Topic

Vegetarian / Vegan glitches

Eating is a huge part of Glitch, as it is in real life. One of the components in most of the most power-packed foods is meat. Has anyone made his/her glitch vegitarian?

The next point that that raises is why would you make your glitch a vegitarian? Pigs give their meat freely (they enjoy it, as we see) and do not die in the process.

With grain being a product of chickens, does the vegitarian glitch shun it as the human would shun fried chicken? Or would it only be the vegan who would shun grain, as it comes out of a chicken, as an egg does in real life.

And on the subject of vegan glitches, would they avoid eggs? They come from plants, not animals. How about milk and dairy products? Does it matter that they are produced by happy butterflies?

Only the poor salmon seems to have to die to feed Glitchdom.

Posted 14 months ago by Billy McBinky Subscriber! | Permalink

Replies

  • If you were vegetarian on Glitch, you'd do your best to avoid tree poison, since that's the only time a sentient creature dies due to player harm. Unless rock reincarnation counts as dying?

    I think to an ethical vegetarian, animal husbandry is probably one of the least objectionable parts of the game.
    Posted 14 months ago by Saro Subscriber! | Permalink
  • I'm not particularly interested if a player is a vegetarian. I wondering if anyone is trying to play their character as one and how you would even define the concept of vegetarian in Ur, given that animals don't die. I guess the only thing you wouldn't be allowed to eat would be the salmon. If you tried to extend real-live concepts of vegetarianism to the game, you'd be hard pressed to geat enough energy.

    I had been thinking of this idea for a while, but was moved to write when my wife said she was playing and tried to give someone food and they refused it because it had meat in it.
    Posted 14 months ago by Billy McBinky Subscriber! | Permalink
  • I'm a vegan IRL and i have to say that aspects of the 'happy meat' philosophy annoy me (in reality pigs don't 'freely give up their flesh') but to be honest, for me personally I have switched off that part of my brain because I play Glitch to escape the crappy outside world. Its just pixels and 1s and 0s in here.
    Your results may vary, that just my take on it.

    And no, my character is not vegan or vegetarian as I can't see those being sustainable or even possible (living on crudites doesn't seem that fun).
    Posted 14 months ago by warki Subscriber! | Permalink
  • Cross-post from the ideas forum:

    I remember being on Glitch's Facebook page and some person was angry because the tutorial involves nibbling on a pig. Maybe the rock could offer some kind of veggie-friendly alternative? The rock would say "nibble this pig!" and the player could respond "no way, rock-se!" and the rock would be all "never mind then!"

    I have a vegetarian friend who plays Minecraft and did some texture change where the meat all looked like grilled tofu. The pigs still had to be smacked, though ...
    Posted 14 months ago by Klara Subscriber! | Permalink
  • There's even less reason to smack pigs in Minecraft, since with Melons and Wheat you can easily live off non-animal food in that game.

    The way animals work in Ur isn't 'realistic' because Ur is a dream, and like most dreams, weird stuff can happen that is 'normal' inside the dream (like chickens giving grain and piggies giving meat out of thin air). Plus, as has been said, eggs come from eggplants, and unless they're prepared properly to hatch animals they are basically plant parts. It's all magic and illogical, which is part of the fun.
    Posted 14 months ago by Sloo Subscriber! | Permalink
  • Huh...but playing your Glitch as vegetarian COULD be a fun challenge....
    Posted 14 months ago by Jia-pop Subscriber! | Permalink
  • I'm a vegan in real life, so naturally when I started playing glitch I tried to find out if it makes sense to play a vegetarian or vegan character. In my opinion, it doesn't, because the game world is too different from the world in which these terms originate. Trees are sentient, eggs come from plants but grain doesn't, pigs freely give up their meat without dying, butterflies give you milk in return for services rendered. I'm not sure where honey comes from, and salmon has been pointed out, but apart from these, none of the reasons why I would not eat an animal product in real life seem to apply to the game world, and just avoiding products I avoid in real life would result in me torturing chickens but refusing to eat certain plant foods. I don't think it would be a challenge either, since it is very easy to live on plants you can easily grow in a garden in large amounts.

    Also that whole discussion about torturing or killing animals in video games becomes kind of pointless when you a) still do it in real life to some extent or b) also kill humans, or generally behave like a sword-swinging/guns-blazing nutcase in certain games. I couldn't keep a straight face while trying to explain how nibbling a pig is supposedly bad, when stabbing a soldier with a sword is not (I like fantasy RPGs as you can tell). There is an ideological reason I could think of, which is that role-playing a character who eats animal products contributes to society's view that this is acceptable behaviour. However, if felt strongly about this, I would have to avoid Glitch altogether because its light-hearted approach to animal products is, in a way, worse than e.g. a role playing game that depicts life in a situation where we have no easy alternatives. Which is kind of the whole point for a vegetarian or vegan in real life: Don't take more than you need, don't kill things just because you like the taste, etc. Glitch, in some way, downplays the ethical aspect by depicting pigs as happy animals that love being petted and paying for that with parts of their body they supposedly don't need.

    So if that was too much, the short version is that as someone who has spent a lot of thought on the reasons for living a vegetarian or vegan life I can't see a good reason for doing the same in Glitch, and many other video games.

    The only game I've ever played where playing as a vegetarian or a vegan character meant something is Nethack (a 25 year old dungeon crawler). You can play a monk who believes in a vegetarian lifestyle, and gets an alignment penalty everytime he eats something that is not vegetarian. You can also, as an added challenge (since in Nethack, eating animal parts in certain cases confers some of their powers), elect to follow a vegan diet. Both choices are possible regardless of which character you play, and will show up as a conduct you challenged yourself to on the final report when you die/win; conducts like these two are part of the game's replay value once you get the basics down, and many players will attempt to adhere to as many as possible at some point. Neither of these two conducts is particularly hard, they just mean you need to know a little more about nutrition to be successful. Basically, just like real life. I have yet to find another game that transfers the general idea behind the two terms so perfectly to a fantasy world with otherwise entirely different rules. And even Nethack has the "problem" that, it being a dungeon crawler, you have to kill all sorts of creatures with malicious intent just in order to survive.
    Posted 14 months ago by Snokatt Subscriber! | Permalink
  • I liked the food mechanic they had in Crystal Chronicles. There were a range of meat and vegetable based foods and each character started with their own likes and dislikes, so you'd get more benefit from food you liked. But you could change what you liked by sticking to food you didn't, as eventually it would readjust to suit. One of my vegan friends stuck to the fruit and veg as a result, leaving me to eat all the meat he left behind. Perhaps something like that would work for Glitch, although there are many more things to eat this time.
    Posted 14 months ago by Anaglyph Subscriber! | Permalink
  • @Snokatt: Nethack! Yay! (Also spawned similar dungeon-crawlers known as Moria and Rogue.)

    @Anaglyph: Perhaps not so much a like/dislike system, with everyone having their own stats, but a simple exchange system. You could make a veggie LemBurger by substituting x veggies for the meat. Or maybe we could age beans as we do milk, produce soy, and then tofu ...

    I'm not a vegan/vegetarian, but I have friends/relatives who are, or who have dietary restrictions by way of having Celiac disease (gluten-free) or other intolerances/allergies.
    Posted 14 months ago by TK-855 Subscriber! | Permalink
  • Veggie here , my pixels are eating other pixels ....
    I have respect for all living beings but pixels aren't alive .
    They are not real.
    Specially in this game everything is so extremely unreal and funny .
    Every belief/life style  should stick with the core reason i think.
    My char is a bunch of pixels i am only inside "the bag of bones" we call human..
    Still i have total respect for all that do ,like in all i say think or do, feel very free to disagree :)
    Posted 14 months ago by Great Brain Robbery Subscriber! | Permalink
  • Me and my gf are both vegetarians in real life and don't see the big deal of eating meat on the game. Its a game nothing more. I am opposed to murder yet it doesn't stop me from getting head shots on COD.
    Posted 14 months ago by Noc Subscriber! | Permalink