Press X to Pet: A Critical Analysis of Dog-Petting Mechanics in High-Profile (MMO)RPGS

Abstract

ABSTRACT 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.