My daughter wants to build Monte Albán in Palworld——to scale of course——a challenge for which she will get twenty real-life dollars, up significantly, I tell her, from what such work would have earned her in the real city around 500 B.C. When I join her game in my own loincloth, our two brown avatars lurch across the landscape hungry and freezing, all bare skin and red and purple afros and rock-hard abs.
Palworld is coming more for your throat than your Pokémon, a billion creature capture games into the genre, and having ousted Ark on the cuteness barometer we might just let it claim the basic intertextual play and allusion due to any real art, with its snarky, pet-butchering twist toward the real. And so we skip the thought of primitive accumulation upon the game’s request; Palpagos Island was always, naturally, uninhabited. Suspension of disbelief.
“So they sayin wasn’t nobody living here?” my daughter says from across the room.
“Great question. You should ask Silvia Federici or one of them.”
She shakes her head.
We get right down to hunter gathering: stones and wood for fire and workbenches; wool and Lamball meat for food and armor. We pummel the sweet lambs silly as they bleat with every satisfying thwack of our clubs, till dead black swirls replace those otherwise bouncy irises. Their remains roll down hills and get kicked around by more powerful pals.
We string our own bows; we carve our own arrows. We gain a few levels for our labor, yet untroubled by the creep of alienation, sharing haphazardly the fire for searing meat or frying eggs ourselves. We recall this sweet woman at the breakfast buffet in Monterrey, shelling out perfect omelets where we dreamt of flipping our own eggs too. We lust after experience, but recognize that our quickest path to power is catching more pals. We craft spheres and keep thwacking, stacking up Lamballs and Cattivas, Chikipis and Foxsparks, who all look the way they sound and contribute their unique abilities to our little encampment. Come nightfall, though, things change; their need for bedding feels vulgar. Upkeep is constant, tossing picked berries or the flesh of their distant cousins down their gullets in a never-ending chain of failed satiation. We can’t keep up with their needs, my daughter and I, snatching stone and chopping wood with blistered palms, burning our fingertips on the stove while a menagerie of shiftless cryptids salivate behind us. And have you ever cut down a tree by hand? Top ten least easy things I’ve ever done outside.
We’re struck dumb by the futile nature of our pre-agrarian lifestyle, banging our heads against the game’s algorithmic imperatives for growth.
“We need a logging area,” she says. “And an advanced workbench.”
“Facts,” I say. “Facts,” as I hammer away reluctantly at another pal bed.
With enough tech points, a quarry appears on the build menu. A mill. A furnace. We would work these modern machinations ourselves but despite having rock-hard abs we are limited by the meagerness of our ten digits and opposable thumbs, lacking as we are in our ability to breathe fire or never tire. The four minutes in which we dreamt of working the quarry ourselves have passed by. We are bored and sore to death by the repetitive clinking and wads of guano, the early mornings and late nights, and, God forbid, another splinter? We’ve only just ascended from stone scavenging, those decades chopping wood right off the tree and shit. The pals, our polymorphous companions in this venture appear eager to help, which seems to me better than the quintessential Pokémon’s cockfighting destiny. They do not speak our language and therefore have no union. “Hunger” clogs up our U.I.; the more hyperbolic among them are apparently “Starving” or, worse, “Stressed,” and the most egregious of all have the nerve to be “Overfull.” Another claims to have an illness, a peptic “Ulcer” to be exact; more are allegedly “Depressed.” But these claims all produce the same feeling in the managerial class, that pang of lost efficiency. We build a fountain for their sanity, where Cattiva can be caught loitering round the clock. There are now eleven-going-on-thirty-five of them, these pals, watering crops and grinding stone, roasting berries and flint knapping hundreds of arrowheads.
“I swear some of these pals be lazy,” my daughter says.
“Crazy right? It’s like I asked them to clean their rooms or some shit.”
She rolls her eyes.
They seem to us impatient; it takes time to build an empire, even longer than it takes to build rock-hard abs. There are leaps in ideological strata through which one cannot jump——can only crawl, evolve into over millennia.
Bandits attack, bodying four pals and destroying our crops. One scoundrel lays on the trigger of an assault rifle long enough for the sun to completely rotate on its axis, and makes the petty gripes of our surviving pals feel even less significant. After the assault we toss out some Band-aids and paper towels, let most of the wounds heal themselves and grieve for the unplanned aggression against our burgeoning empire (Norf Philly, we’ll call it). We must help the pals help themselves to prepare for the future, not for rest or recreation. We shift labor to build a few new beds and another fountain for the labor to fuck off in. We construct another bin to store their food until we realize we’re in the red on our most basic supplies. Some stone worker has a “Fracture,” a Lamball is “Incapacitated.” We have not secured a path to production that can operate on its own or by any means indefinitely. This is the constant situation in Palworld, besides our avatar’s hunger and the cold, exhaustion and missteps, not to mention the time outside the game in which you should be sleeping, or fucking your lover, or perhaps soaking tomorrow morning’s steel cut oats.
We soothe the conflict over lacking materials, my daughter and I, with one common amplifier: more. Two workbenches are better than one——two stone grinding mills, two of each type of pal, mode of weapon, form of combat, two warring ideals between puberty and parenthood trapped in one digital simulation of what it means to be alive.
And just like that we’ve sort of atomized labor, “Major Injury” pals and all.
“Dada,” my daughter says. “I think we should build the weapons bench.”
And it’s decided. Another worker, this Zubat/Tomcat mashup, falls ill; I ask if she plans to give him medicine or rest, thinking mostly of their little pal fingers working the screws and springs, adjusting extractors and greasing our firing pins.
“Easier to just catch another one,” she says. And by this point, she’s already decided to capture human beings too, the merchant first, of course, so that we can “buy things whenever we want.”
This particular mode of human trafficking is punishable by death, but her wrongs are nothing compared to my answer when she asks why money exists in the first place, when I explain the difference between use and exchange value with cows and copper for some reason. She remains, in her own way, a saint.
And so we venture out into the dark to grab five more Tombats, tossing the sick one in a box. All through the morning, the evening, and the night, they work on the weapons bench as we salivate over the future of firepower. We’ve had our beefs about resources, my daughter and I, about who should be using our stones for what structures, who has the most rock-hard abs, how many arrows we each have cooking in the lab, a little penguin stacking up thousands of them through thick beads of sweat, but on this point we both agree: all labor power should now be organized around the weapons assembly line.
It’s not long before I have Cam’ron’s “Oh Boy” stuck in my head as we ravage the island more rapidly than before, expanding our empire and thinking “Cam’ll blam blam em,” as we lean into the eradication of endemic life with the shotty, the handgun, the metal bat for when times are tough.
Let’s be honest: Who in America hasn’t considered shooting a Pokémon? Or themselves, or someone regrettably elected through the democratic process? Who hasn’t lost sleep ruminating over this, our most readily accessible pathway to being happy in the here and now?
For what it’s worth, my daughter’s model of Monte Albán is coming along great. She obsesses over the finer details of the Juego de Pelota, stacking and unstacking stones a dozen times over and comparing the angles to photos she took while we were at the ruins. “Look Dada,” she says, “this is the ball court and I’m gonna put some more pal beds down in the center.” So I consider taking her to Chichen Itzá some time.
Having forgotten about the twenty, my daughter catches a wolf, and pets it; little hearts float out of the creature's head and produce nothing. It’s funny, nights like these are the only nights she’s prone to tell me, unprompted and without qualification before her actual bedtime: “Dada, I love you.”
