When my partner Callie’s dissertation research began to explore the relatively young field of animal studies, I took an interest. Jacques Derrida, who was very fashionable during my undergraduate years, wrote The Animal That Therefore I Am, a text considered foundational to the field.
I made a fumbling attempt to incorporate animal studies in an essay on Infocom’s Starcross a few years ago. I think I had the right idea, but my argument was a bit messy. I’ve been interested in exploring characterizations of animals in Brian Moriarty’s Trinity, which I experience as representing humanity’s rather depraved carelessness regarding life on earth (there are more creatures yet to discuss there!).
All this being so, I was exited to check out Roar. Just like the author, " It never felt strange that I was always on the side of the animals."
Roar
Hatless
Summary
A detour: when I was a teenager with dreams of writing, I fell in love with Ionesco’s play Rhinoceros. The fact that I read it at all is strange: I’ve only met one person who ever mentioned it to me, and I’ve never seen it recommended in print. Fortunely, the one person who mentioned it owned a copy!
In Rhinoceros, humans transform into Rhinoceroses. It is a movement and a trend. It is also, so far as I can guess, a metaphor for populist fascism. It’s absurd, then, in the way that so many good horror stories are. Humanity is vanishing, and what remains will be destructive and inarticulate. Just as in Contaminated Space above, resisting transformation and remaining human dooms one to complete and total isolation.
Now, the animal studies counter to Ionesco might be–and Brian Moriarty seems to agree–that we humans are thoughtlessly destructive enough already. Rhinoceroses might even be a step up.
Let’s consider the case of Roar, then, a breathless dramatization of one non-human primate’s escape from a deadly global conflict between humans and non-human animals (humans are animals, after all). When I say “breathless,” I mean b-r-e-a-t-h-l-e-s-s, friends. Thanks to an endlessly scrolling interface, the text is a contiguous stream of misadventures and escapes spanning multiple continents and bodies of water.
You speed down the streets of Mombasa, a sprinting rhino at your heels. You shoot at Simmonds.
He screams and tumbles from the vehicle.
“There’s the chopper!” Simmons points to a helicopter descending behind an enorumous box-like superstore.
You swerve around a pile of red barrels with ‘danger’ signs on them. You shoot at the barrels.
WHUMP! The blast tumbles the rhino sideways into the canal like a grey wrecking ball.
That’s right, you can shoot red barrels to blow up enemies just like a Resident Evil character. This is a fun, fast, and utterly humorous text with a surprising ability to keep topping itself. Pop culture, consumerism, everything is in-bounds. Elsewhere, a pitched “battle” in a big-box store:
The polar bear smacks into the signboard and has its head trapped in between 🡐 Sleeping Goods and 🡒 Camping Gear. You ricochet off a display of bunk beds, still accelerating as you hurtle towards the war wall of the warehouse.
Ahead, the floor has caved in entirely across the aisle, forming a kind of impromptu flooded crater with a family of hippos wallowing in the mud-filled center.
Further on, confrontations with giant squid and a dinosaur.
It’s all a bit surprising when the end is reached: the protagonist was carrying a treaty of some sort that settles matters. Is it a magical treaty? A geas of some sort? My feeling is that the animals likely have some legitimate beefs. The twist is that the protagonist is an ape colluding with humans. We are the good (non-human) animal, then. Are we the only one? No telling what my own cats would be up to.
Roar is so much fun that not even a crank like me would grouse over the ending. This is the first work I’ve played where I was genuinely surprised by the time limit: “how did they do that?” Having just added over 60 animal references to a work in progress, I was very happy to see a pangolin menioned (I have one, too!).
Returning to Rhinoceros: I was curious about the conflict between humans and animals. Perhaps it isn’t important in a work like this but, because the author and I both were always on the side of the animals, I wondered why they fought, and how the protagonist joined the human side.
But in the end, it’s too much fun to get fussed about. I’d happily replay a post-comp release!