Press X to Pet
A Critical Analysis of Dog-Petting Mechanics in High-Profile (MMO)RPGS
Bibliographic Data
| ID | 3852178 |
|---|---|
| Authors | Samantha Baugu, Samantha Baugus (Russian State Agrarian Correspondence University, corresponding author) |
| Year | 2024 |
| Volume | 21 |
| Issue | 1-2 |
| Pages | 118-130 |
| Publication date | 2024-04-02 |
| Open Access | No |
| Type | ARTICLE |
| Venue | Comparative American Studies An International Journal (JOURNAL) |
| Journal identifiers | ISSN: 1477-5700 • E-ISSN: 1741-2676 |
| Publisher | Informa UK Limited (PUBLISHER • GB) |
| DOI | 10.1080/14775700.2023.2301192 |
| OpenAlex | W4390666671 |
| Language | EN |
| References cited | 21 |
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
Anthropocentrism · Arbitrariness · Environmental ethics · Epistemology · Sociology · Folklore, Mythology, and Literature Studies · Gothic Literature and Media Analysis · Human-Animal Interaction Studies · Philosophy · Psychology
Manifestly Haraway
The “digital animal intuition
The Ethics of Animal Labor
Gamer Theory
Undoing Gender
Effect of Petting a Dog on Immune System Function
Pets and the Socialization of Children
Four-Legged Poilus ”
Service Dogs
Frames of war
Imagining Home
Disanimality
Simians, Cyborgs, and Women
Why Children Keep Pets
What a Dog Can Do
| Highly cited | No |
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