Last week, when Guild Wars 2 revealed its latest minipet, there was a minor squabble on the forums as some players objected to it. The minipet depicts a fish flopping around gasping for air, like, y’know, dying fish do. Worth pointing out here is that this fish doesn’t die; it just follows you around suffocating eternally because minipets are magic.
The original poster wasn’t screaming for PETA or anything, just raising the question for feedback. “While I know it’s not real, it does give me an ‘Ick feeling’ as I watched it lie there gasping for air, so I would vote for a change in animation,” the player wrote calmly, asking for other opinions. The replies started out well, but it didn’t take before the insults started: the OP was “ruining a gag” with “political correctness” and “whining” and “safe spaces,” the usual. Oh, MMORPG forums.
Maybe we can do better than that — I thought it was an interesting question. Obviously most of us spend a lot of time in video games slaughtering animals, but death is usually sanitized and cartoonish in most MMOs, so we rarely see long, drawn-out death animations, and we’re rarely asked to torture enemies. It seems to me that’s what has people squeamish, the same way many people eat meat but don’t want the animals to suffer. And obviously MMOs aren’t “real,” but that doesn’t mean your reactions to what you see on the screen aren’t real (or aren’t justified).
So what do you think — does the fish bother you enough to not buy it? Where do you stand on depictions of animal cruelty in MMORPGs?
(Thanks, Tanek!)
Every morning, the Massively Overpowered writers team up with mascot Mo to ask MMORPG players pointed questions about the massively multiplayer online roleplaying genre. Grab a mug of your preferred beverage and take a stab at answering the question posed in today’s Daily Grind!
