Cross-post from: https://sh.itjust.works/post/13765975 at Games@itjust.works (No idea how to properly link to the community)
Palworld has brought back a Pandora’s Box that Pokemon let open in Black/White: Does Team Plasma have a point? Is the player in Pokemon/Palworld an evil entity just for playing?
Some preliminary context for those unaware. Pokemon Black/White’s version of an evil team was Team Plasma, which argued that Pokemon trainers were evil for capturing Pokemon and forcing them to fight alongside them. While the game gave us the character of N, who is honest and sincere in his ideas and intentions, Team Plasma is presented as an hypocritical boogeyman that wants to force all other trainers to free their Pokemon, but secretly this is only a ploy to make sure no one can oppose them when they attempt to grab power for themselves.
Palworld has its own take on the idea: out of the different hostile factions, we find early on the Free Pal Alliance, which similarly argues that capturing pals and forcing them to do your bidding is evil, and we find again that their leader really commits to the idea, but her underlings are constantly attacking pals in the wild and sometimes even putting them in cages.
Perhaps surprisingly, the Pokemon fanbase was very defensive of this idea, often repeating the arguments provided by the games that captured Pokemon like the companionship anyway, dismissing the fact that wild Pokemon violently resist being captured unless you force them into submission to accept the Pokeball. The fact that you forcibly push them into a situation where their previous freedom to choose not to associate with you gets overwritten by a newfound willingness to obey means that they’re being effectively brainwashed - if we were to apply our real life standards to this situation we would say without a doubt that the situation is exploitative and we’re wiping our ass with the idea of consent. Palworld is even more “in your face” about this, given that the brainwashing mechanic of Pokeballs/spheres does not only work on the mons, but on humans as well. The general reaction of the Palworld community seems to be acknowledging that it’s fucked up, but nonetheless jumping straight to the fact that the Free Pal Alliance are hypocrites as a whole or even calling them a parody of PETA.
My position here is: should these games even address the ethical dilemma? Once you put the ethics into the game’s narrative, the designers are basically forced into going to “Yes, but” territory, since acknowledging the ethical issue leads you to the conclusion that the game only allows you to play as a morally dubious character at best, but given that that would be unwise from a marketing pov (at least for Game Freak), the narrative ultimately has to twist the argument into some sort of fallacy (The Pokemon actually want to be captured/The Free Pal Alliance is full of hypocrites anyway), which in my opinion is actually the heinous design decision, since you’re pushing the player into twisting the moral dilemma in a way, thus training moral hypocrisy, rather than the much healthier position “Yes, capturing Pokemon/Pals is evil, but it’s a game so no actual sentient creature is being harmed”.
Both Pokemon Black/White and Palworld hint at the idea of human-Pokemon/Pal association out of free will through the character of N and the Free Pal Alliance, who do not capture their creatures, but rather they choose to cooperate with them out of real free will, but this option is mechanically impossible for the player (save, arguably, for rare exceptions where Pokemon freely join you through through scripted events). This ends up cementing the ludonarrative dissonance where the player has to justify themselves into thinking that what they’re doing is morally acceptable, despite being presented with actually ethical in-lore alternatives that they just do not have access to. It is understandable that, from a game design perspective, the Pokemon/Palworld developers do not want to spend significant effort into reworking the mechanics of Pokeballs/spheres, which are already effectively fun for their gameplay loops, but that leads them into the position where Team Plasma and the Free Pal Alliance have to become caricatures of their actual ideas, which on the other hand is a waste for their respective lores.
Anyway, I hope you enjoyed my rambling. My Chikipis have already laid all the eggs I need for baking cakes, so I’m off to butchering them for meat, bye.
This was well written, and the core reasoning is solid.
It’s one of the things that make me respect old style Team Rocket: they do awful things (like cutting off Slowpoke tails) for profit, and the games (RGBY/GSE) don’t dig too deep into the morality of that. They’re there as an opposing force, not as an ideological view.
I agree with 90% of what you say - the only point I disagree on is that Palworld doesn’t “Yes, but” the ethical controversy. The entire point of Palworld is that catching Pals and using them as slave labor is unethical. That’s why you can butcher them, sell them for profit, force them to work long hours until they go insane, etc. You can literally put their corpses on a stick as a decoration. Palworld doesn’t pretend that pal slavery is ethical the way that Pokemon pretends that pokemon slavery is ethical, and that’s part of what sets it apart from Pokemon.
I also don’t necessarily agree that the FPA is undermined by fighting against Pals and occasionally having them in cages. Fighting against pals is heavily established in the lore to be necessary - the equivalent of trying not to be mauled by a bear while traveling through an area where there’s vastly more bears than people. They can support the idea that Pals shouldn’t be enslaved, while also needing to not be mauled to death in order to achieve that goal. Having Pals in cages is tougher to explain, but a diary entry about how the FPA sometimes relocates Pals in order to repopulate areas cleared out by trainers, or how they sometimes have to remove individuals that have gotten too aggressive after negative interactions with humans, would solve the problem in an interesting way while giving them a bit of nuance.
I know nothing at all about Palworld other than that it exists, but I gave a lot of thought to the issue back when BW were the newest games and it was a controversy.
And I’d say you’re dead right - that was always my view too - that the games failed by introducing the topic, then “settling” it with vague, hypocritical “Yes, but…” expediency.
The thing though, and the reason I eventually stopped thinking about it, is that there isn’t a good answer.
From an ethical viewpoint, N was entirely right.
But from a practical viewpoint, Gamefreak long since established the mechanics of capturing Pokemon, and part of it is simply that the more powerful mons are more of a challenge, and that challenge comes from the fact that they don’t want to submit - you have to force them.
That makes sense and is satisfying from a gameplay perspective, but yes - it’s problematic from an ethical perspective.
The aftermath was at least better handled back then - the mons continued to resist until you won them over, which you did simply by spending time with them. The problem there though, and part of the reason that I give Gamefreak a bit of a pass on the matter, is that players whined about the supposed hardship of having to spend time winning over mons, and Gamefreak gave in and introduced shortcuts. That’s one part that I’d sort of situationslly disagree with you on - the original mechanic to win a Pokemon’s loyalty wasn’t brainwashing - it was taming, in the traditional sense. Brainwashing was only introduced later, to accommodate players who were too lazy to spend time actually winning the loyalty of the mons.
So it could be argued that to at least some notable degree, it’s not so much that Gamefreak doesn’t care, but that the players don’t care.
The biggest issue to me though, and the main reason I stopped thinking about it, is that it comes down to a basic societal dilemma.
Much of human society is, by any reasonable standard, foul and loathsome. We’re led by blatant psychopaths - ego-driven, greedy, self-serving shitheels who really shouldn’t even be allowed out among other people unaccompanied, and who hold insane amounts of wealth and power. They’re vile, twisted scumbags, and their evil permeates society. Millions of people every year suffer and die, just so that a handful of scumbags can continue to enjoy entirely undeserved privilege.
That’s grotesque and insane, but it’s also a fact that people have to deal with.
And there is no good solution. Yes - you can teach children to be ethically and morally conscious, and that’s certainly virtuous, but only up to a point, because beyond a certain point, all you accomplish by that is making them unfit to make their way through a world that is neither ethical nor moral - a world in which to some notable degree, they’re going to have to be selfish pieces of shit, just to protect themselves against other selfish pieces of shit.
But of course, that also jusr ensures that there’s a constant supply of selfish pieces of shit, and 'round and 'round it goes.
Yes - the world could be a fine place if we all had N’s principles. But if only some have N’s principles, they’re most likely just going to end up ground underfoot, entirely unequipped to deal with the loathsome, selfish pieces of shit who don’t and never will share those principles.
So in a way, the way that Gamefreak (and now apparently the Palworld devs) dealt with it has some merit - basically to say, “This ethical issue exists, and you should be aware of it, but you should also be ready to ignore it when expedient.” Because the unfortunate truth of the matter is that there are many people who will never do anything other than ignore it, and loathsome though it may be that’s the world we have to live in.
For now…
The aftermath was at least better handled back then - the mons continued to resist until you won them over, which you did simply by spending time with them.
I have played since Red/Blue. You never needed to deal with disobedience unless you were transferring overleveled pokémon. Any pokémon you catch yourself never resist your commands, be a Rattata or a Mewtwo. You didn’t even need to give them treats or anything, it was never like real-world taming. Brainwashing has been here from the very beginning.
Should they address the dilemma? If they want they can, I don’t mind either way.
It’s funny that people are more likely to inherently accept violence and vigilantism in games than any other morally questionable gameplay focus.
Though there are some games that question the focus on violent gameplay. Then again when they bring it up they don’t just shrug it off and say not to worry about it.
We wouldn’t have dogs or farm animals if we didn’t palworld them.
