Do fish have feelings? How developers decide which animals we can kill

Have you ever virtually kill something or someone? In a videogame, it is quite a common task to perform. Take First-person shooters, for example. One will not expect to shoot at glass bottles or paper targets in this genre of games. Different levels of violence are present in various videogames genres and players are used to it. What they may not realize though, is how the game can be ideologically biased depending on who or what the player can hurt. This issue was addressed by Erik van Ooijen.

Player’s objective in most action games is to kill a human being. The task of an ordinary shooter game is to kill enemies and not get killed by them, but how about allies, civilians, and other NPCs? What happens if you accidentally (or intentionally) shoot at a soldier in the same uniform you are wearing? Well, it is up to the game developers. They may disable the shooting option while aiming at someone whose killing is not part of a task. They can allow shooting and visibly hurting them, but not to the extent they fall dead. Or they can not only let the players kill anyone but also motivate them to do so. 

Where are all the children?

Grand theft auto series by Rockstar is famous for having a lot of options that let players do simply whatever they want. That includes roaming around the city and killing innocent pedestrians. GTA games have very detailed worlds but what you won’t find in any of the cities in the games, are children. The developers rather choose to distort the authenticity of the world than to possibly take an option away from players. In other words, Rockstar avoided the moral dilemma of whether in-game children should be made killable. Funnily enough, they address this issue by putting kid-related easter eggs in their games, for example, abandoned school buses.

“Killing Kids may be a little too much, even for GTA.”

u/mage_g4 on reddit

Violence is not the domain of only game genres that are generally considered violent. The act of killing animals is present in various games, some of them being very child-friendly. Erik van Ooijen in his article The Killability of Fish in The Sims 3: Pets and Stardew Valley describes two examples of games, that as he says: “Construct a hierarchy of classes of animals that are either included in, or excluded from, the realm of moral concern.” What he means is that although these games promote animal care, there seem to be exceptions to which species are considered animals. 

Let’s grow a steak!

In the life simulator The Sims 3, the idea of death is present. While the act itself is still a little cartoony, the characters can die because of old age or an accident. The greatest act of violence in this game, however, is nothing more than slapping or pinching another Sim. The human characters cannot seriously harm or kill each other. The same holds for animals in the Pets DLC. This add-on introduces various species that you can either control in the same way as human characters (cats, dogs, horses) or keep as decoration pieces in cages or terrariums (lizards, snakes, rodents, turtles, birds, and fish). All of those animals have to be fed by the player, or they will die, but again, there is no option to directly harm or kill them, with one exception. This exception has fins and lives underwater. 

Yes, players in The Sims 3 Pets, can fish in ponds and ocean and put their caught fish in an aquarium as minor pets. But despite that, they can also cook and eat them. That makes the fish the only killable animal in the game. Fish can also be used as fertilizer, which is even more interesting. We did not mention that The Sims avoids animal cruelty to the degree that the other meat products used for cooking grow in gardens like plants. At this point, it should not be difficult to guess what you can use to make your cruelty-free steaks grow faster.

Pescaterian Valley

The moral exception regarding fish is not exclusive to The Sims 3. Another game that is quite similar to The Sims 3 is Stardew Valley. This farming simulator puts the player in charge of a small farm. The animal-friendly ambition in this game is so strong that it does not offer the option to keep livestock for meat.

As the game’s only developer Eric Barone said: “I didn’t want to have that sort of violence. You give the animals names, pet them, and a little heart goes above their head and stuff, and then you butcher them? […] It just felt wrong. It didn’t jibe with the feeling I was going for with the game, so I cut that, and I don’t regret it.” Therefore the player cannot slaughter the animals for meat and the animals generate different products instead (cows and sheep are milked, pigs dig out truffles).

“I didn’t want to have that sort of violence. You give the animals names, pet them, and a little heart goes above their head and stuff, and then you butcher them? […] It just felt wrong. It didn’t jibe with the feeling I was going for with the game, so I cut that, and I don’t regret it.”

Eric Barone, the author of Stardew Valley

The absence of the meat creates difficulties in Stardew Valley, even though the player can cook from farmed goods, among 70 or so recipes, not a single one contains meat, aside from, yet again, fish. Players can catch fish in the river or the ocean and keep it in their inventories alive before they put it in an artificial pond at their farm, where they can reproduce and generate various goods. Another option is to use the fish as a cooking ingredient. So while Stadew Valley tries to strongly convey the animal care message, it is even more striking how it excludes this animal class. 

It is probably not this attribution’s role to find or judge the cultural reasons why humanity perceives some animal species as closer to humans and therefore more worthy of our care. We know that people pull trillions of marine animals out of seas and oceans every year. This is possible because our society makes those animals killable. As a part of the cultural process, computer games have an impact too.