Playing the Animal in Shelter and Lost Ember
Nathan Schmidt, Contributing Editor
Let me start with a question: what’s the difference between playing and pretending? Sit with that one for a minute. When I play a game, to what extent am I pretending to be in the game? I’m reminded of the way Legend of Zelda games always let you name your character. Why go with anything other than “Link”? Except, of course, when you’re nine and you realize you can play Ocarina of Time as “Poopwad.” That’s a classic. But I always call him Link because it helps me immerse myself better—it helps me pretend. I want to play in this world as the Hero of Time himself, not some other schmuck.
Lost Ember, Mooneye Studios (2019).
But when I’m playing—engaging with the mechanics of the game—I’m not always necessarily doing it with the character in mind. This isn’t DnD, after all. I don’t get to ask, “Well, is Link the kind of character who would really want to kill Ganondorf?” Pretending is empathetic. It’s the difference between me playing Spider Solitaire by myself and me embodying an RPG character who has to complete a game of Spider Solitaire, before the evil digimancer locks me forever in the Netscape Dimension. And this is why games that make you play as an animal are so interesting.
Because, for a lot of people, the question of our relationship to animals is determined by empathy. The way I look at “add bacon for fifty cents” has a lot to do with whether I believe pigs are flesh machines that turn slop into shit or meaningfully sentient beings with the emotional range of a human toddler. The way I, as a potential predator, answer the question, “What is it like to be a pig?”, has pretty important ramifications, especially for the pig. This is where I think gamers are uniquely situated to have interesting answers, because we are playing around with empathy all the time. If I’m able to ask myself what it’s like to be Castlevania’s Simon Belmont, I should also be able to ask myself what it’s like to be a vampire bat.
Lost Ember, Mooneye Studios (2019).
Let me offer a couple of examples that will put some more meat on the bones of this idea. Both of these games have playing “as an animal” built right into them. The first is Mooneye Studios’ Lost Ember; the second is Might and Delight’s Shelter.
Lost Ember is explicitly billed as an “animal exploration adventure game.” You start the game as a wolf that’s benignly possessed by a human spirit trying to make her way into the afterlife. The draw to the game, for me, was the idea that you can play as any animal that you encounter in the game’s world. The game pretty much lives up to this promise—your spirit self is able to transmigrate from the wolf into various ducks and hummingbirds and (ugh) wombats (if you play the game yourself, you’ll see how the wombat parts get frustrating fast, mostly because they move so slow and they’re everywhere). There aren’t many significant challenges here. If you happen to fall off a cliff or something you just start right back in the place you fell from. It’s practically a walking simulator that sometimes turns into a rolling simulator, a digging simulator, or a flying simulator. Sometimes your little Navi-style spirit guide interrupts you with a cut-scene that reveals something about your life as a human. This is key: insofar as Lost Ember is about anything, it’s about using the mechanical ability to turn into an animal to tell a story about a human character.
Lost Ember, Mooneye Studios (2019).
In Shelter, on the other hand, you’re a badger, and you stay a badger. You have five little baby badgers that you have to keep fed and safe as you navigate the various problems that come with badger life, problems like eagles and prey that are faster than you are and swollen streams and forest fires. The gameplay is similar to Lost Ember, but without the human-story overlay. You have to figure out what kinds of things your badger-body is able to do that will help you keep as many of your badger-babies alive as possible. On your first playthrough, it’s more than likely that a bunch of your badger-babies will die, which is of course very sad, especially when they die of starvation because you accidentally fed one more than you fed the others.
Shelter (2013), Might and Delight
On the surface, these games are really similar. A set of simple controls allows you to wander around the world as an animal. But they call for two very different forms of empathy. In Lost Ember, you certainly play as an animal, but I’m not sure you’re actually asked to pretend to be one. The gameplay mostly goes like this: here is an obstacle that I cannot safely surmount as the animal that I’m playing as now. I will wander around until I find an animal with, for example, wings. Having switched to that animal, I will now fly over the cliff. And here’s a cutscene about why that cliff was significant in my past human life. The fact that I’m an animal is purely a matter of game mechanics. I could just as easily have been a running robot or a flying robot or a rolling robot. In Shelter, the badgerness of my badger is important. “Being an animal” isn’t just a means to an end or an excuse to play around with physics. Being an animal means something.
Shelter (2013), Might and Delight
The philosophical question of animal experience and cognition is a tricky thicket indeed, and will probably not be resolved in a video game. In Thomas Nagel’s famous essay “What Is It Like to Be a Bat?” he suggests that empathy is actually the problem: “At present we are completely unequipped to think about the subjective character of experience without relying on the imagination....This should be regarded as a challenge to form new concepts and devise a new method—an objective phenomenology not dependent on empathy or the imagination.” Estonian biologist Jakob von Uexküll suggests that all organisms experience the world through their own Umwelt, or environment, in which the differences between the kinds of sensory experience available to you and to your dog essentially mean that you two inhabit different worlds. The goal for Uexküll is not to get you to try to think like your dog, but to think about how it’s actually the otherness of different forms of life that makes the world a whole, like different notes in a symphony.
But there’s a difference between me being a big old philosopher sitting around wondering what it’s like to be a bat and the immersive experience of gameplay, isn’t there? This is why I still think that playing, pretending, and perhaps even empathizing are important. It’s also why I think that humans who make games about animals would do well to avoid the trap of using nonhuman life incidentally, in service to a human story. Maybe I can’t know what it’s like to be a bat…or a badger…or a wolf. But for a few hours, I can have that beautiful experience where I am simultaneously myself and not myself—playing at something caught in between animal, human, and interface.
