In the golden age of Adobe Flash web games, one classic has a surprising ecocritical hook. Fishy! was a childhood favourite of mine. I played it almost every day after school on the family computer in the early 2000s, but I only recently started thinking about its latent environmental message.
The premise is simple enough: you are a small orange fish at the bottom of the food chain, growing larger every time you eat (with a satisfying burp sound) an even smaller fish. By inverse logic, you must dodge every larger fish to avoid being consumed. Eventually your fish becomes, like some banks amid a financial crisis, too big to fail. You fill up so much screen that you cannot
even avoid consuming the fish that once dwarfed your little tadpole as they collide right into you for devourment. Burrrrp.
Then, you devour the game itself. Once your orange fishy hits critical mass and fills the entire screen, the game abruptly ends in a message that reads, “YOU ATE EVERYTHING AND COMPLETELY DESTROYED THE POND ECOSYSTEM.” A victory most haunting to my eight- year-old self.
Although Fishy!’s eat-or-be-eaten winning scenario is sardonic at best, I find myself slightly jarred by its ending as an adult living on the edge of climate disaster. In a world where environmental catastrophe and species extinction are regularly rotating headlines, at what point does ecosystem depletion cease to be a funny punchline?
Consumerist ideology promises infinite economic growth on a planet with finite resources. For as tongue-in-cheek Fishy!’s ending is, the game is more realistic about the actual outcomes of endless consumption than many economists seem to be. Perhaps most pressingly, Fishy! asks us to reckon with the myth of unlimited growth.
Into The Spine