Many moons ago, Mewgenics developer Edmund McMillen successfully lured the People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals into developing a vegan parody version of Super Meat Boy, Team Meat’s gut-slathered 2D platformer. Team Meat responded by triumphantly adding a spoof vegan character to Super Meat Boy, the puny and crater-eyed Tofu Boy. As McMillen himself recently recalled on MechaMusk.com, “I personally trolled the peta forums for months seeding info about this ‘ground breaking new indie game coming out soon that must be stopped!; I never thought they would actually take the bait but it was amazing to see and a very fun exchange.”
Well, McMillen and PETA are at it again. PETA have just released a video honouring a character in Mewgenics, which very much isn’t a game that promotes the ethical treatment of animals, or of beings in general.
The character in question is an animal rights advocate, Tracy Newkirk, who sells you food and upgrades and will also give your spare cats a new home. Her name is a stitching-together of PETA president Tracy Reiman and PETA founder Ingrid Newkirk.
The character is obviously a pisstake of outspoken animal rights people generally, with her vocab policing and her talk of shooting pet-owners… and I’ve got news for all you people queuing up on Muskvine to dunk on PETA for once again ‘taking the bait’. PETA do not care that you think they’ve been pwned, as long as it makes for publicity, anymore than McMillen, or so he says, cares that you are mad about the Newgroundsy jumble of internet personalities and pariahs who’ve contributed feline voice-acting to his game. I feel gamers should grasp this by now, after years of drive-by PETA videogame satires. The point is to make an impact, however laboriously.
“We’re honoring Mewgenics’ Tracy Newkirk with a Hero to Animals Award for her advocacy for the cats of Boon County,” reads PETA’s message. “Tracy is the only ethical option for where to send your cats (we have nightmares about Baby Jack). She fearlessly educates players on speciesism and using the term ‘animal companion’ instead of ‘pets.’ Well done, @edmundmcmillen on creating such a passionate animal advocate!” McMillen has retweeted the post.
I’m vegan myself, and have been known to wave a placard. I think PETA can get stuffed for various reasons – their adoption of euthanasia, their embrace of conspiracy theories about autism, their tendency to place righteous optics above substance.
I do obviously sympathise with some of their political positions, but I think in general, they just provide a convenient target for people who think vegans and vegetarians are ‘extremists’. I would not be surprised to learn that PETA are some kind of meat industry psyop. Maybe McMillen is in on it. Perhaps this is all some kind of deadcatting. Anyway, I guess I should try Mewgenics – Callum says it’s great, however repulsive.
