We live in a glorious age where video games are bigger and more mainstream than ever, allowing us to live out elaborate fantasies and experience worlds we never thought possible. But for all that games have done to allow us some sort of moral choice during gameplay, very few actually celebrate, or even encourage, living a vegetarian lifestyle.
Have you sat down and thought about your favorite gaming characters for a bit and seen if they align with your own beliefs? Sure, we all want to be the hero (and maybe the villain from time to time), but do we have any characters that are truly ciphers for our own personalities and beliefs? Let’s take Mario as a simple example. He’s about as harmless as he gets in terms of family appeal, and while he spends a lot of time eating mostly organic mushrooms, leaves, flowers, and other foods, he’s been known to love a good spaghetti and meatballs when he’s not saving the princess. link from The legend of Zelda It seems like a nice dress for the land type of character, but when you think about it, he runs around killing the native creatures around the area and stealing their hearts to get back to health. He seems cartoonish and innocent, but in short, he feeds on the hearts of his enemies.
Things only get worse the further you look back, as the standard healing item in games used to be meat. In castlevaniaSimon Belmot used to find whole roast chickens inside walls and somehow heal himself from devouring them (vegetarian or not, eating random meat found on an old wall is not a wise decision).
How did we let things get so out of our control? Games regularly send us on adventures that require us to kill animals to continue. how much Final Fantasy What titles have you played where all forms of wildlife approach you, only to be attacked with Firaga? The game forces you to walk through dark forests, their natural habitats, and then rewards you with silly change for vandalizing them.
Oddly enough, some of the best examples of “vegetarian friendly” games tend to be the ones where there’s no story at all, like tetrisor the ones you wouldn’t even think of as video games, like farm. Somehow we’ve reached a point where farm stands as a positive example of an animal-friendly world, while obligations regularly has you snapping the dogs neck. Things get even more complicated if you’re vegan, leaving you with quite a bit of stink or maybe nintendogs. Y tetris. Fortunately we always have tetris (that L block is totally vegan, as if it wasn’t obvious).
Surprisingly, probably the most positive example of a game character leading a vegetarian lifestyle is super meat boy, a platform game considered “Nintendo Hard” by top gamers where you run around like a piece of meat trying to win back your girlfriend. Yes, you are playing as meat, but everything is meant to destroy you, leaving meat the pitiful victim of this harsh world.
Is that the best we can do? A technicality? Aren’t there vegetarian game designers who want to give us a high-quality game with a character that represents our lifestyle? For now, it seems that we are alone in this world of video games.