Accompaniment Song I Guess
The leading opinion on why PETA's digital satire projects are terrible focus primarily on both the intensity of the argument, and thereby the vindictiveness the satire has towards its target. The charge on the first claim primarily focuses on how ridiculous it is to put depictions of animal cruelty in a game franchise this cute, both for the digital representations and its real life animals. I find this preposterous and unfair. Most upset would probably find the premise funny if it was presented mainly as comedic in the same way plenty of newgrounds satires of mario in extreme violence against the koopas is seen as funny. Or the violent reinterpretation of Back to the Future in Rick & Morty is seen as funny. Hell people were playing that edgelord crap Cards Against Humanity openly at my old community college years ago, we are not nearly as sensitive as we make ourselves out to be.
You might be saying 'the digital blood, needles, and skinning doesn't bother me, it's the slaughterhouse videos!'. Well, even though their more brutal documentation videos are edited only to show you the worst parts, no doubt about it, that animal cruelty did happen somewhere and there is a point in raising awareness about how unregulated the meat market tends to be in the sense of warning people it can lead to this. Upton Sinclair's great socialist critique The Jungle got utilized as as a call for sanitation, ie regulation of that market for the interests of the common people. Recently I wrote about multiple meanings and how they are awful, but this is a very clear example to me of how double meanings can actually have a positive effect. In a post-covid world it would be nonsensical to care about the wellbeing and leisure of working class people but also believe that sanitation is a corruption. Anyway moving from a point of humor to a sudden sentimental moment happens all the time in art, hell its a volatility that Undertale is built entirely off of.
The 2nd claim is that it makes for mean spirited satire. I agree completely here. In this one, for example, they reinterpret Ash Ketchum as a vindictive asshole who only desires to keep pikachu in a poke ball despite the show itself speaking heavily to the opposite and all of the trainers as acting maliciously. In their previously outsourced title Mario Kills Tanooki (2011) they depict the world of mario as a world of hate. There's also an irony in there work that in order to change the minds of people you have to shock, upset, or even fight them first. There's no case where in the pokemon satires you solve a problem in advance purely through a non-violent discussion when even in Pokemon itself this does sometimes actually happen, you dont have to fight the shop keeper to buy items, and the pokemon center is free. However just because I agree that this is a mean spirited satire which misses the appeal doesn't mean that I think robs a narrative tale of its impact. A racing title I haven't discussed yet is The Zoo Race (2007). An utterly repugnant work of christian nationalism where every level ends with flags and humans have been warped against their wills in a hollow desert race. This 'satire' of racing games mainly exists for the purposes of appealing to the player to jesus and the story of Noah. Make no mistake its also very mean spirited, the very conceit of it is mean spirited. Yet in its ignorance and cruelty I found myself so distressed and nauseated I actually ended up enjoying the piece in an esoteric way. The ignorance and the fact it so effectively represented a message opposite from the one it was trying very clearly to convey made it endearing in a sort of fucked up way. I think people actually have a sense of appeal here to because of the love for 'so bad its good' films like The Room (2003) or the work of Niel Breen. Or hell even christian films themselves already bring this unique lust and love, and so to give a work a low appreciation only for the crime of ignorance is silly when you regard that.
No, what makes the PETA satires poor are much more specific. For one, all of their oeuvre is outsourced. The person behind the pokemon satires is not the same person who worked on Kitten Squad. PETA is just a publisher, and while the devs are probably sympathetic to the organizations' messaging that publisher relationship means their relationship is far more hands off in terms of talent. Implying that nobody within the organization proper has the ability to put something like this together or make development input, making them come off incredibly out of touch when you work through the works published under them, being ancillary to your own message is lame. Furthermore, there's a bite missing how agency is applied. Without jumping around from each too much, in the Pokemon satires, the pokemon do not have a voice of their own, there is still a prompt that asks the player what they think the names of the liberated characters should be. The player actually has too much autonomy and power across their entire work, they choose the names and the fights are always terribly easy. The conflicts are nonexistent, it's just a way to get from one moral message to the next.
What's my point here, why am I even talking about this? Well this is the endpoint of giving the player too much agency in their seamless experience and applying no friction beyond your moral 'arguments' that could have just been posted in a blog post like this. You died? It's ok we had a checkpoint autosaved for you because we really wanted you to see that message. These satires are completely lame and disposable, they are frictionless and don't test the player at all. However this is just the norm really, stories that preach at the player endlessly is the endpoint of 'gaming' if the friction of an experience is not centered in any way. If the only friction found is in a series of literally skippable cutscenes then whats the point? I shouldn't be able to skip your own message, literally take the skip cutscene button away from me, at least that some friction. I think less of your piece if you don't do this. There are so many AAA titles that are just Pokémon Black & Blue, to a tee but it's fine, and I guess you could say that that trickles down into how everyone else makes their titles frictionless. Anyway I'm not mad definitely c:
The leading opinion on why PETA's digital satire projects are terrible focus primarily on both the intensity of the argument, and thereby the vindictiveness the satire has towards its target. The charge on the first claim primarily focuses on how ridiculous it is to put depictions of animal cruelty in a game franchise this cute, both for the digital representations and its real life animals. I find this preposterous and unfair. Most upset would probably find the premise funny if it was presented mainly as comedic in the same way plenty of newgrounds satires of mario in extreme violence against the koopas is seen as funny. Or the violent reinterpretation of Back to the Future in Rick & Morty is seen as funny. Hell people were playing that edgelord crap Cards Against Humanity openly at my old community college years ago, we are not nearly as sensitive as we make ourselves out to be.
You might be saying 'the digital blood, needles, and skinning doesn't bother me, it's the slaughterhouse videos!'. Well, even though their more brutal documentation videos are edited only to show you the worst parts, no doubt about it, that animal cruelty did happen somewhere and there is a point in raising awareness about how unregulated the meat market tends to be in the sense of warning people it can lead to this. Upton Sinclair's great socialist critique The Jungle got utilized as as a call for sanitation, ie regulation of that market for the interests of the common people. Recently I wrote about multiple meanings and how they are awful, but this is a very clear example to me of how double meanings can actually have a positive effect. In a post-covid world it would be nonsensical to care about the wellbeing and leisure of working class people but also believe that sanitation is a corruption. Anyway moving from a point of humor to a sudden sentimental moment happens all the time in art, hell its a volatility that Undertale is built entirely off of.
The 2nd claim is that it makes for mean spirited satire. I agree completely here. In this one, for example, they reinterpret Ash Ketchum as a vindictive asshole who only desires to keep pikachu in a poke ball despite the show itself speaking heavily to the opposite and all of the trainers as acting maliciously. In their previously outsourced title Mario Kills Tanooki (2011) they depict the world of mario as a world of hate. There's also an irony in there work that in order to change the minds of people you have to shock, upset, or even fight them first. There's no case where in the pokemon satires you solve a problem in advance purely through a non-violent discussion when even in Pokemon itself this does sometimes actually happen, you dont have to fight the shop keeper to buy items, and the pokemon center is free. However just because I agree that this is a mean spirited satire which misses the appeal doesn't mean that I think robs a narrative tale of its impact. A racing title I haven't discussed yet is The Zoo Race (2007). An utterly repugnant work of christian nationalism where every level ends with flags and humans have been warped against their wills in a hollow desert race. This 'satire' of racing games mainly exists for the purposes of appealing to the player to jesus and the story of Noah. Make no mistake its also very mean spirited, the very conceit of it is mean spirited. Yet in its ignorance and cruelty I found myself so distressed and nauseated I actually ended up enjoying the piece in an esoteric way. The ignorance and the fact it so effectively represented a message opposite from the one it was trying very clearly to convey made it endearing in a sort of fucked up way. I think people actually have a sense of appeal here to because of the love for 'so bad its good' films like The Room (2003) or the work of Niel Breen. Or hell even christian films themselves already bring this unique lust and love, and so to give a work a low appreciation only for the crime of ignorance is silly when you regard that.
No, what makes the PETA satires poor are much more specific. For one, all of their oeuvre is outsourced. The person behind the pokemon satires is not the same person who worked on Kitten Squad. PETA is just a publisher, and while the devs are probably sympathetic to the organizations' messaging that publisher relationship means their relationship is far more hands off in terms of talent. Implying that nobody within the organization proper has the ability to put something like this together or make development input, making them come off incredibly out of touch when you work through the works published under them, being ancillary to your own message is lame. Furthermore, there's a bite missing how agency is applied. Without jumping around from each too much, in the Pokemon satires, the pokemon do not have a voice of their own, there is still a prompt that asks the player what they think the names of the liberated characters should be. The player actually has too much autonomy and power across their entire work, they choose the names and the fights are always terribly easy. The conflicts are nonexistent, it's just a way to get from one moral message to the next.
What's my point here, why am I even talking about this? Well this is the endpoint of giving the player too much agency in their seamless experience and applying no friction beyond your moral 'arguments' that could have just been posted in a blog post like this. You died? It's ok we had a checkpoint autosaved for you because we really wanted you to see that message. These satires are completely lame and disposable, they are frictionless and don't test the player at all. However this is just the norm really, stories that preach at the player endlessly is the endpoint of 'gaming' if the friction of an experience is not centered in any way. If the only friction found is in a series of literally skippable cutscenes then whats the point? I shouldn't be able to skip your own message, literally take the skip cutscene button away from me, at least that some friction. I think less of your piece if you don't do this. There are so many AAA titles that are just Pokémon Black & Blue, to a tee but it's fine, and I guess you could say that that trickles down into how everyone else makes their titles frictionless. Anyway I'm not mad definitely c:
Erato_Heti
1 year ago