Studies

The Factory Farm | Monster Hunter: World

The second time I hunted the Tobi-Kadachi, it ignored me. An enormous gliding quadruped, feared and prized for its bioelectrical plumage, it is found in Monster Hunter World‘s Ancient Forest region, one of five luxuriant wilderness spaces. As I crept up on the creature through the slap of wet undergrowth, it paused to scent the air, the plumes lifting dangerously on its tail. When I stepped into the light, however, the animal lowered its gaze and resumed its baleful plod through the jungle.

Perplexed, I gave chase, coming near enough to stroke the barbs across the Tobi-Kadachi’s shoulders, and it turned its head a little, one slitted pupil lingering on the armoured biped at its side. I tried to block its path, smashing my biomechanical axe against the ground in a petulant effort to annoy it. The creature only pushed past, continuing to eye me impassively as some contextual animation routine took dim note of my presence. It was a technical error, of course, the misfiring of a top-level AI state, but an error that sheds a certain light on Monster Hunter: World, a game that blithely recreates systems of animal exploitation while carrying, not so deep within itself, traces of profound unease. In the heat of that stare, I felt oddly abbreviated and reduced, my hunter exposed for another temporarily coherent jumble of raw materials—animal, human, mechanical—in a world that exists to be processed.

Monster Hunter is, in theory, a game devoted to the mystery of human-animal encounters in the wild. The series has always prided itself on the vivacity of its megafauna, the way they actively inhabit its landscapes rather than merely waiting for the player’s arrival. Where comparable titles like the Far Cry games seldom represent creatures as having an existence independent of your scrutiny, Monster Hunter‘s apex predators are said to live out their own lives unwitnessed, heading to watering holes to intercept herds of prey, clashing over turf and returning to their dens to sleep and lick their wounds. It isn’t long, however, before you sense the limits of those unseen lives, as the game’s engrossing “core loop” of butchering beasts to acquire materials for equipment obliges you to hunt the same monsters, again and again, grinding away the veneer of autonomy to reveal the canned behaviours within.

As I followed the Tobi-Kadachi through the jungle, I perceived afresh how its motions were not its own but, in a sense, those of its surroundings, the movements made possible by the schedules and timers, geometries and triggers of which the game’s vaunted biomes are composed. Ranging from hills of candy-bright coral to Cyclopean boneyards that evoke the phenomenon of whalefall, these are visually disordered yet intensely regulated landscapes, equipped with foraging spots, safe areas, shortcuts, tactical fixtures and clearings laid out expressly to accommodate each behemoth’s thrashing and pouncing in battle.

Their capacity for personhood treated as an inconvenient byproduct

There are obvious parallels with the design of habitats for non-virtual animals, and the ways in which those spaces may be said to “generate” the creatures they contain. In the Tobi-Kadachi’s vacant gaze I recognised something of the critic John Berger’s lament for the zoo animal, an ostensibly wild beast, charged with mythic agency, which has been rendered thoroughly inert and unreciprocating by its environment. “The public purpose of zoos is to offer visitors the opportunity of looking at animals,” he writes in a 1980 essay. “Yet nowhere in a zoo can a stranger encounter the look of an animal. At the most, the animal’s gaze flickers and passes on. They look sideways. They look blindly beyond. They scan mechanically. They have been immunized to encounter, because nothing can any more occupy a central place in their attention.” Such encounters were once, Berger rather anthropocentrically argues, a crucial enabler of human cognitive development. Animals as encountered by our distant ancestors were relatable, recognisable yet separated from us by “a narrow abyss of noncomprehension”, and that unsettling duality lies at the root of our ability to make distinctions.

Under the corrosive regime of modern capitalism, however, “animals are always the observed. The fact that they can observe us has lost all significance. They are the objects of our ever-extending knowledge. What we know about them is an index of our power, and thus an index of what separates us from them. The more we know, the further away they are.” This distancing is most extreme in the factory farm, where nonhumans are manufactured and dismantled by the billion in conditions of ferocious secrecy, but it is possibly more damning in the zoo, where the creature’s liveliness is emphasised even as it is reduced to spectacle.

Monster Hunter continues this process of objectification while professing to tell a story about the maintenance of equilibrium between “nature” and “culture”. Its dragons, chimeras and dinosaurs are nostalgic stand-ins for the large nonhuman predators now destroyed, absorbed or excluded by society. They are proud beings, rich in symbolic affect, with which you are encouraged to develop a parental rapport, as “caretaker” of the ecosystem: the stated primary goal of the game’s Hunters Guild is to preserve monster populations by culling out-of-control species, monitoring migration patterns and punishing poachers (not that the last two activities ever feature in the game). Yet in their subservience to the player’s drive to accumulate and produce, the convenient way they fall apart into raw materials on defeat, their constant availability and apparent inexhaustibility, these creatures are exposed for beasts of slaughter.

Drawing upon “frameworks from real life beings and habitats”, in the words of Monster Hunter: World‘s co-director Kaname Fujioka, each of Monster Hunter‘s animals is tailored to the game’s systems and spaces and the player’s growing proficiency. You might call this fantasy. In fact, it compares exactly to how nonhuman beings have been remade and optimised to meet the production constraints of agribusiness, their capacity for personhood treated as an inconvenient byproduct. The factory-farmed broiler chicken is as much a figment of capitalist imaginations as the Tobi-Kadachi, bred to achieve a surreal, unhealthy size in a fraction of the time it once took a bird to reach maturity, the principle trade-offs being each individual’s need for light, rest, comfort, privacy, mental stimulation and above all, room. Per a 2007 EU directive, many factory-farmed chickens in Europe live out their lives in a space smaller than the average laptop screen: they are entities at odds with the architecture of their own creation.

Grinding away the veneer of autonomy to reveal the canned behaviours within

On the surface, Monster Hunter: World‘s maps owe more to the aristocratic game preserve than the hyper-productive factory farm: there is, after all, some measure of languorous, romantic uncertainty in the act of tracking the animal down, bringing it to bay. The association is troubled, however, by the game’s equipment trees, pre-plotted item upgrade recipes which require you to repeatedly slay or “farm” monsters for their parts, a template that breeds an optimising tendency in the player. And in practice, the act of tracking a monster is far from wasteful. “They use everything about the hog except the squeal,” declares a tourguide in The Jungle, Upton Sinclair’s 1906 account of the Chicago meatpacking trade. In Monster Hunter: World, even the animal’s absence is usable. Its traces have value. As you rove each environment you can inspect your quarry’s spoor to generate “research points”, which can be exchanged for various rewards back at the game’s town environments.

Inspecting tracks (which are only ever left by the larger predators—those of less valuable smaller or “endemic” animals are oddly intangible) also allows your hunter’s Scoutflies to zero in on your quarry, forming a luminous path that boils back each map’s geology and verdure to the routes, props and distinctions between spaces for battle, rest or foraging that are its real governing principles. The Scoutflies are one of two privileged “companion” species in the game; the others are the Palicos, AI-controlled feline minions and dress-up dolls who, as Berger argues of household pets, serve as infantilised reflections of their owners (inevitably, many players name them for their cats). The ceaseless operation of the Scoutflies ensures that while a monster may elude your clutches for a time, it has nowhere to hide. The best a monster can do is flee the map after a preset interval, but in a majority of hunting missions, the player is free to start over until the monster is slain.

If Monster Hunter is a grand ritual of animal objectification, there is accidental critical potential in how this ritual glances backward onto the player. Berger notes that “the reduction of the animal… is part of the same process as that by which men have been reduced to isolated productive and consuming units”. The connection is writ large in Monster Hunter: World‘s hunter settlement, a bustling network of vendors, middle managers and craftspeople, all named for their jobs, all desperate to burden you with “bounties”, “investigations” and other piecemeal errands on top of story quests and multiplayer interactions. There is, in practice, little difference between the game’s human havens and the surrounding, unspoilt fastness in terms of the attitudes and practices they foster, a collapse of natural world into culture that is further played out in the encampment’s cyborg décor, with great bone arches lashed to the ribs of dismantled ship hulls.

Moreover, Monster Hunter‘s core concepts are a peculiar testament to the debt the reward systems of many video games owe to animal exploitation. Amongst other trajectories of interspecies abuse under capitalism, Berger cites B. F. Skinner’s famous behaviour studies, whereby creatures like rodents and fruit flies were conditioned to perform actions in response to variable stimuli such as a sound or a pattern on an LCD screen. The concept of the “Skinner box”, with its habit-forming unpredictable payouts, has become an everyday concern in both the manipulation of human workers and the reward mechanisms of modern video games. These two forms of conditioning have recently rejoined as “gamification”, in which the seductive repetitions of much game design are mapped onto work and the procedures of work mapped back onto game design, the better to support “game-as-service” revenue systems that rely on the player developing a long-term attachment. With its daily login bonuses and microtransactions, Monster Hunter is a beneficiary of this trend. But it also dredges up the history of these practices by restoring animals—as both the objects of covetous aggression and part of the game’s raft of visual aids and incentives—to the centre of the frame.

To destroy it is to destroy something that can almost be identified with

In this and other respects, the game can appear almost mindful of connections its narrative works to conceal – hence, perhaps, the sporadic guiltiness of even its most dedicated fans. Articles [8] and community threads about the ethics of hunting are surprisingly abundant, as players and reviewers struggle with the gulf between the game’s celebration of the animal as economic opportunity and its celebration of the animal as noble wild creature. Worried advocates make much of the option to capture injured monsters rather than killing them, though this is little more than a fig leaf for Monster Hunter‘s callousness: you’ll still have to fight the creature, which vanishes from the field once captured, and you’ll still get to harvest its parts.

Many reviews of Monster Hunter: World dwell on the animations of monsters near death, a point where Capcom’s desire to fabricate creatures lifelike enough to hunt begins to tell against its routinisation of their slaughter. Even given your growing desensitisation, the game’s animals put on convincing displays of pain and fear, limping away from the player or sagging, too exhausted to even flinch, under a rain of blows. The gangly avian Kulu-Ya-Ku is especially pathetic in defeat, not least because it is conspicuously endowed with many of the same traits as the player’s character. Like a hunter, the Kulu-Ya-Ku uses tools to defend itself, seizing rocks to deflect your blows and amplify its own. Like a hunter, the creature is a looter – when you first meet it via cutscene, it is rooting through the remnants of a campsite. To destroy it is to destroy something that can almost be identified with, an animal that has not, as Berger puts it, been entirely “emptied of experience and secrets”.

It’s a reminder of the older definition of “monster”, a creature part-human and part-animal, characterised by a blurring of attributes that troubles the beholder’s attempts at creating distance. There is something of this blurring, too, in the spectacle of a glitching Tobi-Kadachi, an empty construct that insists on looking back. If we are a long way, here, from Berger’s foundational interspecies encounter, the experience of being eyed by malfunctioning animal machinery carries with it a powerful opportunity for introspection at a time when a consideration of our various places in capitalism’s scheme is badly needed. It’s a gaze that reveals the player to herself not just as other, but as another entity generated, cultivated and exploited by systems too vast and entrenched to see.


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