Palworld's One Good Question
Nate Schmidt, Contributing Editor
“Can they suffer?”
It’s a big question—according to some utilitarian proponents of animal rights, Jeremy Bentham’s question from his Introduction to the Principles of Morals and Legislation is the most important question. If animals can suffer—and it is pretty obvious that they can, and do—then humans have a moral obligation to mitigate that suffering, just as we have a moral obligation to mitigate human suffering. Now, there are philosophies other than utilitarianism that make a better case for the rights of animals without asking us to accept a bunch of other problematic ideas, but Palworld’s exploding popularity still has me thinking quite a bit about Jeremy Bentham. As far as I can tell, Palworld is a pretty stupid game that raises one very good question: how do we decide when to care about the suffering of animals in video games?
Pocketpair, the developer of Palworld, has tried to make the case that the game is more than just “Pokémon with guns,” even though the game’s promotional material heavily emphasized that element of the gameplay. Pocketpair emphasizes a few other things on the game’s Steam page, too. See if you can spot a pattern:
“Pals can be used to fight, or they can be made to work on farms or factories. You can even sell them or eat them!”
“To survive, you must tread carefully and make difficult choices...even if that means eating your own Pals when the time comes.”
“Don't worry; there are no labor laws for Pals.”
“Build a factory, place a Pal in it, and they'll keep working as long as they're fed—until they're dead, that is.”
“They'll protect your life—even if it costs their own.”
“Endangered Pals live in wildlife sanctuaries. Sneak in and capture rare Pals to get rich quick! It's not a crime if you don't get caught, after all.”
Image by Pocketpair via Steam.
The Pals of Palworld are not what we’d call “subjects”—thinking beings that have their own motives, desires, and agency (as in “subject vs. object”). Rather, the Pals are more reflective of Descartes’ mechanical account of animal existence. Descartes basically argued that the animals’ inability to express themselves intelligibly to humans meant that they had no soul or mind, and anything that had no soul or mind had to be a kind of machine. I think, therefore I am, but animals do not think, therefore they are not anything more than robots. For Descartes, and for Palworld players, animals are cheap and disposable, good for labor and food, and easy to dispense with when no longer useful. Killing a Pal is a loss of resources, nothing more. In fact, killing a Pal to eat it or to protect yourself from danger could be seen as a net gain, depending on your point of view. This is why Bentham’s question, even though it also has its limits, is more sophisticated than Descartes’ theory. Broken machines don’t suffer. Broken creatures do.
Therefore, the troubling way animal suffering is represented in this game is a lot more interesting to me as a critic than the issue of Palworld’s unoriginality. The fact that it is a blatantly unoriginal game is not even up for debate, and that is arguably its main draw: a lot of people like ARK, and Pokémon, and Breath of the Wild, and this game inelegantly mashes those three together like breadsticks, spaghetti, and salad in a blender. The mashup, or the content smoothie, is our cultural moment’s dominant aesthetic. Peter Griffin is in Fortnite; Fortnite is in Magic: The Gathering. Ever since the first Avengers movie, everything is mashed up into everything else, and every savvy marketer knows that the slurry sells like it’s steamy fresh hotcakes. Mix the puerile humor of Happy Tree Friends into a stew made of other popular games, and you get a recipe for instant success. No big mystery there.
Nevertheless, by saying the quiet part about Pokémon out loud—that we have always been expected to suspend our disbelief about the obvious exploitation of adorable made-up creatures in games like this—Palworld inaugurates a social experiment in the limits of tastelessness. How much brutality towards nonhuman beings is too much? Apparently, for quite a few people, Palworld doesn’t hit that limit. It’s just a game, after all—a game that more or less point-for-point reproduces the way animals are actually treated in the parts of the world that have adopted the factory farming model. Go ahead: look back up at the quotes pulled from the Steam page, and replace the word “Pal” with “animal.” How many of those quotes become simple statements of fact about the place of animals in the twenty-first century? In the United States, unless an animal is a service dog, a cop, or an actor, there functionally are no labor laws for them. And dairy cows will indeed keep working as long as they are fed—until they are dead, that is. In fact, as Vox’s Marina Bolotnikova reminds us, you are more likely in the United States to go to jail for protesting animal cruelty than for committing it.
I am not convinced that Palworld brings anything particularly new or valuable to the table when it comes to narrative or gameplay. We’ve seen survival crafting before. We’ve seen the management of dozens of little minions before. And literally every adult who has any familiarity with the Pokémon franchise has noticed the fact that it is basically all about a worldwide cockfighting ring, and we’ve chosen to move on with our lives; almost all of us never chose to make a whole game to prove how edgy we are for noticing. But the game does make me think about the times that I accidentally locked on to an animal in Elden Ring and pointlessly killed it to get it out of the way. It reminds me of the Tears of the Kingdom quest that I needed meat for, so I killed a non-hostile animal just to get it over with, even though I could have stolen meat from a Moblin camp with just a little more effort. It makes me ask who the villain is in Shadow of the Colossus. In other words, just when I am starting to feel righteous about how stupid Palworld is, I find myself face to face with the fact that I am often much more like Descartes than Bentham in the good games that I choose to spend my time and money on instead.
Now, I’m not shedding tears for all the Koopas I’ve jumped on as Mario. Speaking perhaps too generally, games need enemies, and many games are predicated upon the casual and cartoonish slaughter of nonhuman animals, just as many more games are predicated upon the casual slaughter of other people. I know it’s not real. But Palworld’s one good question leads me to another question, one I hope I’ll be thinking about long after this game is little more than a meme. How does the way we interact with digital animals reflect our beliefs and convictions about the treatment of physical ones? Or, perhaps more honestly: what is the amount of suffering by which we are willing to be entertained?
