Post Script
While the game focuses on the positives, there’s a dark side to keeping animals captive
There’s a passage early in Yann Martel’s novel Life Of Pi that springs to mind every time we visit a zoo – in reality or, as it turns out, on a screen. With all its talk of boundaries and fulfilling animals’ needs, the passage could almost be an – unusually colourful, admittedly – excerpt from Planet Zoo’s in-game manual. But the bit which sticks is Pi’s argument, as he dismisses “nonsense” concerns that life in captivity suppresses an animal’s freedom.
“One might even argue that if an animal could choose with intelligence, it would opt for living in a zoo,” Pi says, “since the major difference between a zoo and the wild is the absence of parasites and enemies and abundance of food in the first, and their respective abundance and scarcity in the second.” It’s a nice thought, assuaging any tugs of guilt which might spoil the pleasure of watching animals in their artificial habitats.
Frontier is working from a similar standpoint: that zoos – modern zoos, good zoos – are a positive force in the world. As it has to, we suppose, if it wants to make this game as anything other than a misery simulator. And the studio has been clear, from the moment it first unveiled Planet Zoo, on what exactly makes a zoo good: a focus on education, conservation and animal welfare.
All three of these pillars figure into Planet Zoo’s design. Education means ensuring your guests leave with a greater appreciation for the wonders of nature, and what better way of doing that than with a laminated piece of A3 stuck on a pole? Your education score might be given prominence (along with cleanliness, it’s one of two factors zoos are judged on when the inspector comes to visit) but mechanically speaking, it’s pretty thin. After building and populating each new habitat, you’re encouraged to add a sign and a speaker, then select the appropriate educational content and speaker volume. It feels like busywork, and the knowledge that our zoo’s education rating is lagging behind everything else is rarely motivation enough to go through the motions.
Animal welfare is more successful, not least because it shifts the focus from visitors (the game’s least interesting aspect, a roaming herd of wallets) to the stars of the show. Welfare is what forms the basis of your dayto-day zoo management. Fail to meet an animal’s needs, in terms of space or nutrition or enrichment – meaning deployment of toys to keep it stimulated – and you’ll be told off with a glaring red bar. Let the problem fester, and your animal might grow sick or die.
To drive the point home, low welfare will attract protesters. Their signs might be written in the game’s Simlish-style language, but the message is clear: these are the boundaries of being a good zoo, and you have crossed them.
Ultimately, though, neither high welfare or education ratings are the main marker of success in Planet Zoo. It’s how much you earn. Unless you’re playing in Sandbox mode, your zoo is not a charity. You’ll need to maintain a healthy profit margin if you want to keep building and adopting. The game’s attempt to offset this rather mercenary aspect is also the way it works in the third of those pillars: Conservation Credits, a secondary currency intended to reward good deeds like releasing animals into the wild by letting you buy new (and more endangered) ones. It’s a decent attempt to mechanise a concept as abstract as conservation, though it’s hard not to feel like you’re chasing the dollar by another name.
It’s a successful incentive, though. Planet Zoo is good at moulding you into the kind of zookeeper Frontier wants to see in the world, but the game also allows for the bad and even ugly, as the subgenre of animal battle-royale videos on YouTube will attest. Which is probably as it should be. Planet Zoo’s presentation of its subject matter is hopelessly sunny, and without any acknowledgement of the darker side, the choice to try to do things right would be meaningless.