[Rerun!] No more enemy dogs!
Hey folks, thanks for tuning in.
You’ve most likely already noticed that this is another rerun of an older post and not the Mrs Maisel thoughts I’ve been promising, and I am sorry, but my mental health is still not great and I haven’t had a chance to finish it yet. I swear it’s still coming, though, and it’ll be worth the wait! But in the mean time, this is a little article I wrote a while back - I know it’s not super well written, writing is a learning process - and I thought you might like to see this if you missed it the first time around.
Anyways, thanks as always for your support, I’ll be back next week with those thoughts on The Marvellous Mrs Maisel - for real real this time.
Take care y’all, I’ll talk to you all again soon. Ka kite anō au i a koe. 💚
Rebecca
Kia ora, friendos!
Welcome to my first post for 2023! Whether you stayed up to ring in the new year at midnight, or went to bed at 8pm because you had things to do in the morning, I hope you all had a great New Years Eve. I spent it staying up with family and listening to a playlist we all collaborated on, just like we did for 2022 - it was nice!
Let’s get into it, shall we?
So I was looking through my folders of written stuff for something to share today and I came across this: and article I wrote in 2020 in the hopes of being published by a certain website I no longer care to visit (RIP) - it was rejected on the grounds that they don’t usually take prewritten pieces, because that’s not how the industry works, which was a bummer but I guess I get it. But now it gets to see the light of day, finally!
This maybe isn’t some of my best work, but I wanted to leave it as is with very minimal editing because I wanted to use it as a kind of gauge of how my progress as a writer is going - I think I’m improving, what about you?
Game Developers! Please stop making me kill dogs!
What did they ever do to you??
I am not a big dog person, or even a little dog person, not really. I’m more of a cat person. But one thing I can’t stand in videogames is when the videogame asks me to kill a dog. I think we can all agree that dogs are great. They’re cute, they’re loyal, they work hard (I see you, seeing-eye dogs!) and they just generally help to make the internet and the world a better place. So why do game devs hate them so much?
From games like Fallout 4 to Destiny 2 to Halo 5, dogs seem to be just one of those natural enemies to the protagonist and I don’t understand it. In The Last of Us: Part II you can kill dogs and hear their owners mourn, or you can kill the owners first and listen to the (much worse) sound of a dog mourning it’s owner. Telltale’s The Walking Dead Season 2 (spoilers!) has Clementine kill a dog as part of the story with no way whatsoever to avoid it. Wargroove has dog units you can control and then watch be murdered by the opposing team. There’s even a choice you can make in the original Life Is Strange that leads to the death of Frank’s dog, Pompidou! Sure, Fallout calls them ‘Vicious Mongrels’, Destiny calls them ‘War Beasts’ and Halo tries to pretend they’re not dogs at all by making them out of metal (although the Prometheans are still very much living creatures according to that game’s canon), but they’re still very clearly dogs. If it walks like a dog and quacks like a dog, it’s almost certainly a dog.
My best guess as to why dogs are such a common enemy type in games is that, in real-life they can be quite dangerous if not trained properly or have been poorly treated. And people do sometimes use them to protect their homes, or as police dogs (gross) that are literally trained to attack people, so it’s not that much of a cognitive leap to imagine them as a serious threat if hostile.
Conversely, you almost never see cats as enemies in games because unless we’re talking about a mountain lion (I’m looking at you, Red Dead Redemption) or a tiger or something, your average videogame protagonist is probably not going to be that worried about them. And cats are typically loners by nature, so while a giant swarm of feral house cats might be considered a threat, it isn’t going to be quite as believable as one or two dogs presenting the same threat to life and limb. Now, I know there are games that exist that let, or even encourage you to kill cats, but I have never, and will never play them. I’m not even going to mention them here by name. They’re the worst.
So, I would humbly ask that, if you are a videogame developer reading this and you are considering making dogs an enemy in your game, please just… don’t. If it absolutely must be a real animal, make it a seagull enemy or something instead. No one likes seagulls.
So what did you think? Are you tired of dogs being enemies in videogames? Let me know in the comments section or hit me up on the social media links at the bottom of the page!
Thanks so much for reading, I really hope you enjoyed this post. If you did like it, maybe tell a friend? Word of mouth is the best way I can get new people onboard, so I would really appreciate it! Once again, I hope you had a nice new year’s eve, and I’ll talk to you all again in a few days.
Ka kite anō au i a koe. 💚