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Animal Bastards is a funny, thought-provoking game about whether animals are bastardsAnimals were the real monsters all along
Animals were the real monsters all along
Go and playAnimal Bastards, first. It’s dead simple, it’ll barely take you three minutes, and there’s no way you won’t laugh while doing it. Honestly, it’ll take you less time to play than it’ll take for me to explain it. But for the click-averse, here’s the precis: it is a game where you are shown pictures of animals, and you must judge whether they are bastards or not. Once you’ve made your call, the game will present you with a fact about the animal, after which you can either confirm or reverse your original decision. That’s it.
The humour here shouldn’t take a lot of explaining. After deliberating for a good twenty seconds over a Tree Kangaroo, I actually made myself laugh with the speed at which my cursor shot towards the word “bastard”, when presented with a photograph of an ostrich thereafter. Another time, I chuckled at my resolute insistence that an eagle was “still definitely a bastard”, despite the game’s heartfelt attempt to convince me otherwise.
This one was a doozie.
Eal Meals.
Eel Feels.
There’s a wider point to touch on here, too. While a lot of us recognise that it’s silly to call any animals “bad”, we’re happy to go full “humans are the virus”, and make weirdly absolutist moral judgements about our own species. Just because chimps and walruses aren’t burning fossil fuels, we ascribe a weird sort of sainthood to them, and castigate ourselves for being an “evil” species.
Now, I’m not saying for a moment that this makes human environmental destruction fine. Quite the opposite. My point is that we can take responsibility for what we’ve done, and act on that, while still accepting that we are still animals, who only ended up in this situation because of the lottery of natural selection. There’s no dichotomy between “humans” and “nature”, is what I’m saying.
Polar bears might well be grieving over pictures of us looking forlorn on tiny icebergs, had they ended up developing global environmental dominance as an evolutionary survival strategy, instead of us. Toads might be failing to deal with the fungal plagues killing us off. And we’d be just as dependent on the bears or the toads to clean up their fucking act, as they currently are on us.
It wouldn’t make ‘em bastards, though; just animals, same as we are.
Animal Bastards is not half as po-faced as I am about all this. And it is, of course, perfectly valid just to play it and call an animal a bastard, because it has what you consider to be the face of an inveterate bellend. The game is, at the end of the day, a fun joke. But like all the best fun jokes, it pulls some interesting brainstrings.
