A.V. Club writers Jen Lennon and William Hughes debate the popularity of petting animals in video games, exploring both the fun and potentially frustrating aspects of this trend.
A.V. Club writers Jen Lennon and William Hughes go head-to-head about the trend of saying hello to animals in video games .writers discuss their varied perspectives on a pop-culture topic. This time, Jen Lennon and William Hughes discuss the temptation of interacting with all the very good animals in video games .
Maybe I’m so susceptible to it because I don’t have any pets in real life, but I love animals. It’s possible that my tolerance for this sort of stuff is higher than yours because I’m lacking in actual furry friends.
There’s another piece of the puzzle for me, too: Does the type of animal make a difference to you at all? Are you more likely to give in to scritches for animals for which you have a particular fondness? I’m a crazy dog person but I couldn’t give less of a shit about cats, so it’s very easy for me to ignore a cat in a game. And, in fact, if there’s only a cat and no dog, I’m a lot more likely to see the animal interaction mechanic as manipulative and refuse to engage with it on principle.
Getting back to the topic at hand, you mentioned that there are meaningful human-animal relationships in video games that you’ve actually enjoyed; what are some of the ones that make the cut for you?I am proud to call myself an equal-opportunity hater: If there’s some kind of animal I haven’t seen get this treatment in a game before, I might give it a test-snuggle just to see the animation, but neither digital pups nor virtual kitties get the automatic “Aw!” from me.
As to your second question, there have been tons of rich animal-human relationships I’ve been invested in in games: I teared up when Argo the horse fell initself a nod and say I have plenty of affection for Dog from the first game in the series, who’s as happy tearing out Darkspawn throats as he is fetching a ball.
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