Gamers Discover Concept of Parody
this says a lot about our society
The vast scale of the internet is cool in that it allows to see all sorts of stuff we’ve never seen before. You can watch a celebrity try a really spicy chicken wing for the first time. Or you can watch some guy on YouTube listen to Bruce Springsteen for the first time. Every day someone finds out about a new nepo baby. Probably some other examples too.
If you know where to look right now, you can watch people who play video games discover the ancient concept of parody.
Last week, South Korean video game developer Pocket Pair released a new video game called Palworld. In the game, the player catches cute little monsters called Pals using a device called a Pal Sphere and is able to command them to do things like fight other Pals or gather resources. A list of Pals you meet is compiled in a Paldeck.
The game looks like this:
“whoa. Whoa. WHOA. WHOA!!!!” you’re yelling. “This looks just like Pokémon! Pal Sphere = Pokéball and Paldeck = Pokédex. The monsters designs look a lot like Pokémon. Are you seeing this??” Great job, dude. You’ve cracked this case wide open.
However: eagle-eyed viewers will note that some things in Palworld are different. You and the Pal can wield guns? You can force the pals to work manual labor? You can fully kill the Pals instead of just making them faint? And then you can use their organic material in food recipes? That’s so sick and twisted. Not rated E for Everyone by a long shot. Many gamers are asking: Can you believe Nintendo would even allow this to happen without taking legal action? This has led to a slew of agonizing discourse about corporate intellectual property rights. Pocket Pair’s CEO said that it has received death threats and abuse over plagiarism allegations.
Here’s an image I grabbed from a Twitter account that has since locked down:
Plus another thread of infringement allegations (38,000+ likes so far):
Even Hard Drive, a site that is literally an Onion-style parodies of video game news, can’t seem to parse this situation. I’m not sure if they realize the irony.
Again I gotta say: Yeah, we know. Everyone with eyes knows. This isn’t a particularly big “gotcha.”
I can’t believe I am defending a very superficial parody but it seems worth pointing out that you can do parody without anyone’s permission. That’s the beauty of parody. It can be brazen and explicit and it doesn’t even have to be a good spoof. It can be hacky and shoddy and it doesn’t need to announce itself. Imagine if someone became incensed because the Weird Al song “Fat” sounds just like Michael Jackson’s “Bad” and has similar album art. Are you going to ding Weird Al for not writing the melody? Of course they’re similar — that’s the point. It’s commentary through imitation. Palworld doesn’t have to open with a big splash screen that says “This IS a parody of Game Freak and Nintendo Corporation’s Pokémon intellectual property, just to be clear.”
I think this is all is just one more illustration of how online discourse has distorted the act of evaluating creative works. Everything now is framed as a struggle between successful IPs, measured in financial metrics rather than artistic merit, and cataloged in ill-fitting formats like reaction videos and terse tweets. I guess this situation is also a result of a large swath of people who engage with one specific medium (video games) without thinking about how it might relate to other sections of the arts. If one’s first instinct upon seeing Palworld is to seek comment from Pokémon’s legal counsel instead of its creative team, I’d say something has gone terribly wrong.
Arguably, the worst one could say about Palworld is that it’s lazy commentary. “What if Pokémon had guns?” is middle-school fan-theory stuff. Palworld simply makes manifest what people have been debating about Pokemon for decades in countless schoolyard debates and forum threads. Dorkly is up to part 70-something of “ If PokeDex Entries Were Literal.” Thousands have wondered if Pokémon are edible. They’ve also asked whether the creatures can die and whether their captivity counts as animal abuse or enslavement. On that last point, PETA put out multiple Flash games more than a decade ago, and another developer published a game called Ojimon in 2015. (A synopsis in this YouTube video’s description says, “Catch the weird ojisan monsters and force them to mine stuff to pay for your infrastructure projects. Or something. Give it a look and enslave them all!” Forcing Pokémon to work on infrastructure is basically Palworld’s main gimmick.)
There shouldn’t even be a debate on this. Parody — even the lazy stuff — is permissible. I remain adamant that parody does not need to be insightful. I know this because for many years I was a reader of MAD Magazine, whose many crude, cheap shots were most of its charm. Let’s check out MAD Magazine #386, from October 1999, which was presumably before many of the people getting mad online this week were born.
What are our friends — Ass, Musty, and Crock — up to?
Can you believe Nintendo would just allow this blatant IP infringement to happen? Mods? Mods???