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Steam, lemmy and reddit are currently creaming themselves over a game which devs makes multiple really cringe "jokes" about slavery and exploitation. Read the steam page descriptions.
Those "pals" are clearly antropomorphised creatures being dogwhistle for humans. And if you read the game reviews, even the g*mers are not lost on that fact (just they love that):
When escapism is no longer liberating, the goal of the g*mer is to become the oppressor
idk, i still get an insane amount of joy from lighting up fictional bigots. it's a special treat. :)
I mean, this has always been true about the monster taming genre. This game just kinda leans into it like it’s a joke instead of pretending it isn’t happening. Not saying I’m a fan of that angle. In fact, the original trailer had CG video of pals working in sweat shops and they all looked sad and tired, and it was a huge turnoff for me from the game. But let’s not pretend that the premise of every monster taming game ever isnt that you force them into servitude and almost always into violence.
That said, after seeing actual gameplay, all you do is send your pals out on your ranch and they perform chores. It’s not especially dark or gruesome about it. Sometimes the chore is helping you make food or medicine, and sometimes it’s mining or logging, and yes, sometimes it’s making weapons or ammo. I’m not a fan of the memes about slavery or the people who think it’s funny, but the game marketing doesn’t strike me as all that problematic. I would argue it’s worse that you run around punching and shooting these creatures and making them fight to the death, but again, that’s the whole genre. Did you know there are games where all you do is shoot people? People love that shit
You can also capture and sell human NPCs.
Supposedly in the game's lore Pals were also originally humans (somehow...), which is why you can capture both with the same pokeball.
I think the writing is generally on the side of satirizing the monster collection genre rather than, I don't even know what you're getting at, trying to advocate for slavery?
Now, is it done well? No, the game design is still fundamentally one of power fantasy, wake me up when there's a Pal Revolt mechanic, but it's not even all that ambiguous.
The game itself is fine, it's a fun, if fairly generic "survival" sort of game with heavy base building mechanics. But the memes about it all became about "edgy pokemon with guns and brutality" so this very PG sort of game is being treated like some R rated gorefest by idiots trying to be funny because their favourite youtuber made a joke about it. So naturally CHUDs love it because they get an excuse to be openly horrible.
It feels so 4chan adjacent that I'm looking at the last few friends in my contact list that I thought were on the level like "how do you not sense this? is your nose broken? Are your eyes sightless?" I don't like having to actively weigh and question how much my last vestiges of irl social contact are worth/whether it's worth having that fight over their unnervingly 4channer-adjacent slop.
Even worse is people keep justifying it with 'well Game Freak doesn't try/innovate/QA check anymore' but that... That shouldn't justify gleeful-slavery frenworld. Cassette Beasts is right fuckin there, as is Tem-Tem. (Neither of which really moved me personally, but that's beside the point.) The more I mull it over the more it genuinely pisses me off. Absolutely, I'd love an engaging, lore-heavy monster tamer alternative to Pokemon with the way Game Freak's been handling the franchise lately, but this one should've been sniffed out and rejected from the jump, I feel.
Honestly, mixed feelings on this TBH. There's a lot of appeal that I 100% get for games that allow you to do anything, games that allow you to be a crapsack person in a crapsack world, etc. If I hadn't seen this thread I don't think I'd have seen any problem with it at all.
I've enjoyed Conan: Exiles (not that I did anything with the slavery mechanics in-game as I mainly went around singleplayer cheating my ass off, but I also didn't care), Rimworld and Tyranny have been in my library with intent to getting around to playing for a long while now, slavery gets whittled down to either numbers or actually pretty neat roleplaying/lore mechanics in games like Humankind, Endless Legend, and maybe in some Civ games, and I've not batted an eye at any of it. Such things can exist, there can even be a bit of tongue-in-cheek humor about it particularly when it's all fictional and not representing real life humans and events, and the truth is slavery did and does exist, and is a large part of human history- and its inclusion can add a lot of character to a game or setting if done right (and not in a glorified, whitewashing way- that's definitely icky)
On the other hand, I have actually cared when I saw slavery and such topics being represented incorrectly in games. At least, I didn't like the pleasant whitewashing slavery got in one quest in AC Odyssey, for instance.
Honestly, I had the game wishlisted already and had been planning to get it- even now, hell if I know if I will. Enslaving Pals or humans IG doesn't appeal to me, but what I've seen of the game (not the slavery bits, the gameplay, the Pals, the artstyle, etc) absolutely does. And what I've seen so far even in this thread doesn't quite sell me on the "Pals are dogwhistle for humans" (quite a stretch IMO) and "Palworld is a dogwhistle for Frenworld" (far less of a stretch, but the devs are Japanese) bits.
There will always be plenty of g*mer chuds even, but I'm not sure I read the comments (the English ones anyways, I don't understand Polish) as chuds, or particularly bad or glorifying the subject rather than that similar blend of humor which honestly seems pretty tame and acceptable given the context (fictional Pokemon, and if you do so and like the game advertises, you're playing a cartoonishly evil shitlord- but even that doesn't mean either being a shitlord, condoning shitlordism, or anything other than making a light joke of it in a fictional, non-human context).
Same here. I played a lot of Pokémon as a teen and for what I have seen there is an undeniable tie between the concept of Pals and the one of Pokémon, and most of what this game seems to offer is a version where all things that are implicit possibilities in the Pokémon world become an explicit reality - Because, who hasn't thought about what would happen if you threw a pokéball to another trainer? Or about where does their meat come from? Or about why they seem to use Pokémons as manual labor, and if they pay them at all? The concept of throwing a 10yo out of their houses with an electric rat to travel the world competing in animal fights is a very long-lived meme too.
The message of this parody-game seems to be clear: all those hidden, shady bits in Pokémon are now real, and you are as free to be as much of a shithead as you wish with that. Again, not so strange, since the appeal for fictional cruelty has been a thing since you could remove stairs from pools in The Sims and even before.
Agreed, and the possibility of being a shithead adds to the meme factor, but not quite in a way that I feel would be considered problematic or actually glorifying the issue.
If I get the game I'm not likely to abuse my Pals at all, rather the opposite. I'm not generally the kind to engage in wanton or unprovoked cruelty (though I'll admit in-game- vidya, DnD, etc I do tend to be very... "justice oriented" and entirely willing to indulge in that, which is pretty much just how I tend to be as a person anyways).
Before I realised it was a video game I genuinely thought “palworld” was the latest frenworld baby speak nazi ban evasion sub.
Honestly I'm instantly highly suspicious of any concept that uses infantilised terminology or symbology to describe itself. It's something that either weird 4chan nazis or their unwitting sympathisers do.
Read the reviews on steam, it essentially is.
Yeah this game is just a mish-mash glorifying both slavery AND animal cruelty. Very uncomfortable... and the fact this game is so popular speaks volumes.
EDIT: Learned a lot about certain comrades through this comment thread, didn't expect so many to get so defensive about their favorite bourgeois franchises.
Idk about this one. It's not like the sole goal of the game is to enslave and exploit people/mons. I haven't played it so I wouldn't know but I was actually excited for a monster collector that didn't continuously keep disappointing me like Game Freak does every other year.
The Pokémon comparisons are obvious but it doesn't play at all like Pokémon, which is a turn based RPG, this game feels more like an action RPG/shooter/factory sim.
This is silly
You don’t need a dog whistle to imply human slavery when you can literally enslave humans in the game.
There are human NPCs in the game and you can put them in the pokeballs. At that point, they become docile and you can put them to work.
The hitler particles in white gamers can be seen from space with their reaction to this game. The reviews on xbox are also very disturbing.
Steam is probably one of the whitest male gamer spaces, which is what I thought until I discovered Xbox.
I really don't think Pals are a dogwhistle for humans. Its just a monster collection game where you can make the monsters do stuff. Its legitimately not that deep. Its not like a game is saying slavery is good or anything. Like sure, you can be mean to the digital puppets if you want, but really a lot of stuff is just head cannon. Are they working for you because they are scared or because they live in some communist utopia and work as a choice? Up to you. Really I think its just a way to put them to use for more than just combat. Plus it means you can focus on tasks you find fun instead of some of the busy work of survival games. Seriously, every game has things like this. You can take any idea and if you intentionally read it in a negative light that will be what it looks like. Does pokemon promote dog fighting? Ofcourse not. Even if it really is just digital dogfight simulator. Does Disco Elysium promote drug use because drugs have useful effects in it? Does Skyrim promote capital punishment as a good thing because guards will try to kill you for committing crimes and you can kill bandits for the government? Irl crime is caused by disenfranchisement of the poor, is Skyrim proposing we kill them all? No. Skyrim wanted an easy low level enemy you could deal with to learn the game and make some early money. In fact, any game that involves killing anything can be construed in such a way if you like. Ofcourse this isn't to say games can't carry messages, but I don't think this one really does. I think the devs just saw they could do some edgy marketing and went for it.
Plus it means you can focus on tasks you find fun instead of some of the busy work of survival games.
You can also do that by not designing the game to have busy work, tbf
The thing about survival games is that the busy work is the point. Participation in it at first and finding ways to get around it as your base gets more complex is part of the fun. You start from nothing and eventually through effort and planning get powerful. The busywork is the obstacle for the player to overcome.
Without the busy work survival games become some kind of BR. Which has its appeal but scratch fundementally different itches. A pizza and a burger are quite different even though both have bread.
This is literally just "frenworld" the reddit Nazi community (but I repeat myself) embodied in a game.
“frenworld”
Oh shit "fren" = "pal", you're right.
Yeah it's an annoying habit I have lol
You can capture full fledged NPC humans and make them your “Pals”.
Yes you can enslave actual humans.
Maybe it's just me being jaded and cynical af, but is there a chance that the game was intended to be a commentary on worker exploitation? I don't know much about the game and I doubt the average game consumer would see it that way though.
No, definitely not, it's the edgy g*mer libertarianism all over both shop page and comments.
So this is why pokemon never made a 3D realistic game.
I've somehow managed to avoid all discourse about this game and am only just finding out about this.
As mentioned by others the game itself is nothing remarkable, it's the description on steam and comments that make it disgusting.
I get what you're saying, but I think it's a bit of an overreaction.
The 4 first screenshots could very well be criticism what you do in-game, tho I doubt it is, it's probably the devs just wanting to be edgy.
The reviews are pretty standard from g*mers too. Most are probably just making fun of the fact, but since it's Steam there's 100% someone that wrote stuff like that unironically.
I think discussion about possible AI use by the devs and it just being another lazy survival game with ripoff pokémon and guns are better talking points. There's also the IP infringement, but I don't care about Nintendo's property.
What the fuck happened. There was some pretty good discussion yesterday and now suddenly it's a bunch of useless trolling comments.
It's why I love this instance so much, only place which remains lucid during even the biggest of bullshit circlejerks.