game begins in

Ordon Village where Link works as a ranch hand. After the village children are carried off by raiding Bulbins (goblin-like creatures), Link pursues the monsters into the forest hoping to save them. During a cut-scene in the woods, he encounters a rift into the

Realm of Twilight from which a Shadow Beast emerges and grabs him. Physically marked by the Triforce, a power bestowed to Hyrule’s legendary hero, Link manages to blind the beast with the glowing Triforce symbol. After the beast releases him, Link drops to his knees and transforms into a wolf before losing consciousness. Link later awakens in wolf form, imprisoned and chained in a cell. Link’s new form, referred to as

“Wolf Link,” resembles an actual wolf more so than the overtly monstrous, muscular, bipedal human-animal hybrids depicted in early werewolf games (Fig. 5-1).

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Players’ experiences with Wolf Link frame lycanthropy as a challenge to anthroponormative gameplay in The Legend of Zelda series and similar action- adventure games. Bernhardt-House’s examination of the werewolf as a “queer” figure offers some guidance in this regard. He describes lycanthropy’s queerness as “an alternative form of humanity which acknowledges and celebrates the animal side” (179).

In this sense, Link’s lycanthropy can be read as a “queering” of the game series and its genre, because his character subverts the conventions of gameplay designed around humanoid characters while also demonstrating that animal’s otherness has value. While earlier games about werewolf characters frame lycanthropy as a form of masculine empowerment through the acquisition or exaggeration of bestial qualities (specifically physical strength, aggression, and violence), Link’s depiction in Twilight Princess suggests that lycanthropy can present a nuanced understanding of subjectivity and one’s surroundings. In the game, lycanthropy initially results in Link’s disempowerment as players’ early encounter with becoming-wolf begins in a prison cell followed by servitude as Midna’s steed—an edifying irony regarding animal treatment given Link’s frequent horseback riding throughout the series.5 Moreover, the game mechanics associated with Link’s lycanthropy, such as “Sense Mode” and the context-sensitive buttons (Fig. 5-1 and Fig. 5-2), facilitate anti-environments and altercasting that play a role in helping players acknowledge nonhuman animal perspectives.

5 Midna is an impish character who acts as players’ guide, teaching them game controls and offering hints if players get stuck. She also rides on Wolf-Link’s back, assisting him with her magic in battle so that he will help save both Hyrule and the Twilight Realm. Near the end of the game, players learn that Midna is the princess of the Twilight Realm and that she had been cursed and cast out by Zant, a conspirator to the throne, and Ganondorf, the series’ antagonist. Upon defeating Zant and Ganondorf, Midna is restored to her throne and her human-like appearance.

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Sense Mode in Twilight Princess highlights nonhuman animal ontology for players during gameplay. Sense Mode is a distinct visual mode that players can access with the press of a button when controlling Wolf Link (Fig. 5-3).6 While players’ third- person perspective remains intact in Sense Mode, the game environment’s visual aesthetics change, dampening and darkening most of the game world’s colors. At the same time, scents and odors in the game environment are rendered visually as brightly colored smoke lingering in the air. As Wolf Link, players are encouraged by Midna to use Sense Mode and follow scent trails to track down specific individuals, items, and locations. Additionally, players can use Sense Mode to interact with “Poes”—ghosts of the deceased that cannot normally be seen by humans, existing in the liminal space between life and death. Their visibility in Sense Mode further reminds players of the werewolf’s hybridity as a figure caught between two realms, identities, and kinds of animal bodies. The aesthetic and procedural changes that occur when players shift into

Wolf Link’s Sense Mode operate as an anti-environment.

Drawing on Marshall McLuhan’s writings, Tyler explains that anti-environments in games are alternative perspectives that challenge players’ normative engagements with the digital world. He writes, “Anti-environments…can promote awareness and pattern recognition. They can provide new strategies of attention that train perception unto the unnoticed environment” (71). Given these qualities, Tyler argues that anti-environments situated from nonhuman characters’ perspectives are particularly effective in

6 The change from a normative view of the game world to Sense mode and back operates somewhat like the switch between normative play and kill visuals in Cabela’s Big Game Hunter: Pro Hunts. In both games, the human-predator perspective is technologized through its visual distinctiveness from the rest of the gameplay and its aesthetics that reveal otherwise “hidden” information.

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challenging anthroponormativity in their juxtaposition with play modes depicted from human perspectives. Link, in his human form, frames the normative play mode for both

Twilight Princess and The Legend of Zelda series broadly. Wolf Link’s Sense Mode challenges gameplay from Link’s normative perspective, drawing players’ attentions to its species-specific limitations. Sense Mode acknowledges that nonhuman animals have alternative ways of perceiving the environment—such as a heightened sensitivity to smell—that humans cannot access but can only imagine. The game’s Sense Mode represents these alternative modes of perception as visual metaphors rendered through the game’s graphical user interface (GUI). This is especially the case with reference to smell and the widely-accepted notion that wolves have highly sensitive olfactory systems. The GUI serves an important role by visualizing Wolf Link’s sensitivity to odors, making visible what would otherwise remain unseen to humans. The GUI also demonstrates the medium’s insistent visuality, calling attention to its limitations in auditory and haptic representations. Finally, because players must switch back-and- forth between both modes to complete the game, Twilight Princess argues that neither species’ perception is inherently superior. Both perspectives have value in specific contexts and are complementary, rather than directly opposed, to one another.

Link’s Hylian and wolf forms also differ in the actions they afford players, encouraging them to value and identify with the nonhuman animal through altercasting.

Building on Eugene Weinstein and Paul Deutschberger’s descriptions, Tyler defines altercasting as the ways in which gameplay projects specific identities onto players towards a specific end, usually through narrative elements and gamic actions (73).

Twilight Princess altercasts players as Link and Wolf Link differently through context-

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sensitive buttons. Context-sensitive buttons are a game mechanic that allows game controller buttons to serve several functions based on the avatar’s specific context.

When an avatar enters a situation, the game’s user interface highlights which actions

(e.g., speaking, moving objects, opening doors, etc.) will occur if the player presses the corresponding button. For example, if Link is standing still and carrying a bomb—one of his several weapons—the on-screen display for the context-sensitive button will give players the option to place the bomb on the ground. If Link moves, however, or targets an object, the same context-sensitive button allows Link to throw the bomb. The game’s context-sensitive buttons also respond to Link’s body by allowing only particular actions to be performed in and outside of wolf form. For instance, Link usually carries a sword, shield, and secondary items; however, as a wolf, players cannot use these objects because wolves cannot carry or use such objects with their paws. Instead, Wolf Link attacks enemies by biting and defends against attacks by dodging, using the same buttons on the controller as they would in combat as Link. Unlike Link’s human form,

Wolf Link can ‘dig’ in patches of dirt that hide items or secret passages, “howl” to communicate with other wolves and unlock secrets (Fig. 5-4), as well as “speak” with nonhuman animals who provide helpful information using the context-sensitive buttons

(Fig. 5-5).7 This latter ability is particularly influential in reworlding the anthropocentric universe of Hyrule by way of rendering nonhuman animals as independent, self- determining agents rather than environmental decoration—or, in reference to Haraway, they are also made kin to Wolf Link in that “Kin making is making persons, not

7 In both of his forms, Link uses gestures rather than speech or text to communicate with other characters in the game. The other characters, or NPCs, communicate with Link using written language displayed in dialogue boxes.

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necessarily as individuals or as humans” (103). By providing a set of wolf-specific actions, Twilight Princess altercasts players as a nonhuman animal, reinforcing the player-character’s becoming-animal.

Altercasting, through context-sensitive actions, along with Sense Mode’s anti- environment, encourages Twilight Princess players to identify with nonhuman animals and their imagined alterity. At the same time, these elements of the game’s design also direct players to enact a form of becoming-with between human and animal that affords the player (and Link) response-ability in the face of Hyrule’s myriad crises, the most apparent of which is a collapsing of parallel worlds and its inhabitants (human and animal) upon one another. Because neither Link nor Wolf Link can be separated from each other or used alone to complete Twilight Princess, the players’ (and Link’s) success is predicated on using human and animal modes together to successfully find actionable responses to the game’s environment and events. Where one perspective falters, the other allows progress towards the game’s completion. Thus, the Link-Wolf

Link avatar serves as a model of Haraway’s making kin that presupposes no fully- discrete, individual subjects and is predicated on becoming-with to find response-ability.

Currently, the legacy in the video game industry of gamic werewolves such as these, that might help players to acknowledge nonhuman species and human-animal relations, remains to be seen. Outside of the examples cited above, few contemporary games feature werewolves that nuance the bloodthirsty and violent lycanthropes that predominated in the late 1980s and 1990s. Becoming-werewolf is largely constructed as becoming-game (more so than animal), which, in its ideal form, manifests as mastery over the play experience, associated with greater speed, strength, cunning, or

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aggression. In other instances, gamic werewolves are often flattened as yet another creature in the menagerie of supernatural specimens that populate horror and fantasy worlds with little critical reflection on its animal quality or on a potential reconsideration of animal-agency. It also remains difficult to discern if The Legend of Zelda series will see Wolf Link return as the central character of another game.

With the high-definition port of Twilight Princess published in 2016, however, we might trace a future trajectory for gamic werewolves by examining the Wolf Link Amiibo packaged with the re-release. Amiibos are Nintendo’s popular ‘toys-to-life’ figurines that use near field communication (NFC) to transfer data to and from supported Nintendo

3DS and Wii-U games (Fig. 5-6). As wireless communication and storage devices,

Amiibos allow players to add, customize, and save characters or items to games as well as unlock new levels to play by tapping the figurine to a reading device, such as the Wii-

U gamepad. The production of the Wolf Link Amiibo points to the werewolf’s legacy in

The Legend of Zelda series and presents the werewolf as yet another iteration of hybridity—in this case, as both material (figurine) and digital (data). The Wolf Link

Amiibo is a hard, plastic sculpture of Wolf Link with Midna riding on his back. The

Amiibo also contains data that can be added to both Twilight Princess and The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild (2017). Within both games, the Amiibo data, like moulded plastic, renders Wolf Link as exclusively animal, removing players’ ability to access

Link’s humanoid form. For example, in Twilight Princess the Amiibo unlocks a challenge dungeon, the Cave of Shadows, where players fight enemies as Wolf Link and only

Wolf Link. Players receive bonuses and rewards for their efforts and effectiveness in defeating foes. Adopting playstyles from earlier werewolf games, such as Altered Beast,

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the Cave of Shadows encourages players to master werewolf gameplay by beating the challenges quickly, preserving health, and creating combinations of attacks. In Breath of the Wild, the Amiibo adds Wolf Link to gameplay as a domesticated hunting companion to the latest iteration of the Link avatar (Fig. 5-7).

The gameplay offered by the Wolf Link Amiibo points to different legacies for lycanthropy in the Legend of Zelda series. In Twilight Princess, Wolf Link symbolizes players’ mastery of both the game’s mechanics and performing as animal (or, at least, how one might imagine an animal to perform), continuing themes demonstrated in other werewolf games. Breath of the Wild, in contrast, uses the Amiibo to add Wolf Link as a character to the game, coupling him with the Link character-player as his hunting companion. Restructuring the avatar from human-animal hybrid to human-animal companionship externalizes Link’s taming of the beast within. This externalization might suggest a peaceable coexistence between human and nonhuman animal, continuing a narrative of human-animal kinship, or a relationship fraught with the problems of animal domestication and pastoral power. The specifics of Wolf Link’s gameplay remain to be seen. Regardless, the Wolf Link Amiibo’s potential to interact with future Nintendo titles leaves open the possibility of Wolf Link’s return. The werewolf will perpetually prowl the peripheries of the game series as a symbol of hybridity, becoming, and—in a few select cases—kinship.

The Trouble with Tentacles

Tentacles mean trouble. This is a lesson learned by many video game players in digital worlds populated by cephalopod-like creatures. Tentacles are often synonymous with gameplay mechanics that threaten to ensnare, crush, sting, poison, or destroy players’ avatars, making foes of soft-bodied mollusks. Across a wide range of game

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genres, tentacled species appear as non-player characters (NPCs) that attempt to thwart players efforts. Squids, such as the baleful bloopers of Nintendo’s Mario franchise, often appear as minor enemies that remain largely innocuous until a brush with their bodies harms, if not kills, the game’s protagonist. Cephalopodic characters are also presented as nefarious endgame bosses, such as the heinous Old Gods of

Blizzard Entertainment’s World of Warcraft, whose tremendous tentacled-bodies require an entire party of player-characters to subdue. Juxtaposed against conventional humanoid avatars, these cephalopod NPCs and their writhing, reaching limbs largely function as ripe metaphors for unbridled power, unfettered greed, and uncivilized otherness that threaten to choke from existence all that is “good” and “human.”

There are, however, games in which troublesome tentacles act as bridges rather than binds between humans and cephalopods. Consider, for example, Octodad:

Dadliest Catch (2014), an independently developed adventure game by Young Horses.8

Players enter the video game during the protagonist’s wedding where Octodad, an octopus masquerading as a man, dons his attire before uniting with his human bride at the altar. In a cramped dressing room within the chapel, the player is offered a brief tutorial for piloting this ungainly, orange octopus avatar (Fig. 5-8). Players learn that to maintain his ruse, Octodad keeps two tentacles neatly curled around his face forming a shapely makeshift-mustache while his remaining six tentacles are distributed into the four limbs that a human might have—one for each arm and two for each leg. While

Octodad appears human enough (at least in shape) and getting dressed seems

8 Octodad: Dadliest Catch is the sequel to Young Horses’ Octodad, a freeware student project created at DePaul University and released by the developers in 2011.

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relatively uncomplicated, playing through the first sequence of the game proves to be anything but simple. The controls that maneuver Octodad significantly differ from traditional controls used to move human avatars in comparable third-person adventure games. Each of Octodad’s four “human” limbs must be moved individually, rather than all at once (as is usual for most humanoid avatars). Players must painstakingly lift and position each tentacle somewhat precisely to achieve a semblance of human-like locomotion throughout the game. The results are often comically disastrous, with

Octodad’s limbs producing exaggerated gestures, stretching and swinging wildly, and occasionally seeming to defy the logic of real-world physics. As players direct Octodad’s search for his wedding accoutrements, objects are hurtled across the chapel’s various rooms and the tables are both literally and figuratively turned before he reaches the bride.

In Dadliest Catch, tentacles trouble the conventions of anthroponormative play within the medium, challenging players to (re)think their understanding of both human and nonhuman animal experience. The game’s story and aesthetics align human players with the cephalopod protagonist through the avatar body rather than situating them on opposing sides of conflict. The uniquely mapped controls of the avatar itself dislocate players from a seemingly smooth experience of mediated play by explicitly defying normative methods of player control over their character. This dislocation draws attention to Octodad’s imagined subjectivity, one that resists the anthropomorphic in its clumsy attempts at mimicry and asserts his animal and (game) machinic qualities. In a way, playing as Octodad offers a sort of speculative experience where players might ruminate on the philosophical problem of embodiment through Octodad’s struggle to

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appear human—though he is in some sense always already human via the player’s control. The game operates thus as a critique of anthroponormative embodiment and agency, in which humans and their technology and culture are scrutinized and rendered strange, if not alienating, by the avatar’s cephalopod perspective.

The play mechanics found Dadliest Catch are relatively commonplace in today’s video game market. Games such as QWOP (2008) and Surgeon Simulator (2013) also rely on avatar controls that are meant to estrange the player from their digital embodiment, though typically that takes the form of a human avatar. What makes

Dadliest Catch unusual is that the game offers an alternative model of human- cephalopod relations—or more broadly, human-animal relations—that strives to find common ground between creatures with very distinct physiologies and ecologies. While

Octodad bears little resemblance to actual octopuses, the cumulative effect of the game’s storytelling and play mechanics importantly challenge players’ concepts of what is “human” and what is “octopus,” moving against cut and dried definitions of these terms. Such an endeavor is especially important now more than ever as we face ecological crises in the Anthropocene. As Donna Haraway points out, “It matters which stories tell stories, which concepts think concepts. Mathematically, visually, and narratively, it matters which figures figure figures, which systems systematize systems”

(101), particularly if we are to find practical solutions for both human and nonhuman life.

In the latter half of this chapter, I primarily examine games that heavily feature cephalopod creatures because this animal class is often viewed as a rich site for

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phenomenological and ontological investigation, including in Haraway’s own work.9

Thus, my research attends to specific video games and their tentacled characters to determine how they challenge players to entertain and enact alternative ontologies and human-animal relations through play.

Who’s Your Octodaddy?

Gameplay in Dadliest Catch makes significant moves to challenge anthropocentrism and redefine the “human” category, in part through the mechanics of its avatar. When playing the game, players control one or two of Octodad’s tentacles at any time, switching between each with the press of a button. Octodad’s tentacles can be used to grab and toss items in the game world; however, they are not designed to be intuitively controlled and often prove to be inexact in their responses to player input. The constant need to switch between tentacles makes even simple tasks, such as lifting items and walking, time-consuming and trying endeavors. This is especially the case when compared to movements of human avatars in popular game series such as The

Elder Scrolls or Grand Theft Auto, in which compound actions (running, attacking, opening doors) are coded to individual inputs. Through Octodad, it becomes apparent how many games are specifically designed with human subjects, anatomy, and agency in mind. As players struggle with the avatar controls to get Octodad dressed, complete household chores, and run errands, the game also suggests that society takes for granted that its subject is always already human and for the most part able of controlling all of its limbs. More specifically, its subject is a specific kind of human—one with four

9 Melody Jue’s “Vampire Squid Media” (2014) offers some background on this as she examines the vampire squid in Vilém Flusse and Louis Bec’s Vampyroteuthis Infernalis (2012) and other works.

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functional limbs—and this revelation challenges players to consider what it might mean to acknowledge alternative ontologies in every day practice. Thus, the gameplay of

Dadliest Catch encourages players to question anthropocentrism and what it means to be human both in and beyond the game space.

Additionally, the challenges players face when directing the Octodad avatar to behave inconspicuously in the game’s terrestrial environment facilitates the process of becoming-with an imagined nonhuman other. The character’s overly fluid motions— tentacles slipping, sliding, and writhing past their targets—mark Octodad (and by proxy the player) with qualities that one would imagine a creature accustomed to living most of its life below water would have. This categorization is reified further during specific game moments where the player can direct Octodad to swim quickly through large, open tanks and long, narrow pipes using a single input for the game’s controls (Fig. 5-

9). Becoming cephalopod in the game relies on players’ performance of these actions, at once understanding themselves as a part of and apart from Octodad’s movements.

From here, the gameplay creates a becoming-with through an enacted awkwardness shared between the Octodad character and players controlling him. Octodad’s awkwardness stems from his position as an aquatic creature out of its element; meanwhile, players’ own awkwardness arises in moments where they cannot successfully make Octodad perform as a human despite their own humanness. Through this mechanism of play, Dadliest Catch inscribes upon the player the imagined subject position of an octopus thrust into a suburban human environment (in a sense, the worldview of a fish out of water), and in doing so, facilitates becoming-with.

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The play mechanics of Dadliest Catch also drive the game’s narrative creating scenarios where players’ becoming-with enables human-cephalopod kinship. After the game’s opening sequence featuring Octodad’s wedding, the story picks up years later where Octodad and his human wife, Scarlet, now live in a home together with their two human children, Tommy and Stacy. Octodad’s household is reminiscent of iconic depictions of white America nuclear families from the late 1950s and early 1960s.

Family relations are amicable and stable, while Octodad tends to the mundane, domestic tasks, such as grilling burgers, mowing the lawn, and buying groceries (Fig. 5-

10). The game remains unclear about whether the human members of the family are aware of Octodad’s ruse or if they’re knowingly participating in his charade. There are, however, obvious quirks in the family’s dynamics as a result. Perhaps the most apparent of these is Octodad’s inability to speak a human language. His audible responses to his family’s inquiries are subtitled, bookended by asterisks, and described using expressive gestures, tonal adjectives, and indecipherable “blubs” or gurgles. The family appears unperturbed by these factors, seeming to comprehend Octodad’s communications, which suggests that language use—a skill often used to separate and elevate humans from nonhuman animals—should matter very little in drawing kinships between species. Likewise, most of Octodad’s apparent cephalopod behaviors, especially his clumsy, player-directed movements remain uncommented upon. Scarlet,

Tommy, and Stacy simply accept Octodad as family despite his difference. Even when the truth of his existence is finally revealed, the family expresses little concern for the questions Octodad raises about human-cephalopod intercourse and paternity. Players looking for answers to such questions are left to search their imaginations for answers.

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Still, Octodad’s blissful home life remains under constant threat of the looming possibility that his nonhuman identity will be exposed to everyone either by his (players’) inability to use his tentacles to mimic human limbs or by Chef Fujimoto, the game’s antagonist, who threatens to cook Octodad and tell his family his secret.

Overall, the outlandish premise of Dadliest Catch offers a reworlding where human-cephalopod kinship and the multispecies family are used to subvert human- animal hierarchies. The design of the main protagonist as an octopus deeply enmeshed within a human household encourages players to examine animals as kin from a perspective that challenges traditional relations between humans and animals in both domesticity and captivity. For example, Octodad’s farce as a human father queers the normative roles thrust on animals living alongside humans, such as that of pets, service animals, and livestock. His perspective of aquariums as “festering prisons of iniquity” challenges views that support animal captivity as a humane practice, while his conflicts with Chef Fujimoto critique the willful ignorance of nonhuman animal ontology that often justifies the consumption of animal flesh. Finally, as the family patriarch, Octodad is empowered in caring for his human kin, inverting hierarchies in the home that reify humans’ power of care over captive and domestic nonhuman animals. Dadliest Catch also entertains the notion that the space of the home and the relations forged within it need not be limited to specific species (e.g., dogs, cats, certain species of fish, and so forth), suggesting that kinship making might offer a path to bridge the divides between wild and domestic animals as well as between green and blue ecologies.

Another aspect of Octodad that facilitates making kin, becoming-with, and response-ability is its multiplayer cooperative, or co-op, mode. In this version of the

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game, up to four players can play together, each controlling one of Octodad’s four limbs. The cephalopod body as an avatar for four distinct players acts as an emblem of the group’s tentacularity. Players become-with each other, by simultaneously entering into assemblage with one another, the avatar, and the game machine in general through the collaborative acts necessary for piloting the avatar successfully. For example, one player might be responsible for directing a tentacle to flip a burger on the family grill, while two other players might coordinate the delivery of that burger to

Stacy’s plate simultaneously by controlling Octodad’s footsteps. Co-op mode encourages players to work together—in part, acknowledging material, semiotic, and historical obstacles amongst themselves—as a means for finding response-ability in the games otherwise alienating environment.

Squid-Kids with Squirt Guns

In contrast to Dadliest Catch—an independently developed and relatively short video game—Nintendo’s juggernaut hit Splatoon (2015) offers a rich model for how video games might facilitate making kin towards response-ability in the face of ecological crisis.10 Released for Nintendo’s Wii U console, Splatoon is a post- apocalyptic, team-based, third-person shooter. The game’s narrative takes place on

Earth several thousands of years into the future, after mass extinctions caused by global warming have eradicated the majority of terrestrial animal life on the planet, including Homo sapiens. The main characters of the game, called “Inklings,” resemble human children except for the long, large tentacles that protrude from their heads in

10 Splatoon was released in May of 2015 and by the end of June 2015 the game had sold over 1.62 million copies internationally (Purchese). In 2016, Nintendo reported that 4.27 million copies of Splatoon had been sold across the globe (Nintendo 9).

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place of hair. Despite their mostly humanoid appearance, Inklings are not direct descendants of humankind. Instead, these human-like squids are distant relatives of our contemporary cephalopods. Still, the narrative of Splatoon makes kin of humans and cephalopods by uniting our historical moment with speculative squid fiction in a way similar to Haraway’s invention of the “Chthulucene.” Specifically, the game overtly links the dystopic epoch that the Inklings inhabit, called “The Mollusc Era,” to the

Anthropocene in several ways.

The story of the Mollusc Era in Splatoon performs in that “the human” is largely absent from the game’s narrative about cephalopods and their quest to find response- ability to their current energy crisis. The story takes place in the bustling city of

Inkopolis, where players engage in mock gunfights with paintball like weaponry. The city square of Inkopolis where players congregate and shop bears some resemblance to present-day Tokyo, Japan, and is filled with myriad digital displays, neon lights, and blaring music (Fig. 5-11). Players learn that the city draws its electrical power from a single, nonrenewable energy source called the “Great Zapfish,” a rare type of bioelectric catfish (Fig. 5-12). In single-player mode, players are tasked with retrieving the Great

Zapfish after it is stolen by the Inklings’ nemeses, the octopus-like “Octarians.” Much of the game’s plot is reveled through single-player mode where players complete platformer stages and battle Octarian agents to find this precious resource. While the

Great Zapfish itself might be a never-ending power supply, its removal from Inkopolis conjures parallels between the Inklings’ energy loss and humans’ depletion of organic, nonrenewable resources. Coupled with the game’s frequent allusions to human extinction as a direct result of energy crises and climate change, Splatoon suggests the

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possibility that Inklings are ill-fated to repeat the history of their primate antecedents if they and the Octarians cannot find a way to coexist (or perhaps find kinship) with one another.

In addition to supplanting humans in the Earth’s global ecology, Inklings and

Octarians have evolved unique morphological and behavioral characteristics to fill the ecological niche left behind by their former pinnacle species, primate kin (Fig. 5-13). In a brief text blurb, the game describes Inklings as follows: “The Terrifying Biology of the

Inkling! Strength: Can leap up to 5 feet. Brain: Simple and predatory. Bones: None!

Eyes: Can spot prey from 100 yds. away. Defense: High-pressure, high-capacity ink sack.” The Inklings and Octarians’ cartoonish appearances confound these descriptors, largely because the game’s aesthetics are designed for younger audiences. The most apparent quality of both these cephalopod creatures, however, is their ability to shapeshift into both a cephalopod and a humanoid form. While shapeshifting avatars are not new to video games, Inklings offer nuance to the trope as well as to the ways avatars make kin as discussed earlier in this essay. For example, like werewolves and other mythical figures appearing in horror and fantasy games, Inkling shapeshifting forges a kinship between different species through the hybrid animal body. In their humanoid form, Inklings have physiques like prepubescent human boys and girls. As squids, they have large round eyes, no mouth, and small, soft bodies (Fig. 5-14).

Uniting these forms in a hybrid body uniquely bridges the divide separating phyla and classes that are traditionally demarcated, both taxonomically and biologically, as evolutionarily distant from one another. Conceptually, Inkling shapeshifting reaches beyond the typical associations forged between human bodies and other mammals or

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vertebrates—those made based on physiological and psychological congruence—to identify cephalopods as “persons.” The transforming bodies in Splatoon are notably nonhuman in origin, which serves to decenter the human as the primary locus for forging new personhoods.

As symbols for cephalopod-human kinship, Inkling avatars enable gameplay that challenges anthropocentrism in multiple respects. Mastery over the avatar’s squid and human forms is vital for players’ success. Inklings’ shapeshifting is a central mechanic to gameplay, and, in some ways, the process operates akin to players’ exertions of control over both Nuna and Fox in Never Alone. In both games, players navigate the digital world by switching between two visually and procedurally distinct avatars—one human (or humanlike) and one animal—each defined by the unique actions they offer players when navigating and affecting the digital world. In Splatoon, players initiate the process of shapeshifting by pressing and releasing the “ZL” trigger buttons on the Wii U controller. Inkling metamorphosis occurs nearly instantaneously with minimal graphical flourishes. The humanoid avatar shrinks into the shape of a squid when players press and hold the ZL button. The Inkling avatar returns to its humanoid form when the ZL button is released. In humanoid form, Inklings can run and jump as well as use myriad technologies to spray large quantities of their biologically produced ink on environment surfaces. In squid form, they can swim and dive in the inks that they have sprayed.

Each morph has a specific purpose and context in which it is ideal to use. Though at times the human morph of the Inkling can dominate the majority of gameplay—a product of design that makes it the avatar’s “default” setting (that is, it does not require the press of a button to activate)—it is not the sole or preferred form for the entirety of

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the game itself. In this way, the transformation ability of the Inkling avatar attempts to question the privileging of the human figure as the ideal form of embodiment.

Inkling technologies reflect their users’ chimeric bodies in form and function, and this design choice emphasizes tentacularity as a component of gameplay. Inkling weapons are purchased in groups of three rather than as independent pieces (Fig. 5-

15). In battle, Inklings switch effortlessly between their main weapon (usually a spray gun or paint brush) and two sub-weapons (paint bombs, tracking devices, ink bazookas, etc.) with the press of buttons, complementing the fluidity with which they change shape. Weapons and the ink they produce, serve several purposes, including producing paths for swimming, warding off enemies, and laying claim to territory (albeit temporarily as inks are erased after each match). Similarly, Inkling clothing fulfills many roles by acting as customizable fashion, bonuses to specific combat skills, and markers for team affiliation during major in-game competitions. The multiplicity of technologies and their uses in conjunction with the Inklings’ hybridity demonstrates the tentacular quality of

Splatoon’s characters—their experiences are enmeshed in a rich ecology where it is difficult to separate kid from squid from technology.

This is especially true when considering the role of ink in the game as it bridges the boundaries between bodies and technologies. The ways Inklings might use ink in the game encourages players to imagine a posthuman ontology. In the game, ink is both a biological and technological product. The Inklings produce ink from their bodies and use their weaponry to adapt it as a tool for play, marking, and transportation. For players, this means understanding technology not as an extension or prostheses of the body, but as a vital organ of the body. Ink’s transience in the game parallels the

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ephemeral qualities of Inklings bodies—their changing shape and impermanent deaths.

The inks shot, sprayed, splashed, and splattered across Inkopolis are not only traces of bodies, but they are also immersive environments for bodies (Fig. 5-16). Inks are both mark and medium for the squid-kid. Here, technology becomes a vital point for establishing the posthuman tentacularity of the game’s narrative and gameplay.

The design of the hardware used to play Splatoon also fosters a tentacular experience of play by drawing overt attention to the player-machine assemblage.

Specifically, the Wii U console (Fig. 5-17), the only sanctioned hardware for playing

Splatoon, distributes gameplay across several pieces of technology, including the television screen, the console box, and the Wii U gamepad—a technology that hybridizes a traditional game controller with a tablet and stylus. The Wii U gamepad relies on inputs that, ideally, would require players to grow an extra hand (or, perhaps, a tentacle). Much like the awkward controls found in Octodad: Dadliest Catch that map player control counter-intuitively, the Wii U gamepad demands that players spread their visual and haptic attention across screens and forms of input. For example, players must constantly move their gaze from the television screen to the game pad on the tablet controller while simultaneously operating the Wii U’s control sticks and buttons.

Additionally, players might also tilt the tablet controller to change the in-game perspective or, in the heat of battle, use the stylus to move quickly across a battleground. While a few of these inputs have options for adjustment, most do not.

These manipulations of the game’s controls, however, might draw players’ awareness to how their own material bodies—their eyes, hands, and head—move together with the

WiiU’s parts in assemblage. For example, consider the players who, in the heat of

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battle, replace their gamepad stylus with their index finger. In such moments, the player is simultaneously both body and technology enacting tentacularity by blurring the categorical distinction between organism and machine.

On the surface, competition appears to be the major theme of Splatoon’s gameplay, but this way of engaging with the game is subverted by its emphasis on kinship and community. In online multiplayer matches, teams of three or four Inklings mock battle using specific parameters to claim territory or capture the flag. But even under the pressure of these competitive conditions, players practice making kin. In battle, color marks kin but only temporarily, and often strangers from across the globe find themselves banding together against randomly selected opponents under banners of all kinds of colors including neon purple, pink, orange, teal, green, or blue. Teamwork requires players to recognize how the Inklings’ body and its technology work in assemblage with other Inkling avatars also under the direction of other players and game machines. This tentacular quality of gameplay is not unique to Splatoon. We might broadly apply this reading to most online multiplayer games that require team play and collaborative effort, assembling players and their game machines. What sets

Splatoon apart is its focus on play and community as compared to other games that emphasize violence and antagonisms. According to the games narrative, Inklings battle against their own kind as a celebratory performance of their victory over the Octarians.

Their matches are visually similar to the sport of paintball—a game—rather than the depictions of militaristic warfare found in most multiplayer team-based shooter series such as Battlefield, Counter-Strike, or Gears of Wars. Any sort of Inkling-on-Inkling violence in the game is enacted under the auspices of bonding over a shared history

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and is depicted without gore (probably in part because the game is aimed at a young audience). Death is always impermanent and Inklings who may have been opponents one game can become teammates in subsequent match-ups. Everyone who plays

Splatoon is an Inkling, everyone is at once both friend and a foe. Any lines drawn in ink are inevitably erased and redrawn with kinship remaining the common denominator.

Player-Animals

In examining several games about human-animal hybrid characters, it is evident that video games are well-equipped to offer models for (re)thinking the place of humans in both the medium and our ecological imaginary. These tentacular video games encourage players to explore alternative ontologies and enact nontraditional human- animal kinships. Specifically, through play, players become part of the tentacular that connects the digital world and its representations to the material realities of the game system and the ecological moment of the Anthropocene. With these readings of Twilight

Princess, Dadliest Catch, and Splatoon in mind, we might look at other games, or return to Haraway’s reading of Never Alone, and consider how storytelling and production methods coupled with game mechanics, interface design, and play contribute to the medium’s modeling of making kin. We might also consider how the design of various hardware technologies (controllers, keyboards, mice, touch-screens, augmented and virtual reality interfaces) can be used to foster becoming-with that leads to player response-ability.

While the games discussed in this chapter model making kin in various ways, it is important to recognize that their representations only offer an inkling of what it might mean to make kin in the Chthulucene through video games. There are many possibilities given the diversity of games and there is also quite a bit of room for error

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considering the medium’s complexity. For the most part here, my readings have been largely utopic, emphasizing how these video games effectively facilitate becoming-with.

There are, however, qualities of both these video games that intentionally and unintentionally work against or subvert the attempt to make kin. I will briefly touch on some of these aspects here as they raise important questions for further investigation.

For example, the representation and gameplay of consumerism in these videos games shortchanges the cultural and material implications of tentacularity, specifically with regards to labor and waste. Both the worlds of Dadliest Catch and Splatoon are designed to be overtly consumerist. In Dadliest Catch, the spaces of the home, the grocery store, and even the aquarium are lined with products and Octodad is often given instructions to use, retrieve, and buy these products. Meanwhile, Inkopolis is filled with multiple shops where players can spend in-game currency on objects for their

Inkling avatar. Products for purchase appear and disappear with little consequence to the natural ecologies of game environments. While the drive to consume pervades the spaces and mechanics of these games, there is little or no acknowledgement of the labor practices, waste production, resource depletion, and environmental degradation that might be associated with unrestrained consumerism. There is also no suggestion of how labor and waste related to consumerism affect the environments and creatures within these digital ecologies. Though the games may push against the notion of “the human” in the Anthropocene, it is unclear that they challenge notions of consumption in the Capitalocene (another name and narrative for our current epoch that Haraway challenges through her Chthulucene) or gesture to these aspects of the medium itself, i.e. how the production and consumption of games impacts our global ecosystem.

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Another element that acts as an obstacle to becoming-with in each of the games is the observation that the nonhuman animals are only—and can only be—mostly conventional imaginings of what it might be like to be a wolf, octopus, or squid; these are distinctly and unmistakably anthropomorphic versions, that is, caricatures, of nonhuman animals. Many times, these representations significantly deviate from how ethologists understand real-world animal behaviors. It is all too easy for uncritical players to draw faulty connections—or none at all—between how they interact with a simulated animal and how they might understand their extra-gamic relation to actual creatures. It is possible for players to dismiss any connection the games might make to actual animals because their content is ultimately a representation, fiction, or abstraction. There are, however, some games (notably Goat Simulator and Octodad) that in their refusal to give players precise agency and control through their interfaces offer the closest approximations for encountering a truly radical alterity. The estranging potential of such games highlight at once the impossibility of humans living as nonhuman animals and the essential notion that humans are animals. Through gameplay and creative imagination, players can grasp that one might live and experience the world as an agent that is fundamentally different from one’s self.

Acknowledging this is the first step towards making kin.

Furthermore, there is value in teasing out how a video game might critically challenge anthroponormative views of species relations, specifically because games are tools we use to think. They are computational systems that, through models and simulation, allow us to explore and perform alternative possibilities. Determining how games allows us to think ourselves as other in identity and experience offers us another

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means by which we might find theories and narratives that account for the interconnectedness of life on our planet. In doing so, we might find new practices for cultivating responsibility and response-ability regarding ecological crisis. Returning to

Haraway’s arguments about why and how we make kin, we need stories and systems that account for the historical, cultural, and material networks connecting life and that create recuperative practices for all species. Although this project has only surveyed a small sample of video games and game genres, we might see how the medium can be used productively to make kin and challenge the privileging and primacy of the human in the Anthropocene and beyond.

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Figure 5-1. Midna speaking to Wolf Link. Nintendo Entertainment Analysis & Development. The Legend of Zelda: Twilight Princess. Nintendo, 2006.

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Figure 5-2. GUI for Wolf Link and Link. Nintendo Entertainment Analysis & Development. The Legend of Zelda: Twilight Princess. Nintendo, 2006.

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Figure 5-3. Scents depicted in Sense Mode in the colors orange and pink. Nintendo Entertainment Analysis & Development. The Legend of Zelda: Twilight Princess. Nintendo, 2006.

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Figure 5-4. GUI for howling as Wolf Link. Nintendo Entertainment Analysis & Development. The Legend of Zelda: Twilight Princess. Nintendo, 2006.

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Figure 5-5. Wolf Link’s conversations with cats. Nintendo Entertainment Analysis & Development. The Legend of Zelda: Twilight Princess. Nintendo, 2006.

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Figure 5-6. Wolf Link amiibo featured on Nintendo’s official website. “Wolf Link.” Nintendo Amiibo, www.nintendo.com/amiibo/detail/wolf-link-amiibo. Accessed 4 Jun. 2018.

Figure 5-7. Wolf Link amiibo in Breath of the Wild. Nintendo Entertainment Planning & Development. The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild. Nintendo, 2017.

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Figure 5-8. The tutorial during which Octodad prepares for the wedding. Young Horses. Octodad: Dadliest Catch. Young Horses, 2014.

Figure 5-9. Octodad swimming in an aquarium. Young Horses. Octodad: Dadliest Catch. Young Horses, 2014.

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Figure 5-10. A player attempts to grill and serve burgers as Octodad. Young Horses. Octodad: Dadliest Catch. Young Horses, 2014.

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Figure 5-11. Inkopolis. “Inkopolis.” Inkipedia, 23 May 2018, splatoonwiki.org/wiki/Inkopolis. 4 Jun. 2018.

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Figure 5-12. The Great Zapfish of Inkopolis. Nintendo Entertainment Analysis & Development. Splatoon. Nintendo, 2015.

A B Figure 5-13. Characters from Splatoon (2015). A) Inklings and B) Octarians. “Splatoon.” Nintendo, www.nintendo.com/games/detail/splatoon-wii-u. 4 Jun. 2018.

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Figure 5-14. Inklings in their two forms A) kid and B) squid. “Splatoon.” Nintendo, www.nintendo.com/games/detail/splatoon-wii-u. 4 Jun. 2018.

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Figure 5-15. Some of the weapons used by Inklings. “What’s New.” Nintendo Splatoon, splatoon.nintendo.com/splatoon/. 4 Jun. 2018.

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Figure 5-16. Two multiplayer battles in Splatoon. “Splatoon.” Nintendo, www.nintendo.com/games/detail/splatoon-wii-u. 4 Jun. 2018.

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Figure 5-17. Nintendo’s Wii U console playing Splatoon. “Splatoon.” Nintendo, www.nintendo.com/games/detail/splatoon-wii-u. 4 Jun. 2018.

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BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH

Melissa Bianchi received her Ph.D. in English from the University of Florida in

2018. She completed her M.A. in English at UF in 2012 as well as her B.A. in English and B.S. in biology in 2010 concurrently. Her scholarly interests include digital rhetoric and composition, game studies, and ecocriticism. Melissa’s research appears in several referred journals and edited collections including Digital Environments (2017), Ecozon@

(2017), Revenant (2016), and elsewhere. In addition to her research, she has taught undergraduate literature and composition courses at the University of Florida about a variety of topics including writing for digital media, animal studies, and visual culture. In the fall of 2018, Melissa became an Assistant Professor of Writing and Communication at Nova Southeastern University.

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