Book Review: Game: Animals, Video Games, and Humanity

Abstract

Assembling thirteen eclectic essays about ducks, boars, dogs, fish, squids, beetles, sheep, cows, humans, and more, Tom Tyler’s Game: Animals, Video Games, and Humanityis best described as a conscientiously cultivated menagerie. To take a page from Tyler’s book, which draws extensively on etymology (among other critical perspectives), one might turn tothe definition, extended use, and history of “menagerie” to better understand this projectand its value. Before doing so though, it is worth noting that “bestiary” would also be an apt descriptor for Game; however, this term already characterizes Tyler’s previously published book, CIFERAE: A Bestiary in Five Fingers (2012), the predecessor to Game and one worth mentioning here briefly. In CIFERAE, Tylerlooks to an assortment of both real and imaginary animals to consider and question anthropocentrism, and so too does Game pursue a similar goal of studying animals and their representations to decenter the human. To this end, Gameraises questions about animals appearing in video games, investigating the characterization of supposed differences and similarities between humans and animals in these digital artifacts (2022, 3). Tyler contends that, “The pursuit of such questions about how games deal with animals prompts in turn a consideration of what those animals can tell us about games” (3). He then considers in what ways animals can help us understand various aspects of video games and their development, including conditions of play, rules, rhetoric, ideologies, and iterative design (3), which are predominantly studied from a human perspective. In answering these inquiries, the opening chapter of Game establishes a unique dialectic between games and animals that underscores several possibilities for challenging anthropocentrism.