Ecology in gaming

This is a topic I return to again and again, at least once a year. Monster Hunter Tri was just released yesterday, and in that game, you're charged with, well, killing monsters. Except, are they monsters by any conventional definition?

Watching videos of the gameplay, it seems to me that the animals in the game are just that – animals. There doesn't seem to be any sort of supernatural element to make them into "monsters" per se. If I were to categorize anyone in the game as a monster, it'd be the humans who brutally hunt down these elements of the natural world (who appear to be doing nothing more than defending their territory), butcher their corpses and turn their bones into weapons and armor.

Monster Hunter is a pretty extreme case of this, but gaming has always had a tenuous relationship with ecology (in an environmental sense). Beyond the actual, physical impact of the gargantuan amounts of plastics and electronics needed to produce games and consoles, gaming has, in large part, been about a domination of the ecological. In Super Mario Bros., you stomp turtles to death. In Metroid, you kill animals who either attack you for entering into their territory or don't do much of anything at all, just because they happened to get in your way. In Turok, you kill dinosaurs. Dinosaurs!

I don't mean to expose myself as some sort of hippie. I realize that these interactions have little to do with the real world, and I've obviously enjoyed all of those above games. I've never once thought to myself, "man, I'm going to go murder some lizards once I'm done playing Turok." Games do largely exist independently of the real world, no matter what we tell ourselves.

Yet, it's no different to me than when a game is horribly sexist or racist. I had serious problems with Resident Evil 5 because of what it was implying – that black people are a horde to be slayed with a shotgun. That's some pretty loaded imagery. And in a lot of cases, there's pretty loaded imagery of animal killing in so many games, and yet, it's something that's almost never talked about.

This falls into that fairly ephemeral realm of the issue of systemic "isms," where there's no discernible cause-and-effect relationship between what's shown on screen and what happens in real life. I mean, I also don't mean to come across like one of those crazy people who say that "violence in video games leads to violence in real life." No, I'm more concerned about the mindset of making animals, in this case, the protagonist, much like I have a problem with making dehumanized humans into cannon fodder in a lot of shooting games. Death, in both cases, is hardly treated with the gravitas that it deserves.

Killing is obviously a major part of videogaming, like it or not. There's seemingly few developers who have actually taken the time to figure out a reason why a gamer should be playing their game other than to kill things and, intermittently, watch some cutscenes. And sometimes, when done correctly, that killing can be fun and engaging, or can make you consider your actions more carefully – Bioshock, for instance, is extremely cautious to make each one of its enemies somewhat relatable or humanized. I don't know about you, but I always felt a little bit of remorse for the enemies in that game because they couldn't control themselves. Few games take the time to set any of that up.

Which is why it's almost as bad when games do the same with animals or animal-like creatures. I'm supposed to derive enjoyment from killing creatures that are simply following their primordial instincts, and have been programmed in that way? I am still interested in playing Monster Hunter Tri, but it will require me to not think about things like this.

In the pantheon of games that take ecology and the ramifications of environmental factors into consideration, I can name three games: Okami, Flower, and the latest Prince of Persia game. I know there are others that I haven't played, but consider Okami for a second. It's made clear that what you're fighting isn't from the natural world – you're fighting monsters in a true sense. And the primary motivation in the game is to restore the natural world to its former beauty and vigor, which is an admirable goal, right? Not to mention that you actually play as a wolf.

I don't expect games to actually change this element of their being; I just wish that the implications of killing animals were explored more fully. Well, in all honesty, I wish that all elements of gaming that are somewhat taken for granted would be looked at more closely, but that's for another series of posts.

(In case you're wondering, yes, I am a vegetarian. But I'm also not crazy, I swear.)