PETA Crosses The Line with Farming Simulator 17

Today, PETA announced that they have ‘told’ GIANTS Software GmbH that their upcoming Farming Simulator 17 isn’t giving players ‘an accurate depiction of the industry‘ if their pig farming aspect doesn’t show that ‘pigs are killed by being hung upside down, stabbed, and dropped into scalding-hot water‘.  It is their belief that real-life video footage from abattoirs be included in order to allow players to fully appreciate what pig farming is all about and that the sanitised offering by GIANTS shouldn’t be released.

They go on to outline the belief that by not including this real-life footage, it is not accurately reflecting pig farming and should therefore be changed to Vegan Farming Simulator 17 because ‘to do anything else would be dishonest‘.  In a further outpouring of idiocy, PETA European Outreach Liaison, Harriet Barclay says ‘PETA urges anyone who considers pig-slaughter footage too gruesome to include in a simulator game to rid their real-life plates of animal corpses and switch to cruelty-free vegan foods‘.

So, let’s remove the ridiculous politics from this and translate it to other video games, because PETA believe that the only way to accurately depict anything in a video game is to include genuine footage.  This would mean that Call of Duty and Battlefield would have to take a side-step from its sanitised depiction of war where it goes beyond the fundamentals of war – two or more factions attempting to survive while simultaneously preventing the other from doing so in order to gain dominance – and we instead include footage of children being shot in the face, women raped while their husbands watch, families being set on fire in the middle of villages and other atrocities that humans have carried out as an aside to their objective.

Virtua Tennis would have to be interlaced with footage of real-world players sweating and getting a little out of breath.  Cycling simulators would have to show people stopping while they change their tyres or urinate.  In fact, RPGs such as Skyrim wouldn’t be able to show someone skip through a sleep cycle and we’d have to wait for them to doze off, enter REM, and eventually wake of their own accord since there were no alarm clocks back then.  But all that’s fine, because it means that the games would at least be accurately depicting their subject matter.

Heaven forbid that games remain a form of entertainment and escapism.

And, as for that ridiculous notion that you need to become a vegan if you don’t want to have slaughter footage included in your video game… let’s see how it would stand up if anyone claimed that you shouldn’t be playing a first or third-person shooter if you’re not prepared to kill someone yourself, or that you shouldn’t be playing a flight sim if you’re not a qualified pilot, or how dare you even begin to play Uncharted if you’re not willing to venture into the jungle and put up with being shot at by anyone who happens to cross your path.

Gaming is not reality, PETA.

You can read PETA’s letter to GIANTS Software Managing Director, Christian Ammann, here

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