Well, neither of those things have had a soulful and sensitive novel written around them.
Well, that could describe Twelve Years A Slave and no one is rushing to release Plantation Manager.
Will we be getting the “Girl from Nantucket” DLC soon I hope?
I hear she’s tall and tan and young and lovely. Or maybe that girl was from somewhere else, dunno.
Twelve Years a Slave isn’t a novel, besides which there is another clear and obvious difference between the two. I don’t approve of whaling as a profession, but plenty of even more heinous things have been turned into games.
Whaling?! What a horrible thing!
What’s next!? They’ll simulate that most horrible of all human endeavors: war!?
/s
You made a good point, is all I’m saying.
If I can’t have my whaling sim I’ll just go buy a whaler and sate my urge for whaling on the open seas. The choice is yours society!
I sympathize with the criticism of a whaling game; whaling as an activity is not something most modern people (outside of, I guess, Japan and Norway) would find acceptable. Unlike American chattel slavery, though, which was recognized as wrong at at least some level even by many of the people who practiced it, whaling was simply seen then–and for many years beyond the time of Melville’s novel–as a normal economic enterprise, and one which provided a host of usable benefits for people. There wasn’t the same sort of consciousness about endangered species or animal rights then, and I can’t really fault 19th century people for hunting giant ocean critters that offered so much stuff they needed, any more than I can fault the indigenous people of the Plains for hunting the buffalo to near extinction (or at least contributing mightily to a process the white man finished up).
There are plenty of things to get all worked up about, justifiably, in the gaming world. I’m not really sure that a whaling sim is one of them. That being said, the reason I have not purchased this game so far, even though I am sort of a Moby Dick fanboy, is that I personally have similar qualms about actually playing a whaling sim. But that’s entirely on a personal level, and I’d certainly not impose that on anyone.
Oh, and i was thinking of Roots, put Color Purple and settled on 12 years because shamefully, I couldnt think of any other books about slavery.
Whaling is a deeply distasteful relic of past times, and this romanticisation-for-profit is well worthy of criticism when whaling and other activities of mankind remains a threat to the last of the cetaceans.
Not being snarky, but how do you feel about sims that let you captain a U-Boat or fly for the Luftwaffe?
Has half a century of the global Save The Whale movement passed you by?
When whales shoot back you can whataboutthewar i guess. This whole thing has an air of Settlers Smallpox Blanket DLC or Sim Missionary or something. Just because it can be done doesn’t mean it should be, or at least, with an accompanying awareness/donation campaign (which i guess i should check to see if its a thing) before Sea Shepherd show up.
I was hoping to forgo the snark, but whatever.
My point is that there are lots of games out there that simulate something that today can be found objectionable. Why pile on this one?
and how many Industrialised Slaughter of Sentient Animals games are there in the genre? Oh, this is the first one, and what, people can’t call out the very first time a games dev decided to make money from it?
Whaling remains a hot topic and people have died in the name of protecting whales. Its been an emotive subject for decades, and whaling is nigh on taboo in Western culture.
If the devs are going to appropriate it for gain then they absolutely should face criticism.
I have no problem with them facing criticism. I simply don’t agree with the criticism, not totally at least, in this case.
I was going to count the number of hunting and fishing games but ran out of fingers and toes. (Yes, you said sentient, but that’s a fine point)…
I’m just asking that of all the games out there that could be deemed objectionable, why start here?
Some people just have a gut reaction to these sort of things. Is whaling inherently more evil or grotesque than murdering humans? Of course not. Is a whaling sim more evil than a game about killing people? No, I doubt anyone would actually argue that.
But just to help you out; replace whaling with something like, say…dog fighting. Do you think that would raise some eyebrows? Why? Is dog fighting somehow worse? Not really. But it hits a little closer to home. Nobody cares about games where you can send elephants into a line of spears or set pigs on fire just so they’ll disrupt ranks of soldiers (Rome:TW), because we’re so far removed from that now. But dog fighting is still a real thing, even in this country. That’s why it would cause outrage.
Besides, some people sympathize more with dogs than they do people. Some people feel the same with whales and whaling, which as noted above, is still a thing in some parts of the world. Or maybe they’re just desensitized because we’ve been portraying the killing of humans in games and other media for ages. We’ve glorified war for thousands of years.
I actually don’t think there’s anything wrong with whaling sims. It’s just another violent fantasy in a hobby built on violent fantasies. And, as I tried to hint at in my first post, it’s not exactly likely to lead many to take up the business of whaling.
But I do understand the psychology behind the outrage. I would expect a small minority to voice their opinions over something even as innocuous as Nantucket. Which is perfectly fine, of course.
In fairness, those are also not industrialized. Maybe this is a travesty against morality, but the fact is the whales don’t care we are playing this game, and it’s come about solely because of the romanticism of the industry associated with Moby-Dick. Maybe Melville is the real villain here, eh.
I think there is a big difference, when a small community uses natural resources to survive, vs faceless mega corporation farming things to extinction to maximise profits. This sim lies somewhere in between those two realities, and so it’s easy to get bugged by it.
Native americans used every part of the animal, and they had great respect for it. It was a symbiotic relationship with nature. The commercialization of that process, at least for me, raises a lot more questions. Life feeds on life, in one way or another, and I don’t have any problems with subsistence living, but it does tend to take on more questions when it becomes industrialized.
I used to read alot of Willard Price books as a kid. One was a total rip off of Moby Dick, and despite getting the message across about how hard life was on a sailing whaler, it still didnt really portray the message that the whaling was wrong as it was a product of the 60s. If my kids wanted to read this there would be huge caveats around it being a product of its time and some kind of accompanying awareness of cetacean rights and anti-whaling. Whaling is not entertainment. Most of the West understands this taboo.
As a New Englander that has walked through Melville’s house, lived at the base of Greylock Mountain, listened to Moby Dick read on the deck of an historic whaling ship, and lived in the state that was the home to a hockey team called the Whalers I feel personally attacked. ;-P