Pokémon: Red, White, & Blue as an Educational Game
Basic Information
Game Name: Pokémon: Black & Blue
Developer: Peta
Platform: Web
High-level Instructional Goal: The meat industry is evil and Peta is great
In this critique I assume the game's purpose to be one of persuasion and the intended audience to be people who eat meat and enjoy McDonalds.
Brief Description
This game was made by Peta in parody and critique of Pokemon and of the meat industry. The title, Pokemon: Red, White, and Blue insinuates that the game is focused primarily on an American audience and the US meat industry. You start the game as a Miltank fighting to get away from a Mysterious Stranger. Miltank faints and Pikachu jumps into the battle.
From here you go through a series of conversations with other characters and fights in a turn-based style similar to the Pokemon games. You fight a McDonalds customer, two slaughterhouse workers, and a demonic depiction of Ronald McDonald. On your journey to spread the message of animal cruelty in the food industry you talk to a group of Peta protesters and a reformed Ash Ketchum who fights to “free them all”.
The game overall is short but text heavy. The experience is mostly spent reading and trying to figure out which attacks are most powerful to get through the fights. After a few minutes, I no longer wanted to play because of how heavy-handed the demonizing of people who eat meat is, the cartoonish depiction of the evils of the food industry, and the somewhat cringe-inducing levels of self-aggrandizing rhetoric.
Educational Objectives
Prior Knowledge
This game is actually a sequel. The first one they made was Pokemon: Black & Blue which aimed to critique Pokemon itself as a world where Pokemon are forced to fight each other at the behest of their cruel and uncaring owners. This game assumes the player to have knowledge of this, as the effects of it are referenced. The lack of knowledge of the first game does not limit or change the experience of playing this game though.
The game does make a few assumptions of prior knowledge that would change the experience, though. One of these assumptions is that the player is familiar with the Pokemon games and lore. I stopped keeping track of all the existing pokemon a while ago and so had to look up Miltank to remind myself exactly what they did in the Pokemon universe. Having this prior knowledge could still be harmful to the players resulting opinion and learning experience. Pikachu’s and Ash Ketchum’s personality are at direct odds to their usual one and the militant tone immediately destroys any feeling of nostalgia.
In the same vein, the player needs to know what PETA is and how the American meat industry functions. The game does not necessarily discuss or educate about these topics but does refer to them while making its argument.
What Do Players Potentially Learn
In this game, there are three things players may learn. One is the intended educational goal of the game: The inhumane slaughter practices of the McDonalds franchise and, by extension, the meat industry overall. This is taught and supported by most of the rhetoric and art of the game that put in clear view the results of abuse. Players also will learn about PETA; specifically PETA’s opinion of McDonalds, PETA’s opinion of McDonalds customers, and PETA’s opinion of itself.
The games shows PETA’s view of itself as a heroic existence doing valiant work to save non-human lives and convert the malevolent and ignorant masses to their enlightened viewpoint. At times this can be a bit too heavy handed and cringe-inducing as with the moment your crew of Pokemon meet the PETA protesters and repeatedly *swoon* about their beauty and wonderfulness. At other times it’s shown through the depiction of those seen as against PETA as pure evil and aggressive. I am still not sure why I ended up in a battle with the McDonalds customer who was painted as mainly clueless and hungry.
This also shows PETA’s view of McDonalds and it’s customers: pure evil and ignorance. At the end of the game when you fight Ronald McDonald (revealed to be the CEO) they don’t understand that what they do is bad or why it’s bad. There is an attempt to communicate that these inhumane practices are the result of corner cutting and motivations entirely based on financial profits but it’s too quick to truly make an impact on the player.
Knowledge Transfer
Are there any vectors of knowledge transfer for the lessons taught by this game? Maybe (not really). The games ultimate goal is to convince its players to believe in PETA’s views and goals. It's highly likely, though, that the game will convince anyone who does not already love Peta as much as they love themselves. This is due to the lens by which PETA chooses to analyze this issue. Linking a militaristic and dark tone with the lightheartedness and nostalgia of Pokemon and then using that to vilify those you aim to persuade leads to the players then digging their heels into the ground and turning away.
Overall, it is hard to say what transferrable skills would be gained from the game. If one approaches with an openness for the message and is able to look past the aggressive tone and use of a beloved childhood theme as a tool, they might gain a more critical eye towards the food industry and McDonalds slaughterhouse practices.
MDA
Mechanics
The main mechanic in the game is fighting. Fighting is modeled to basically function the same as it does in the Pokemon games, although I doubt it is balanced the same way. Some pokemon are able to change their stats with buffs and poison or trap opponents. Pokemon stats other than hp (health points) are not shown anywhere. Players can view a summary page of each pokemon but defense or attack stats are not listed there. The fighting system is not explained but players can choose between different actions to take to attack on their turn. Generally, the physical attacks (lightning bolt, tackle, roll out, etc.) are more effective than the Peta related ones (protest, recruit, paint, embrace, lecture, etc.). After attempting a second play-through, it seems the abilities of some characters change with each play.
Between fights, the growing team of pokemon travels around on their mission to spread their message. The player has no control over movement or story progression. Movement between scenes is done automatically and are simple short animations. During this travel, the player bumps into other characters and talks to them. An argument can be made to consider talking as a mechanic. Talking takes up the majority of the game. When talking, the text appears on the screen automatically. The player can click on the text area to have the rest of the text in the section immediately appear and then click again to trigger the next chunk of dialogue to begin scrolling through.
The last mechanic in the game is the prize chests. Throughout the game after specific events, the player is presented with treasure chests they can open for a prize. The first opens a pop-up video about McDonalds slaughter practices, the second reveals some Peta edition pokemon cards, and the third reveals a Peta Pokemon computer wallpaper for the player.
Aesthetics
The primary aesthetic of Pokemon: Red, White & Blue is somewhere between fantasy, a game as make-believe, and narrative, a game as drama. The games main purpose seems to be to tell its story and to persuade. The game’s story is a continuation of the first PETA Pokemon Parody where Pikachu and other pokemon escape from their abusive and cruel owners. It’s hard to say who the player plays as and where the player exactly fits into the game. The main play is during the fights where the player can choose any of the available pokemon to fight with.
The lack of a character for players to identify with causes for it to be difficult for characters to identify with or place themselves within the story. If one were to consider Pikachu as the main character and the player surrogate, then a different problem arises. Pikachu is shown as having a very strong militant personality and a single-minded drive. The game starts with Pikachu viewing the intended audience as some mixture of misled and evil. The story continues as Pikachu repeatedly confronts different proponents of the meat industry and changes their minds.
Dynamics
The main dynamic I observed during my play-through, was one of passive play. Because the game is mostly made up of scrolling text, the player spends more than half of the game reading. The lack of control over movement, story, or whether you fight everyone or not removes all agency for the player. The only choice they have is which attack to use when fighting people. It’s hard to lose unless you are intentionally trying to, making the stakes seem very low and removing any feeling of a challenge. Losing a battle also has no effect on the game as you can immediately continue again with all of your pokemon at full health. Passive play is also caused by the games inability to teach it’s own lesson. The piece of the game with the highest educational value is the skippable pop-up video given to the player as a prize at the beginning of the game.
(The pop up was actually the most exciting point in the game because I was momentarily scared I had may have to navigate some PETA virus or malware)
The secondary dynamic I observed was that of spam-clicking. To get through a lot of the text, especially in battles, I found myself rapidly clicking at the text blocks to make them go away. The battles dragged on with the uninteresting animations and attack descriptions that, after the first battle, I found myself also rapidly clicking through.
Learning Principles
To accomplish its educational goals, the game attempts to utilize three Instructional Complexity Principles:
- Comparison: Compare multiple instances > only one instance
- Activate preconceptions: Cue student’s prior knowledge > no prior knowledge cues
- Anchored learning: Real-world problems > abstract problems
In Pokemon: Red, White & Blue, these three principles are used to try and educate the player about animal abuse in the food industry and to persuade the player that the industry is bad. These principles focus on the induction/refinement and sense-making/understanding portions of learning. Through playing this game, players are meant to be introduced to the subject matter and ultimately understand PETA’s perspective. There is an attempt to use comparison by repeatedly meeting proponents of animal slaughter and then changing their minds after battling them. Each enemy brings a different viewpoint (corporate, consumer, slaughterhouse worker) that can be compared to each other and ultimately compared against the ideals of the pokemon, the PETA protestors, and the reformed Ash Ketchum. A problem arises here, though.
The views that are presented for comparison are not nuanced enough for the player to understand the problems fully. For example, the slaughterhouse workers are presented as active participants in the abuse and, when defeated, are not convinced that what they do is wrong, but instead wish they worked at a tofu factory because tofu wouldn't fight back. It ignores the stories and experiences of the people who have to work these jobs (usually unhappily sources: 1, 2, 3) and the resulting message feels too clear cut as good vs. evil to explain why these practices continue. For the same reasons, the games attempt to utilize anchored learning is unsuccessful. Its depiction of a complicated and serious real-world issue is too one-dimensional. While there may not be room within one flash game for a full analysis of inhumane slaughter practices, there is room for a more nuanced view than one of “anyone who isn’t with us is evil”.
The games use of the Pokemon intellectual property (IP) and of McDonalds is a large part of it’s aim to use the principle of activating preconceptions. Pokemon is popular, McDonalds is ubiquitous, there is, therefore, no need explain either in the game and PETA can then build off of the existing gentle feelings of nostalgia to recontextualize the problem. The logic there seems to be that players care more for the emotional and physical well being of pokemon than the animals we eat and will have an easier time understanding their point of view. Using players existing thoughts about these two IPs to change their minds, though, needs to be gentle. The game starts off with everything already being terrible and Pokemon already existing as the subject of abuse fighting against a corrupt system. It would be more convincing if the game began with a similar tone to the pokemon we know and love, and slowly pulled back some curtain revealing that pokemon (and animals) are not loved or cared for in the way we thought but are tools for entertainment and consumption.
For some examples of games that do this transition between safety and negativity well:
- In Depression Quest, you start as a normal person with some motivation issues. As you play, you descend into the depths of depression and begin losing the ability to make good choices. You lose your agency to your illness, mirroring the experiences of some who experience depression.
- In Devotion, the effects of government control on its people is explored as it becomes harder and harder to normalize the horrors your experience. (video summary)
- In Night in the Woods, the story of a college drop out expands into an eerie mystery combined with the characters real fears, anxieties, and hesitations about being a young adult and growing up into an adult.
- Doki Doki Literature Club begins as a classic dating sim style game but eventually turns into an existential horror game, creating a fun but unnerving experience.
Synthesis and Critique
This game is unsuccessful in educating the player on the problems and complexities of the US meat industry. It’s also largely unsuccessful in persuading players to adopt PETA’s views on the meat industry and the consumption of meat. I came to the game with pre-existing knowledge and opinions on this industry and the abusive practices that occur within it. By all means, I should be relatively easy to convince on this topic (I used to want to be a veterinarian and once tried to watch a movie on the meat industry when I was young and ran away after a few minutes). When playing, though, I just felt annoyed at PETA and didn’t even want to finish playing.
Part of this can be attributed to my prior knowledge of PETA’s hypocrisy and antagonistic actions. Mainly, though, it is due to the games failure to communicate it’s intended lessons or to involve me as a player. The game isn’t fun to play and felt vitriolic and preachy. I felt attacked by the game I was playing and immediately became closed off to the lessons it tried to impart. The game came across as a fetishization of meat eaters as bad and PETA as good, making that the primary lesson.
PETA could successfully create a game with their intended message if they moved away from the Pokemon visual aesthetic and from patting themselves on the back. A simple idea a friend of mine, Dan Saad, came up with when I told him about the game, was for them to create a game from the point of view from a chicken. By telling the story of a chicken living as a part of the meat industry would be a much more impactful and convincing experience for players. The chickens staring ignorance about its own situation is also a great place to start the player, who might not know about what chicken will experience over its life. As the chicken learns about the system, so too might the player learn.
