Re-read that title. This is seriously s**t-hot breaking news here, exclusive to SarcasticGamer.com as well as the GamerCast Network, pretty much every gaming site in the world, and general common sense. PETA have called Fable II the most animal-friendly game of 2008; a not-so-prestigious-but-almost-laughable award that most certainly wont be going to Cooking Mama. The thing is, as UK industry mag EDGE pointed out, Fable II isn’t actually the most animal-friendly game out there.

Silly PETA! Will you ever get anything right?

The animal welfare charity’s annual Proggy awards dish out all sorts of things to companies and various forms of multimedia along with Congressmen and, um, Norfolk, Virginia’s Most Vegetarian-Friendly Restaurant. Obviously, these well-designed awards hold a lot of prestige, so it would mean the world to some games company to receive an award for “most animal-friendly”. And, naturally, this game will be 100% animal friendly.

Obviously, the choice was Fable II, because as PETA claims:

Fable 2 is a vegetarian’s dream come true. Why? In this virtual fight between good and evil, characters powered by tofu are just as powerful as their meat-eating counterparts—and are more fit and attractive to boot. Featuring a strong pro-vegetarian theme, eating a plant-based diet helps you rack up “purity” points, whereas eating meat makes your character fat and evil. A fun and innovative game, it’s also an effective tool that teaches gamers the real-life benefits of a vegetarian diet.

I have a feeling that the benefits of a vegetarian diet are hardly the most important thing in a player’s mind when they’re in the middle of something in Fable II. I’d like to see PETA explain away rabid dogs in Fallout 3, but hey, I didn’t pick the award.

In fact, I’d like to see PETA explain Fable II! As EDGE dutifully points out, there’s plenty of animal cruelty to be done in Lionhead’s game. Eating live baby chicks, for one. Shooting bunnies, another. Kicking chickens several kilometers, too. PETA’s response?

“I’ll be honest, it’s not our favorite part of the game. But what we like about Fable II and why we gave it the award is because the game presents you with choices, and then you see the repercussions of what those choices are. This is what the awards are based on, and that’s what PETA’s philosophy is—for people to understand how their choices affect the real world.”

Last time I checked, their philosophy was to help animals by annoying everyone, or something along those lines. Can’t they just leave our games alone in peace, without attaching some sort of hippy message to them?

Video games are all about escapism. It’s why you can kick chickens for miles, and smash rabid hounds into mush in a post-apocalyptic nuclear wasteland. Or even, to stretch a little further, why you can harmlessly pretend to cook chicken in a joyful, colourful kitchen with no sense of guilt. Obviously, people cook meat – and it’s not up to PETA to decide whether we should or not – but one area the charity certainly doesn’t have say is in how we play our videogames. If I want to lay waste to animals from within the harmless confines of a videogame, that’s up to me. Not them.

PETA’s Thoughts on Chicken-Kicking in Fable II – EDGE

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