Subcathoin

My first Vox Games column, Good Game, ran this morning over on The Verge’s gaming forums. That’s where I’ll be running the column until we transition to a more permanent home.

I reexamined a story I first wrote about last week. Playing with Pigs is a project in the Netherlands meant not just to get people to play video games with pigs, but to spur a reexamination of how we treat farm animals.

I spoke with one of the game designers as well as the team’s philosopher and animal ethicist. 

Go check it out over on The Verge. 

I went a bit long with the story, but I still wasn’t able to squeeze in everything interesting I got from my interviews with the team.

The project is part of a bigger program at the Utrecht School of the Arts called Creative Design for Playful Impact, one of the developers tells me.

“The program collaborates with creative professionals, students, teachers and various kinds of organizations,” said Kars Alfrink, designer  and researcher at Utrecht School of the Arts ”It performs applied research into the design and application of play in various domains. Research is done through design. The aim is to learn by making things. The program is focused on creating meaningful experiences through playful use of new technologies and media, and on increasing the impact of products and services using play. So play can be both used as a design process and an end product.

“Pig Chase fits into this in various ways. We’ve used playful means to arrive at the design (frequent play tests using paper prototypes, play sessions with pigs). The end product is an attempt at using play to create a meaningful experience for both pigs and humans, one that not only entertains, but also (mostly implicitly) raises questions about the ethics of pig farming.”

Clemens Driessen, the team’s applied philosopher, told me that he thinks using video games does make it easier for people to approach a morally tough issue.

“It definitely can be a way to get people in a different role as a moral subject,” he said. “When you start a game you haven’t played before you need some time to adjust to the new reality, to find out what it is you are asked to do, and then figure out what kind of player you want to be. To me the advantage is that it is an immersive way of engaging with a situation, and to some exent embodied and largely non discursive. That kind of way to relate to moral concerns I think in daily life is quite common, and then it can be taken as a task of a philosopher to try and deepen that experience and make it more complex.

“Also playing a game with an animal is probably a good way to encounter the animal as (at least potentially) a meaningful agent, rather than as merely a poor victim of human misdeeds.”

Finally, I spoke with the team about their take on the chances of the game being adapted by farmers. It’s a pretty big challenge, it seems.

It turns out this isn’t the first time that a mix of creative people have tackled the issue of the treatment of animals at pig farms. Years ago a group came up with a design for a “pig tower,” essentially a gigantic high rise designed to be a vertical pig farm in the middle of a city.

While the design of the tower, which would have housed a half million pigs and include a slaughterhouse in the basement, was more efficient and humane than tradition pig farms, it was met with immense public protest.

“In some designs they even had balconies to get some fresh air and search for truffles,”  Driessen told me. “But still there was a general sense in public media that this was outrageous, comparisons to the holocaust were suddenly quite main stream. For me it was fascinating how merely highlighting and extrapolating existing practices could completely change a debate.”

So far, Dreissen says, people seem to be too bewildered to complain about this new, game-driven project.

The whole thing got me thinking about Plato’s Allegory of the Cave (think The Matrix, but with shadows and, you know, Plato.). Perhaps as we examine how video games impact the way pigs bide their time until a violent death, we’ll start to think more about whether video games (and books, sports, movies, music, etc, etc, etc. ) serve are a way for humanity to wilfully chain themselves, back to the fire, to a cave wall.