Configurations

Game by Tom Tyler playfully explores the intersections between animals and games, especially video games. It consists of 13 concise essays and discusses a wide selection of video games spanning various decades, including the earliest periods of the gaming industry, the 1970s and 80s. The book provides a fascinating glimpse into how ubiquitous animals have always been in video games, as companions, adversaries, targets for hunting, items for trading and food, and even as paw prints, scent trails, and stools. Fittingly for a book on games, moreover, it makes us aware of the rules and conventions of the game and takes pleasure in unsettling them at every opportunity. This makes the book deeply thought-provoking, challenging many of our preconceptions of what games are and why we “humans” play them. Grounded in animal studies, the book critiques a key rule of the game, human exceptionalism—the view that we humans are different from and superior to all other organisms—according to which we think about, deal with, and exploit other animals. The book title, Game, is well chosen to challenge the border between real life and the realm of video games, allowing us to see the extent to which human exceptionalism is built into our digital realm of play. As Tyler explains, “game,” which etymologically means amusement and entertainment, came to be associated with specific types of amusement—namely, hunting. The word, therefore, refers to an activity of killing animals for sport, and also the animals thus hunted and killed. Many video games are revealed to be “a game about game,”¹ which enacts hunting or other forms of bodily “animal” entertainment. As such, video games are a vital medium through which to rethink fundamentally our relationship with nonhumans.

Video games, with their advanced technological features, excel at providing an opportunity to “become animal” and explore a nonhuman perspective. For instance, Game has a chapter on the game Dog’s Life (2003), wherein players take on the role of a dog who explores the canine environment using its keen sense of smell, which Tyler interestingly explores in conversation with Jakob von Uexküll’s concept of Umwelt. However, Game’s predominant focus is on more sobering instances of becoming animal: our own vulnerability and creatureliness as animals. For instance, playing a video game is to experience “death” every time we see a “Game Over” screen; we even find ourselves hunted by all kinds of nonhuman predators, a situation Tyler wittily summarizes as “the inevitability of becoming a meal for zombies” (chapter 6). Chapter 9, “Meanings of Meat,” includes an analysis of Super Meat Boy (2010), a video game featuring [End Page 379] an avatar portrayed as a piece of red meat. This avatar is supposedly a human boy without skin, “completely exposed to the dangers and threats you encounter.”²

Game shows that we ourselves are game meat, which amplifies the vegan messages that recur throughout the book. This is most prominent in the last chapter, “Trojan Horses,” where Tyler likens the whole book to a video game, Trojan Horse (1981), in that it secretly smuggles in vegan sensibility to disarm its opponents. In this context, chapter 8, “Cows, Clicks, Ciphers, and Satire” is particularly interesting. In it, Tyler demonstrates how playing an online game can lead to addiction and the enslavement of human players. Compulsively clicking away our precious time and personal information, we become part of the technological capitalist machine, not unlike the way farm animals are part of the meat industry that processes and exploits their flesh.

Game draws on an impressively wide variety of materials to discuss video games. These include etymologies, medieval fables, literary and philosophical texts, historical facts, Anglican apologetics, a fishing manual, and a memoir by a physicist and wartime pioneer of radar technology. While these sources might seem unusual for a video game book and even too eclectic, they perform an important job of connecting virtual worlds to our other realities. In chapter 2, for example, Tyler discusses the appearance and respawning of game animals...