A new Pokémon game is out and PETA, being who and what they are, have launched an inept parody campaign against it. In this case, it’s particularly grating, as the Pokémon series they’re talking about raises some legitimately troubling issues about the way culture handles those of us with staunch views about animal rights.

In the first Pokémon: Black And White (the new game is a sequel), one of the villains is a kid who, raised among abused pokémon, launches a campaign to end the captivity of the creatures and the practice of forcing them to participate in glorified dogfights. The mantra of his organization is “Pokémon liberation,” a pretty clear reference to the most famous modern text on animal rights. The player character, by contrast, spends the game convincing this character that “slavery is OK if we’re not bad masters.” Moreover, the movement gets hijacked by a self-interested subordinate, who reveals the idea of Pokémon liberation was a stalking horse for a plot to take over the world from the get-go.

In short, the animal rights movement is a sham; anyone who legitimately believes the way we treat animals is immoral is a dupe for powerful, nefarious interests. You can see why that might be troubling.

There’s a danger in taking this too seriously; Pokémon is a sorta brainless kids game (that I unconditionally loved at age 12). But at the same time, it’s part and parcel of a broader culture that makes the use and abuse of animals normative at a very young age. Thoroughgoing animal welfare supporters are a distinct minority in the United States; using veganism/vegetarianism rates as a proxy for a more broadly animal-friendly lifestyle, only about seven percent of the American population qualify. As a consequence, concern about animal welfare isn’t exactly well represented in American public life; quite the opposite. Politicians sneer at concern for animals; spectacles like dogfighting and cockfighting are sadly common despite being criminalized. Even some things that may seem like advancements, like the cancellation of horseracing drama Luck after the death of three stunt-horses, remind us of the underlying brutality in the extant, legal horseracing industry.

The pervasiveness of the use and abuse of animals for human pleasure creates a particularly tough environment for parents who want to raise their kids with similar values. Kids aren’t critical consumers; they’re apt to treat accept inhumane spectacles like dogracing or mass consumption of factory-farmed meat as normal. These elements of American culture are unproblematic for most and hence quite pervasive once you start looking for them. Teaching children to abhor these forms of animal cruelty is fraught in all the ways familiar to parents who want to instill pride in difference in the face of normalizing pressures.

So it’s grating when a popular kids title goes out of its way to marginalize animal welfare advocates. Is it the end of the world? Hardly. But Pokémon’s casually violent message isn’t something that should be dismissed as a consequence of a PETA stunt; it should be treated as indicative of the broader cultural difficulties that parents face in an animal-using world.

By Andrea Peterson

My first reaction to hearing the Game of Thrones RPG was being published by Atlus was enthusiasm, despite early warning signs. Atlus is best known for the Shin Megami Tensei and Persona series—and more recently the psychological to the point of bizarre horror platformer Catherine. But Persona 2: Innocent Sin and Persona 3 remain among my favorite games of all times, the latter marrying JRPG elements with a relationship building system that is best described as bordering on dating simulation. At first glance a publisher who specializes in JRPGs in contemporary settings might seem an odd choice to help bring the gritty medieval world of Westeros to videogames. But these games all share a common and strong linear narrative-focused game structures that gave me hope Atlus would guide Cyanide Studios into creating an experience worthy of George R.R. Martin’s epic fantasy series (and the much-lauded HBO adaption). .

Atlus games’ emphasis on relationship development and pushing the envelope of using videogames as storytelling platforms about the good and evil in worlds where the line between reality and fantasy blur seemed a beautiful, if unexpected, fit for the intrigue-riddled saga of A Song of Fire and Ice. As another guest post on this blog noted, the strength of the Game of Thrones lies in the drama of the interactions between a rich set of characters with complex motivations, rather than on the battlefield in a hack-and-slash adventure.

Despite being set in a universe that shares more similarities with traditional western style settings of Skyrim and Dragon Age than most JRPGs, the intricate web of political alignments and betrayals that have already been set in proverbial stone as Game of Thrones canon seemed a prohibitive barrier to the more open concept exploration that define recent western RPGs. A game fleshing out stories in the extended universe of Westeros seemed a perfect stylistic companion to the rich personal narratives that so define the books and HBO series. JRPGs from the more traditional Final Fantasy to Atlus’ own Persona series tend rein in the sheer scope of settings and player options in favor of delving deeper into the quest at hand and character development, creating experiences defined by the story being told with combat as an important, but secondary, secondary aspect.

Unfortunately, the Game of Thrones RPG takes this tactic too far: The storyline is by far the highpoint, to the neglect of nearly all other aspects. The graphics feel dated, particularly compared to other recently released fantasy RPGs, and despite subtle strategy elements the combat is an exercise in repetition that left me at times wishing I could skip them a la Jennifer Hepler’s suggestion. This is especially true because the game follows parallel tales of a veteran of the Night’s Watch and a Red Priest returning to court after self-imposed exile and the way they cross pths with familiar faces from the HBO series. It would have been a satisfying standalone addition to Westeros lore if the gameplay and presentation weren’t so lackluster.

At the end of the day I became increasingly frustrated by the ways the game fell short of Atlus’s usual standards and Game of Thrones‘ potential. It does provide a platform for more engaging stories set in the Seven Kingdoms, but the execution of the game play falls short of its clear ambitions. I still enjoyed playing the Game of Thrones RPG because of my affection for the source material, but it left me wishing it had another year to incubate so it could develop a combat system with more nuance and graphics matching the visual polish of the HBO series. Ironically, the incompleteness of the experience probably was tied to a marketing decision to push the game out in time with the end of this season of Game of Thrones. The game is not a definitive failure and while I know better than to expect every licensed game is going to be a Chronicles of Riddick, it’s still disappointing to see a collaboration and concept with such promise pushed to market prematurely.

GamePolitics notes that presidential campaigns are increasingly interested in turning the work of running for office into games. This isn’t exactly a new idea: Howard Dean’s campaign had a Dean for Iowa game, where you could allocate campaign resources, canvas, and wave signs for your candidate. But things like this are a shadow of actual engagement — they don’t actually get voters registered or voters out on election day — and they produce a shadow of the feeling of actually being part of a movement. If you want to turn campaigns into games that people are meaningfully invested in, you’ve got to go real-world rather than virtual, and to change the way you manage volunteers on the ground, or to provide alternate opportunities for volunteers. I’m no Jane McGonigal, but you could set up competitions to register the most voters with the fewest registration cards thrown out for problems with signatures or addresses, or do scavenger hunts where you only get clues if you’ve registered enough votes along the way. Any game would have to be organized to place high value on compliance with election law, and to provide appropriate training to player-volunteers. The problem with campaign work is that a lot of it is difficult and dull, oriented towards compliance rather than innovation — and for good reason, electoral law is not unimportant. So finding ways to innovate while also taking advantage of the experience and knowledge of folks who have kept the flame alive will be key not just to good experiences for new volunteers, but to keeping the process running in a way that’s genuinely useful to campaigns.