Posthumanist Attitude Towards Animals in Digital Games

This paper, presented at DiGRA 2022 by Eleonora Imbierowicz, examines how animals are represented in digital games through a posthumanist lens. Building on Krzysztof Jański's five-category typology of game animals (heroes, enemies, companions, tools, and background), the author argues that many contemporary titles feature animals that resist these roles and instead convey traits that decenter humans and grant animals a measure of standing. The central thesis is that such posthuman treatment rests on at least one of three qualities: agency, subjectivity, and ephemerality.

The analysis draws on a range of examples, including the Shelter series, The Last Guardian, Zelda: Breath of the Wild, Shadow of the Colossus, Undertale, and The Witcher 3, to show how these qualities alter gameplay obstacles, player control, and the ethical weight of player choices. The paper also addresses whether games that merely permit posthumanist attitudes, without requiring them, still produce posthuman animal characters. It frames player attitudes through a tripartite model of cognitive, affective, and behavioral components, noting that games can reinforce or disrupt alignment across these spheres, with potentially uncomfortable consequences when they do.

The work situates itself within emerging research showing that fiction and virtual pets can shift attitudes toward animals, citing prior experimental studies by Małecki and colleagues and by Tsai and Kaufman. The presentation is described as a preliminary, qualitative exploration rather than an empirical study, intended to inform the selection of games for future experimental research. Its scope is primarily commercial and independent titles from the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries, analyzed from a game studies perspective.