Coshaping Digital and Biological Animals: Companion Species Encounters and Biopower in the Video Games Pikmin and Pokémon

Video games create new relationships between animals and humans by imagining these relationships reconfigured in an entirely digital space. Many games explicitly explore biological issues in their gameplay and premise, structuring a player’s success around her ability to manage resources and modify the digital “bodies” of her avatar or other characters under her control. This is particularly true in the sub-genre of strategy games. In a typical third-person perspective strategy game, the player adapts to changing conditions in her environment by exercising control over resources coded as biological, resources that often include digitally rendered human, animal, or alien bodies. The emphasis on biological management in such games foregrounds issues of human and animal biopower by requiring the player’s active participation in creating and maintaining biopolitical structures and relationships. I examine two games series — the Pokémon and Pikmin franchises — that complicate the biopolitical resource management typical of strategy games by focusing on the biopower of animal-like digital creatures who are simultaneously resources and companions for the human player and her avatar. In this way Pokémon and Pikmin approximate the “messy coshapings” that Donna Haraway writes about in her accounts of companion species relationships, but these relationships occur within a digital environment where this messiness is communicated entirely through the immaterial technologies of gaming.