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Palworld’s skin-deep Pokémon parody is part of a bigger horror storyThe law is an ass
The law is an ass
Image credit:Rock Paper Shotgun/Pocketpair
Image credit:Rock Paper Shotgun/Pocketpair
Dig back far enough into the history of any word and you’ll find something sinister. Take “cute”. Nowadays it means pretty, lovable or charming, albeit perhaps with an undertone of mistrust or contempt, as in the phrase “that’s a cute observation, Edwin”. But the word originally evolved from “acute”, which very broadly means sharp or intense. “Acute” was once a Middle English word for a short-lived fever - it’s related to “ague”, a word you’ve likely come across in a medieval fantasyRPGsomewhere, which refers to fits of sweating and shivering. The word “cute”, then, is secretly diseased, and so, perhaps, is the experience of cuteness. There’s a psychological phenomenon called"cute aggression"which refers to the desire to physically envelop, dominate and even abuse the thing you find cute - “I just want to squeeze you till you pop”.
Some games put this act of having-it-both-ways under scrutiny.Pupperazzi, for example, pokes fun at how pictures of pets have become a social media currency - indeed, a literalcryptocoinage, building on centuries of “monetising” animals as dynastic symbols and religious icons.We Are The Caretakerslooks at animal companions in party-based RPGs through the lens of decolonisation. And then there’sPalworld, which is essentially Pokémon portrayed as what Pokémon really is, for all its attempts to tell a kinder story about itself - a game of virtual cockfighting.
Palworld’s Penking, one of the game’s rarer creatures and a dependable source of ice magic. |Image credit:Rock Paper Shotgun/Pocketpair
Nobody in their right mind would callPalworlda complex parody of Pokémon, or a clever satire of games that both cosy up to and commodify the wildlife. The satire begins and ends with turning the above cute/exploitable disconnect into an openly macabre sales pitch. Rather than emphasising the emotional bond and sense of respect between animal and trainer, as Pokémon typically does, the Steam page boasts of the chance to not only capture, but slaughter the Pals or work them all to death on your factory lines.
Human beings have been trying to portray other species as their “intellectual property” for decades, depending on how you write the history of “intellectual property”. Selective breeding in modern industrial agriculture is to large degree about stopping other people borrowing your homework. Take US chicken-farming in the early 20th century. Corporate historian Glenn E. Bugoshas a paper on the subjectthat discusses hybridisation, the process of pairing “pure” breeds of chicken to create unique sub-breeds with desirable traits, such as faster growth.
A breeding farm in Palworld. You’ll need plenty of cake to set a romantic mood. |Image credit:Rock Paper Shotgun/Pocketpair
The aforesaid Anubis, one of Palworld’s best fighters. |Image credit:Pocketpair
Where Pokémon’s various storylines portray Pokémon as a protected companion species, Palworld literalises the fantasy that is “intellectual property” and wallows in the mess. The Pals are the commodification of Pokémon in-game, all of Nintendo’s wider revenue streams turned inward upon the simulation that gave them life. They are the Pikachu trademark incarnate. But the Pals are evenmorebountiful than Pikachu, in practice, because they are both resource and workforce.
The shift from Pokémon’s purebred monster-catching to Palworld’s mongrel survival game pastiche is a collapsing-together of abbatoir workers with their victims - hence the Steam page’s jocular suggestion that Pals could conceivably be subject to labour laws. In addition to being individual sources of food, XP and equipment, the Pals wil help you build and operate the machines you’ll use to exhaust their world’s riches, over and over. They’ll happily participate in the construction of the very machines and weapons you use to entrap, kill and process them, asking little in return beyond a feeding trough and some straw to sleep on. Are these creatures cute? Yes indeed, in every sense of the word.
