Planet Zoo Reminds Us That Zoos are Important
It builds on the legacy that Zoo Tycoon left behind.
The spiritual successor to the Zoo Tycoon series, Planet Zoo similarly engages players with the labor of animal habitat construction, maintenance of walking paths and facilities, and the management of day to day zoo operations while subsequently blowing every zoo lover’s mind with an inordinate amount of customization tools and adorable, endearing animal models. The new(ish) Frontier Development title is also a refreshing follow-up to Planet Coaster, and while similar in feel and design, it’s better scaffolded for new players. Follow a detailed, albeit slow-paced tutorial sequence in Career mode, develop a chain of zoos across the globe in Franchise mode, or go nuts in the sandbox and design the zoo of your dreams.
While Zoo Tycoon let us experiment with all sorts of playstyles in our attempts to make the ultimate animal paradise (or hellscape), Planet Zoo takes this concept a step further and makes us confront the purpose of the modern zoo: to enable scientific research and support conservation efforts.
Zoo Tycoon, developed by Blue Fang Games and first released in 2001, encouraged us to house animals, create funky habitats, and make it all stick without guests being eaten by escaped bears. Planet Zoo, on the other hand, bases our success on not only animal happiness, but also guest education. As if people haven’t been saying this for years already, contemporary zoos do not simply house animals for entertainment. Real-life zoos are there for rehabilitation and release. They’re there for zoologists to do research. They’re there to invoke curiosity in children and adults alike. All things considered, they’re there for educating the public about animals, and the game represents this notion well.
In addition to referencing a “Zoopedia” to determine the appropriate barrier type, terrain composition, flora, and enrichment items for each individual species of animal, players must also consider the placement of educational speakers and signage for teaching their guests and donation bins for supporting their animals' financial wellbeing. Separate from habitat-specific educational materials, players may also place digital information boards outlining serious conservation topics like deforestation and climate change. Spreading all of these structures across the park collectively increases guest education, and thus increases your zoo’s overall education rating — the primary dimension in Planet Zoo that underscores the importance of the modern zoo in wildlife conservation.
This emphasis on “education” is a welcome shift from its predecessor’s focus on entertaining guests, as it isn’t particularly difficult to add these elements, and they remind the player that there is value in learning about animals. Guests with higher education levels, for example, are happier and more likely to toss a chunk of change into donation bins strategically placed outside exhibits and habitats. This lines your zoo-owning pockets with additional money to invest in new habitats, facilities, and staff. It also grants rewards for the completion of education-related challenges which, if you’re playing Franchise mode, means conservation credits that can be used to purchase animals in the market.
But if it seems as if guests are the only ones getting a crash-course in zoology, think again. The Zoopedia itself isn’t just a checklist of things to include in a particular animal’s enclosure. Rather, it functions like a real encyclopedia with relevant information about each species including the type of barrier and the appropriate wall height to prevent escape, social requirements, enrichment needs, and terrain specifications. Players can certainly skim the content or utilize an individual animal’s welfare menu to determine what makes its ideal habitat, but reading through the full species summary in the Zoopedia actually reveals so much more about the animal in question. Even better, the relevance of the educational content to your success in the game makes the reading feel necessary and pleasurable.
This isn’t to say players inclined to seek out a game like Planet Zoo aren’t also inclined to read informational content about animals, but it’s reasonable to assume that pausing play to read literature on the subject of play doesn’t normally appeal to most people. Planet Zoo is different. Immersed in the game and the task of developing a grand zoo with well-kept animals, facilities, and infrastructure makes zookeeping your passion-project, and only the well-informed can thrive.
Perhaps the desire to engage with a labor of learning in the midst of a virtual zoo sim is really the product of smarter animal AI than was possible in games of the Zoo Tycoon era. All of the work that goes into building and outfitting animal enclosures is rewarded ten-fold when your adorable red panda yawns sheepishly under the morning sun and crawls with delicate eagerness onto its new climbing structure. The notification that overcrowding may cause your warthogs to fight becomes painful when you see the visible stress on your animals’ faces as tusks clash and dust flies. The error of your mechanic-lite, enclosure-neglecting ways is all the more excruciating when you observe the frenzied faces of an escaped pack of timber wolves and the terror in the expressions of your screaming, stampeding zoo-goers.
Many of these experiences feed into a phenomena of labor-as-play. Building placement and construction are contextual and have purpose; build one too many fountains before you realize that your finances are a mess and you really need an additional keeper, and that beautiful Indian Peafowl you were planning to release into the wild has died from disease. This impacts your guests’ happiness (just wait until the protesters show up)and your progress toward conservation goals, but it also just sucks. You’re a shitty zoo owner and your animals died from a disease that could have been prevented if the habitats were cleaner. That’s either the sort of in-game identity you don’t want to embody or its the kind you strive for through villanesque role-play. Regardless, you’ll be rewarded with the harsh truth that inaction really does have terrible consequences for your self-esteem, your PR, and the environment.
Still, ethical gameplay in Planet Zoo does not come without distractions. While Zoo Tycoon’s construction tools were fairly simple, they were generally user-friendly and allowed you to move on to other, more important activities with ease. Planet Zoo has a seemingly unlimited number of customization options, but its construction and group editing modes have a steep learning curve — one that takes a seemingly inordinate amount of time to overcome. Although I’ve put nearly forty hours into the game, I’m still not certain I know how to use the terrain editing tools to max efficiency, and my paths look somewhat messy. I find myself spending hours adjusting and readjusting, constructing and deleting. Getting things right is onerous at best, and it’s difficulties with the mechanics of the game that take away from its innovation in eco-conscious game design. I can’t focus on releasing Bengal Tigers into the wild if I spend my limited playtime fighting with path snapping and object placement.
And yet, my attention still holds out long enough to accomplish all of these things. The space Zoo Tycoon holds in many of our hearts is undeniable, but Planet Zoo has flipped a different switch for those of us looking for greater moral satisfaction in zoo creation and management. Will the current culture of patches, hotfixes, and DLC, which did not exist in the early 2000s for Zoo Tycoon fans, improve construction mechanics and smooth other, minor shortcomings? Maybe. But if nothing changes, I’ll still be out there tweaking my foodcourt paths and training my workers, beautifying gardens, researching disease, and mourning the absence of each and every animal I release into the wild, even though I know they’re headed to the place they belong.
