Something that frequently bothers me is the way animals are treated in games. There are a few dimensions to this: Often, the only animals represented in a game are those which pose a direct threat, aggressive predators which attack at the earliest opportunity: Wolves, bears, giant spiders, and so forth. This is, of course, rather unnatural behavior to start with: Animals might attack a human being when hungry or threatened, but it’s generally fairly rare. Of course, this weird one-dimensionality isn’t really any different than how games tend to treat human enemies or other supposedly intelligent entities like aliens and androids, so there’s no particular reason for this to bother me – aside from that, in these cases, there’s usually a narrative conceit behind these entities being so uniformly hostile, some opposing organization or ideology, whereas with these animals it’s just represented as being in their nature. Indeed, as these real creatures’ active casting as unalterably aggressive attackers often coincides with the real-world over-hunting and extermination of their species, it’s hard not to feel that this is a fundamentally irresponsible way of depicting them.
That’s only one side of the coin though. The flip side is that any species not depicted this way – particularly herbivores such as cattle or deer – are depicted as inherently gentle and harmless, such that they will invariably run if attacked (or simply die). Running away is certainly a first resort for many animals, but this becomes absolutely ludicrous in cases where you have creatures such as notoriously belligerent and durable wild pigs and absolute units like moose meekly submit to death. The passivity of these creatures is a counterpart to the aggression of the predatory species mentioned above – and seems to break down fairly cleanly along the lines of what sorts of animal humans are accustomed to eating.
These are both part of the essential tokenizing process that generates an entity in a game, though. While a physical object may have complex physical properties, in the game this is all simplified and turned into a simple symbol for convenience: A real pistol has weight, material, cost, date of manufacture, etc, whereas for the purpose of the game it’s just an object that is equipped to do damage at range when you click. The same thing happens to entities in the game, regardless of what creature they’re meant to be portraying: A wolf has a body, a mind, memory, ongoing biological processes, but for the purpose of the game it’s just a creature that attacks you if it sees you. This is to some degree a necessary part of making a game: No matter how realistic or robust your simulation, you’re certainly going to have to abstract at some level to make the thing actually run. What is less necessary is this specific simplistic implementation: Indeed, in terms of details of internal logic, more effort is frequently put into the pistol than into the wolf.
Even more jarring is that even games which aren’t about violence tend to often fall into this same sort of shallow tokenization. In cute and gentle games animals become prized, not for their valuable pelts and teeth to be used in some grotesque crafting system, but for their innate cuteness. They are collected like toys, arrayed like a zoo, stripped of any agency – in its own way, a fate just as disturbing as that of the tokenization of perfect predator or perfect prey, a kind of adorable taxidermy.
There’s not really a simple thing one can do to address these issues, aside from avoiding using real-world animals entirely. Creating a more robust set of behaviors which lead a creature to decide between fight or flight, friend and foe, would be a fascinating design space but one which few games have room for, since it’s usually necessary to straightforwardly convey to the player how they need to be interacting with each entity. The main thing I want is just for designers to have some awareness of how weird this is – and, at very least, to stop making wild boars feeble targets or perfectly passive prey creatures, when we all are familiar with the terror that 30-50 wild hogs can bring.