Press X to Pet: A Critical Analysis of Dog-Petting Mechanics in High-Profile (MMO)RPGS

ABSTRACT

Within high-profile RPGs, dogs (and other nonhuman animals) often cannot be petted. This state of affairs has been changing, though, in response to player demand. In this article, I argue that players want pet-type animals categorized as petable to maintain anthropocentric notions of the relationship between humans and animals. Pairing the idea of petability with that killability, I examine Alice, a German shepherd, from The Last of Us 2 (2020), Fortnite (2017) patch 8.40 (2019), and Patrick Lenton’s (2016) viral Twitter thread about The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim (2011). Each of these texts features very different reasons for dogs being present and very different ways the player can interact with these in-game dogs. Using the notion of killability to examine the role of pet-type animals, the implicit beliefs about the place and purpose of dogs are made explicit within game worlds. These examples of ‘pet-able’ dogs speak to cultural anxieties surrounding companionate human–animal relationships. Incapable of interacting with pet-type animals in friendly or familial ways, players either must acknowledge the arbitrariness of anthropocentric friend/object divides or reassert the (il)logics of contemporary American anthropocentrism and demand the ability to press X to pet.

KEYWORDS:

• Critical animal studies
• pets
• video games
• human–animal interactions
• game studies
• Skyrim
• Fortnite
• The Last of Us 2
• killability

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Supplementary Material

Supplemental data for this article can be accessed online at https://doi.org/10.1080/14775700.2023.2301192

Notes

1. Twitter, rebranded ‘X’, is currently a mess, and as of September 2023, I cannot verify if this thread is public on Twitter anymore. Scrolling back to 2016 on Lenton’s feed (which is still public) is impossible due to the limitations on how many Tweets you can look at. Lenton’s thread has been preserved in numerous screenshots across the internet so I am preserving the time stamp references so the reader can at least find the relevant quote in the screenshots.

2. Like Schuurman (2022), I am speaking from an affluent, Western context (me in the USA, and her in Finland) that has specific ideas about which species are pet-type and how those pet-types should be regarded and interacted with. Even within the USA, many communities would not consider cats homeless, for instance.

3. Although, yes, the Skyrim dog will fight alongside you. For other players, this utility-value might be sufficient, which is why I focused on Lenton’s experience rather than the mechanics of the dog.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Samantha Baugus

Samantha Baugus works in critical animal studies, ecocriticism, and science fiction and fantasy literature. She received her Ph.D. from the University of Florida August 2022. She currently works at Midnight Meadow Publishing and lives with her husband and three cats.