Game: Animals, Video Games, and Humanity (Book Review)
Alenda Y. Chang, Guest Contributor
My father was a fish. By that, I don’t mean to imply that he was some kind of statuesque merman, cavorting in the briny deeps like Jason Momoa’s Aquaman. Rather, when he first came to the United States as a graduate student in the 1960s, the first English name he picked was “Blenny,” which as the Encyclopedia Britannica explains, refers to “any of the numerous and diverse fishes of the suborder Blennioidei (order Perciformes).”[1] My father may not literally have been a fish, but he did choose a fish’s name, and he eventually pursued a doctorate in fisheries biology, later working with scientists like Dr. Eugenie Clark (the “Shark Lady”). Then, in high school, I first read William Faulkner’s As I Lay Dying, with its iconic unreliable narrators and that memorable one-sentence chapter: “My mother is a fish.” My fishy patrilineage collided unexpectedly with literary style—on the one hand, a kid’s inability to conceive of his mother’s death as her coffin threatens to float away on a swollen river, and on the other, my father’s naïve adoption of a nonhuman moniker as a first foray into a new culture and language. In time, he became Benjamin, and then just Ben, a concession to naming norms and/or his dropping out of academia, but secretly, I like to think that he is still at some level a Blenny.
All of this I overshare in the spirit of reviewing Tom Tyler’s Game: Animals, Video Games, and Humanity, published in mid-2022 by University of Minnesota Press, just before Stray (BlueTwelve, 2022) became a minor social media sensation.[2] Game suggests in its very title not only Tyler’s recurring interest in word play, but how deeply imbued our language and media are with the figure of the animal. The word “game” obviously speaks both to histories of play and sport, but also to animal life insofar as it is hunted and eaten. Yet despite the name, Game is not a game studies book. Games researchers may be startled, or even a bit dismayed, when it turns out that every chapter invariably trots out the Oxford English Dictionary to scrutinize the etymological roots of a term, or when asides to classical literature from the late medieval period or Latin phrases begin to outnumber contemporary sources. But Tyler for the most part manages to balance his more esoteric catalogue with lively and detailed discussions of games themselves. Game is actually striking in the generic variety and historical scope of the games it touches upon, with most titles hailing from the early 1980s to the mid-2000s and spanning diverse consoles, handhelds, and personal computers. Furthermore, as someone who writes about games largely from beyond the pale of game studies proper, I appreciate Tyler’s engagement with questions central to game research through unusual channels, which admittedly at times omits crucial interlocutors but also avoids the circularity of reference that inevitably occurs in small communities.
And surprise! It turns out that fish, in addition to boars, dogs, ducks, cows, inklings, rabbits, and other animals gracing the book’s pages, recur throughout Game as a special limit case of our ability to empathize with animals, detailed in the chapter “A Thing Worth Doing.” Here, I was reminded of Erik Van Ooijen’s remarkable essay on how fish are “expelled from the circle of moral concern” (177) in The Sims 3’s pet expansion and the popular farming game Stardew Valley.[3] Naysayers might reason that agonizing about animal representation in digital games doesn’t bear the same urgency, as, say, the use of animals in filmmaking, where animal use is now carefully monitored, at least in the United States, by the American Humane society. But theoretical discussion around so-called “snuff” films and depictions of animal death and suffering already abound in the writing on photography and cinema (think the iconic hunting scenes in Rules of the Game or the electrocution of Topsy the Elephant). Tyler makes a compelling case for games’ more-than-indexical measure of our relationship to animals, showing how games are chock full of the platitudes, paradoxes, and affective encounters found in other media, with some additional wrinkles.
In the end, Game is really a collection of individual essays that can be read piecemeal, each reflecting on a particular facet of animal experience or, more often, on our limited understanding or portrayal of such experience. For instance, in “A Singular of Boars,” Tyler considers collective nouns for animal groups (as in “a crash of rhinoceroses”), zeroing in on the wild boar (Sus scrofa) as it appears across texts and games in order to grapple with the constant danger of metonymic conflation of individual animals with their taxonomic species, or of animal parts or behaviors with the unknowable complexities of their full lives. In “How Does Your Dog Smell?” Tyler lingers over Dog’s Life for the PlayStation 2 to point out the “anthroponormative” perspective bias of most video games designed for humans, where supposedly first-person or even “objective” third-person viewpoints are really those of your average hominid, playing to our capacities for color, depth and breadth of field, and so on.
That said, Tyler does seem to save some of his thorniest material for last, including philosophical rationales for and against veganism. The assembled chapters arguably progress toward frankly assessing humanity’s species-level faults, including war, hubris, and a reluctance to regard ourselves as animals. In an era of egregious mistreatment and collective willed ignorance about animals and their lives, Game knowingly offers innocent fun with its roster of virtual beasts, alongside an unapologetic investment in the welfare of real animals, blennies included.
Read the full review in the forthcoming March 2023 issue of Afterimage journal.
[1] Britannica, T. Editors of Encyclopaedia. "blenny." Encyclopedia Britannica. Accessed December 30, 2022. https://www.britannica.com/animal/blenny.
[2] Lewis Gordon, “Games like Stray and Endling are creating more realistic animals,” The Verge, July 22, 2022, https://www.theverge.com/2022/7/22/23272850/stray-endling-video-game-animals. On Twitter, the account @CatsWatchStray is devoted entirely to cats watching Stray.
[3] Van Ooijen, Erik (2018), ‘The Killability of Fish in The Sims 3: Pets and Stardew Valley’, The Computer Games Journal, 7:3, pp. 173–80, doi:10.1007/s40869-018-0055-x.
