‘Left-click to end a life’: Animals, violence, and agency in video games
[This blog post contains spoilers for Citizen Sleeper and Disco Elysium as well as minor spoilers for Red Dead Redemption 2]
Earlier this year read the book All About Love by bell hooks. While hooks presents the reader with all kinds of sharp observations, I would like to share one point that left an impression:
"We all know what violence looks like. All scholarship in the field of cultural studies focusing on critical analysis of the mass media, whether pro or con, indicates that images of violence, particularly those that involve action and gore, capture the attention of viewers more than still, peaceful images” (hooks, p. 95). Hooks thinks media should move away from normalised depictions of violence and instead present ‘life-affirming’ stories in which love flourishes.
Being a scholar firmly embedded in the ‘Animal Turn’ (both the podcast and the ontological shift within academia) this made me reflect on the extent to which video games have taken such a turn (if at all). The gaming industry has faced accusations of the glorification of violence for several decades, but violence towards animals remains largely absent from this discussion. This is striking considering the salient role virtual animals play as resources to be hunted, companions in battle, or heavily anthropomorphised characters, stripped of their animality.
The podcast episode with Keung Yoon Bae, Osvaldo Cleger and Michael Rübsamen helped me reflect about animals as more than objects and resources in game worlds. I reflect in this blog post about the agency players have and some of the ways in which developers and gamers choose to develop and play games non-violently.
Player agency: Will you climb the mountain?
What makes video games unique is the high degree of agency it affords the player. When presenting the then upcoming game The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim, creator Todd Howard said “See that mountain? You can climb it”. The quote itself has, after the somewhat unpolished release of the game, become a meme, but it does point to the freedom that video games offer players as they decide how they choose to inhabit and traverse the digital worlds crafted for them. Discussing agency from the perspective of gamers, Osvaldo remarks:
“we believe that we have freedom, but those who created the game created the set of outcomes that are possible (…) and in that sense games are also restrictive."
In other words: you can climb that mountain, but you cannot choose to dig through the mountain, to become the mountain, to paint the mountain, or any other modes of interacting with it as the developers have not programmed those options into the game. In fact, the question of ‘can players actually choose’ sparked the creation of the Stanley Parable, a game dedicated to interrogating player agency. We turn extend the question of the existence of player agency towards violence and animals and ask: Can players actually choose to engage nonviolently with digital critters? Or are gamers programmed to enact virtual harm?
Before continuing, it is worth noting that the gaming industry offers an extremely broad range of experiences. Many video games relinquish violence by foregrounding love, exploration, memories, or even singing. Animals do not exclusively star as objects or resources in these games but feature in a wide range of roles from pets to explorers. That said, violence is a form of conflict and is (in any medium) gripping to audiences - and this includes violences targeting animals.
Violating Animals: Hunting, Killing and Destruction
Video games have a long history and salient habit of presenting virtual animals as walking resource banks. One need only look at Minecraft, the best-selling video game of all time and particularly popular with young audiences, to see the instrumentalisation of animals. Shortly after starting the game, players learn that killing a chicken will give them experience points as well as raw, plucked chicken carcasses and feathers. Killing a pig yields uncooked slices of ham, killing a sheep provides wool and mutton, and killing a panda is rewarded with one or two sticks of bamboo. Players can also choose to use the agency the game affords them to emulate bio-industrial farming by constructing a pen and forcing animals to breed and multiply for later consumption. Particularly committed players may even opt for factory farming by crafting, for instance, an automatic cooked chicken farm that fully automatically hatches chicken eggs above lava, resulting in an endless supply of cooked chicken breasts.
The 2019 game Disco Elysium challenges not only virtual systemic violence committed against animals in games like in Minecraft, but explicitly rejects players’ desire for the escapism they seek in game worlds. It does so by confronting them with uncomfortable existential truths about humanity’s relations with the world inside and outside of digital worlds. Keung Yoon Bae mentions this encounter in the episode but I think it’s worth revisiting here.
“I am a detective”, the main character of Disco Elysium says in an otherworldly, telepathic conversation with a gargantuan stick insect whose existence was not proven until that point. The bug responds: “So am I. I was born to detect sucrose rewards and semiochemicals”, reminding the player of its otherness. In the conversation that follows, they reflect on being an animal and the discomforts that come with it. Losing limbs, cloning oneself, and accidentally emerging from hibernation in the middle of winter are part and parcel of their existence. The conversation soon shifts into a more profound reflection on the power humans have over nonhuman others, however. The player character says he, as an individual, does not possess world-ending powers, but the insect responds poignantly:
“You [the character, the player, and humanity] are a violent and irrepressible miracle. The vacuum of cosmos and the stars burning in it are afraid of you. Given enough time you would wipe us all out and replace us with nothing – just by accident."
The game’s developers do not pull their punches as they draw obvious parallels with real-life planetary crises to remind the player that you cannot truly escape in virtual game worlds to avoid the reality of the continuous systemic violence perpetuated on the world.
Bending the rules: From Hunting to Studying
Players further express their agency within contexts delineated by programming by interacting with games in ‘unintended’ ways. In the episode, Michael Rübsamen points out Red Dead Redemption 2’s ambiguous perspective on hunting: On the one hand, this ‘cowboy simulator’ offers an extensive hunting mechanic while on the other hand some storylines in the game overtly question the ethics of hunting.
However, I recently learned that Red Dead players have created an entirely new way of playing that builds on the ‘Study’ mechanic. When the player looks at an animal or plant, they may hold a button to ‘Study’ them and if they manage to keep their screen fixed on the animal for a set amount of time they will gain information about them. The player character, Arthur Morgan, might be a gruff bandit with questionable ethics but after studying something he will make surprisingly artistic sketches of them in his journal. A small subset of players are re-playing Red Dead and using this mechanic to maximise the aesthetic quality of Arthur’s journal. These players prioritise binoculars over rifles and prefer artistic renditions of animals over resources, thus using the game’s mechanics to subvert the developer’s intended playstyle.
Non-instrumentalised interactions with animals are increasingly desired from gaming communities. For example, the popular Twitter/X page ‘Can you pet the dog?’ emerged in response to stray dogs roaming the world of ‘The Division’ and players being unable to offer them comfort. In response, developers of various games (including Red Dead Redemption 2) subsequently added petting mechanics to their games. However, due to its pre-programmed nature, this is more of a gimmick than an active subversion of conventional player-digital animal relations and some have accused developers of adding petting mechanics for the sake of publicity on the page.
Programmed reflections: Towards animal ethics in gaming?
Large game productions such as Red Dead may grant players the agency to play differently, but it is in the independent games (or ‘indie’) scene where developers are creating opportunities for players to actively question their relationships with animals, virtual or real.
Resource management is the most challenging part of Citizen Sleeper, a narrative-heavy sci-fi game in which you play as a human mind stuck in a robot body owned by a large money-hungry corporation. If it isn’t already hard enough to survive on a space station where you meet new friends and foes, scrounge up money, and maintain your cybernetic frame, the game asks you to contemplate how you might find meaning or even thrive while stuck on the station.
Midway through my experience with Citizen Sleeper, I encountered ‘The Stray’, a black cat roaming the dilapidated alleyways of a downtrodden district of the station named Lowend. The game represents this cat as a single image combined with vivid descriptions, nothing more. Yet I found myself caring for this virtual animal, spending hard-earned space currency on cat food every in-game day. In Citizen Sleeper money is hard to come by and risky to spend on non-essentials and I quickly realised that feeding this cat would not lead to any reward but the feeding itself. And yet I kept making sure to not spend a single in-game day not tending to my friend. Implicitly, Citizen Sleeper challenges players to turn off their resource-optimising, reward-driven gamer brain and ask: Can you consider this animal, however mediated, as a being that matters through their existence itself? Player agency allows gamers to choose to entirely ignore The Stray, leaving them to fend for themselves and save money in the process. The freedom of choice inherent in the medium is what makes this encounter interesting.
In no way am I claiming that video game developers nor players are redefining their relation to animals. One might even argue, as the Animal Turn episode explains, that violence aimed at virtual animals might even help gamers reflect on their actions in real and mediated worlds. But, returning to hooks, I am keenly following those gamers and developers at the margins to see how “life affirming” media might look like.
Episodes of The Animal Turn Looking at Animals and Media:
Herre de Bondt is a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Amsterdam where he researches dogs and urban safety in Amsterdam. He completed his PhD in anthropology at Roehampton University in London which he dove into the world of bird feeding in gardens and public urban spaces. With a background in anthropology and urban studies, Herre conducted various multispecies research projects ranging from crows in Tokyo, to gulls in The Hague, and to rats in Amsterdam. Previously a fellow with the Animal Turn, Herre now volunteers as an assistant content producer for the show.
You can connect with Herre via Twitter (@HerreBondt).Learn more about our team here.
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