Developers are being asked to fix every dodgy detail, right down to the treatment of digital guinea pigs. But who does it actually help?
There’s been a flicker of controversy around Stardew Valley, the Life Sim / RPG farming game by Eric “ConcernedApe” Barone. It concerns a guinea pig and his treatment. One of the NPCs has a pet guinea pig who is, apparently, being kept in substandard conditions for the animal’s needs.
Not being a real guinea pig, you may wonder why this matters. “It sets a bad example,” goes the logic. “People, especially young and impressionable people, shouldn’t be given information that might lead them to harm guinea pigs.”
A consideration for the future, perhaps; next time, a developer could Google guinea pigs before drawing the cage. The question is whether or not ConcernedApe should go back and rescue the fictional guinea pig already in Stardew Valley.
The problem with altering an existing game is that it censors our reality. The reality is, ConcernedApe didn’t know that you shouldn’t put guinea pigs in exercise wheels, which means that probably quite a lot of other people don’t know that either. His mistake – and most people’s total lack of response to it – tells us something about society that we wouldn’t otherwise have learned.
View full article at this link, on Gamers.
You Must Insult The Ones You Love 