2025-05-18
As all vegans are legally obligated to say every five to eight minutes, I'm vegan. I am also a game developer. How I haven't played PETA's Pokémon Black And Blue prior to this point is a mystery.
It's very short, which I think is ideal for this kind of game. There is no overworld to explore; the player is railroaded through a sequence of battles and dialogue, which would get stale if it went on for too long. I think each battle has just enough novelty to keep it intersting. The trainers have full animations for every attack, which was a pleasant surprise. There's not really that much to say here; it was entertaining enough for the ~15 minutes it took me to play it.
The characters repeatedly say that Pokémon don't exist for humans to use -- they exist for their own reasons. I suppose it's not unreasonable for an extremely short activist game to outright state its message. The plot of the game also reinforces the message, so it doesn't feel tacked-on at the end. I think a simple, repetitive message makes sense for such a short game. There wouldn't have been time to effectively convey anything more complex.
I think that as an activist game, Pokémon Black And Blue is effective to a small extent, but could have done much more to use the full potential of video games as a medium for storytelling.
Each trainer represents some aspect of carnism: treating animals as toys or property, experimenting on animals, using animals as food and clothing, and forcing animals to perform as entertainment. The Pokémon defeat each trainer, and briefly debate their justification for mistreating Pokémon. These forms of animal exploitation are so deeply entrenched in our culture that most people will automatically recite excuses whenver they are questioned or criticized, without stopping to consider if they even agree with what they're saying: it's OK if it's humane; we have to eat animals to be healthy; animals are like biological automata, incapable of truly feeling or wanting anything.
Because of this, a few sentences in a parody game are not enough to debunk these excuses in the minds of the players, but it could be a starting point. The player might see that they already agree with certain vegan talking points. But when it comes to advocating for animal rights, I think having real discussions with people is far more effective, because it requires people to think more deeply about their beliefs.
This game could have been more effective if, instead of simply clicking through the dialogue, the player occasionally got to choose what the Pokémon say to the trainers. Getting them to think, which of these two dialogue options will convince Professor Juniper to stop experimenting on Pokémon? means that they actually have to consider the points being made.
There are also occasional breaks in the game where the player opens treasure chests containing items like a video on animal rights, a desktop wallpaper, and printable trading cards. This breaks the player's immersion. I don't think the wallpaper or trading cards are very effective for activism, but the video could potentially be effective, assuming the player actually watches it. I think the treasure chests would have been better if the player collected them along the way, but wasn't presented with any links away from the game until the end.
Pokémon, as a franchise, is already fairly vegan-adjacent. Pokémon won't listen to their trainers unless they like and trust them. People who harm Pokémon by using their bodies as food (like Team Rocket with Slowpoke tails) are usually depicted as evil, or at the very least, extremely antiquated.
However, using their bodies to create food, like eggs, milk, and honey, is depicted as morally acceptable, which is not ideal. Wool is also presented as OK. Although, Pokémon are typically depicted as smarter than real-life animals, so it's possible they're agreeing to give these things to humans. It's also hard to imagine real-world horrors of the egg and dairy industries existing in the Pokémon universe; there's no way they're artificially inseminating Miltank and then taking their babies away.
Pokémon can also be bred in the games, although that's more just something that happens at the daycare, and not similar at all to how humans breed animals in real life.
In parodying Pokémon, the game creates a much harsher image of how humans treat Pokémon than is actually presented in Pokémon canon. This choice reads as intentional, rather than as a misunderstanding; the developers seem to have played Pokémon Black and/or White, as the characters bring up events from the game's plot.
This artistic liberty might be detrimental to immersion for some players if they're constantly comparing PETA's interpretation of the Pokémon world with what they're familiar with. But, the choice to parody Pokémon does also allow them to draw upon the player's existing feelings toward Pokémon -- particularly the vegan-adjacent messages I mentioned earlier -- which could also strengthen the message. For instance, the player likely already agrees that killing and skinning Pokémon is bad, and all the developers need to do, in theory, is get them to connect that belief to real-world animals.
(PETA, please hire me.)