Faecal matter in games: excrement and games

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Toilet scene from a developer video for "SCUM": An unusual sight in games

The relationship between games and poop is exciting - also because it is not without its contradictions. On the one hand, the topic is almost always elegantly concealed, especially in the simulation genre. For example, the "Sims" series, which is otherwise unfamiliar to human beings, has an astonishing gap in digestion: why are the Sims, now in their fourth generation, having a bladder and a stomach, but still no intestines? Although angry Sims can retire to the toilet for an "angry poop", the game still owes an open approach to the subject even after 20 years. "Sims" players therefore come into contact with faeces mainly as owners of animals - when cleaning the litter box.

But there are individual games that do it differently - above all "SCUM": In the open-world survival game, players have an almost realistic metabolism. Everything that is consumed then travels through the stomach and intestines, the level of which can be viewed at any time via the status display. Metabolism results in bowel movements: In "SCUM" players can and must poop into the countryside to empty their full bowels.

And because the intestine is, as the blurb of Giulia Enders' bestseller "Darme mit Charme" says, "a fabulous creature full of sensitivity, responsibility and willingness to perform", "SCUM" consistently punishes anyone who treats it badly. If you overdo it with certain vitamins or consume too much food with high water and low solids content, you will get diarrhea. Despite all the excessive attention to detail and explicity, "SCUM" is ultimately just a tiny oasis in the vast desert of shameful silence.

Shit for shit's sake

On the other hand, there are genres and games that, to speak with Freud, seem to have gotten stuck deep in the anal phase because the digestion issue is dealt with so intensely. Among them are some who, with their attempt to provoke through the inflationary use of fart and fecal humor, tire rather than liberate. As a prime example, "South Park: The Stick of Truth" and its successor "The Fractured But Whole" are used, which, like the TV series, have an enormous amount of fecal humor: starting with the obligatory appearance of Mister Hankey, the Christmas poop Ability to throw feces at opponents in combat up to an achievement for using each of the numerous toilets. Faecal humor is undoubtedly part of the "South Park" DNA, but it is no longer original or provocative. It's shit for shit's sake.

The topic certainly has potential for creative border crossings, as a mission in "Saints Row 2" shows: The task is to heat the streets in a tanker filled with faeces and to distribute the contents over large areas on people and house facades, up to almost the whole neighborhood sinks into the feces soup screaming. Laughing at it doesn't necessarily mark a mature adult. But if you leave this scenario completely cold, you obviously lack imagination.

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Scene from "Death Stranding": Standing or sitting on the toilet?

Agriculture stinks

Late adolescent fecal jokes aside, there are a lot of relevant reasons for poop sprites in games. One of them is agriculture. For example, anyone who played the point-and-click adventure "News from Pettson and Findus" as a child in the late nineties was taught the importance of faeces on the farm in a child-friendly manner: In a mini-game, a chicken had to be followed and its droppings as organic fertilizer be caught in a wheelbarrow. Only good reflexes protect against chicken poop on the face.

In the survival genre, too, droppings are often an important resource; after all, agriculture is the third important pillar in the struggle for survival, alongside hunting and gathering. In the survival game "Don't Starve", for example, manure is indispensable for successful agriculture because it accelerates plant growth enormously. Unfortunately, the protagonists are not able to produce excrement themselves. Instead, the main suppliers are the herds of the buffalo-like beefalo, whose dung can be safely collected, as well as the nocturnal, bat-like and aggressive batilisks, which leave behind snow-white guano.

However, those who find a pig settlement are particularly lucky: the pigs in "Don't Starve" have long since learned to walk upright, they have names, they live in pretty houses and behave in a comparatively civilized manner, but they are given something eat, they break the moral chains of evolutionary progress and poop right at your feet.

To the author

Sonja Wild has little to do with faeces at work, but sees herself as an interested laywoman because of her home in the Berlin dog waste sanctuary. At Lostlevels.de and elsewhere, she writes and podcasts, among other things, about indie games.

A zoologist from Oxford University recently found that dung beetles in the Brazilian rainforest prefer bait with human feces to those with the feces of native species. Because zoologists have always been using their own excrement in traps in their on-site research for practical reasons and the dung beetles have been crazy about them, the scientists unintentionally reduced the informative value of their research results. 

Feces bait in space

This could not have happened in the procedural space adventure "No Man's Sky": The fauna there prefers cross-planetary bait that is enriched with animal excrement. To be more precise, with Faecium, a bright red substance that doesn't look that fecal at all, but according to the game description, it smells bad. Nevertheless, it seems to have an attractive effect on animals: mixed with berries, herbs or mushrooms, it can be used to make bait for various animal species.

Faecium is not only found in manure, but can also be harvested as a by-product of the gastric spasmodic flower. The fact that the developers of the faecium certainly did not think of flowers first is indicated by its current name, which the fabric has only had since an update, and the original name Coprit: It is reminiscent of coprolite, also known as fecal stone. This is nothing more than petrified feces. 

So some animals can be attracted with faeces - others use their excrement to mark their own territory and to deter rivals. We know, for example, of meerkats that they register their claims to ownership in this way and, if necessary, even defend their territory down to the blood.

Animal excrement is also used as a marker in the round strategy game "Pit People". However, this is not about territorial fights, but about navigation: In order to find the way back to the castle on the large map after completing a quest, the team of oxen leaves cow dung on the hexagonal fields in a kind of faecal tribute to Hansel and Gretel - underlined with Farting noises. 

Excrement as a weapon

The fact that Japanese culture has a very special relationship to the digestive process and its products was suspected in the West at the latest after the opening of the Unko, i.e. Kacke Museum in Tokyo. As photos show, the museum's bright and bright kawaii world has more to do with poop emojis on Instagram than with the human digestive process.

For a less flowery confrontation with shit, you will find what you are looking for with Hideo Kojima, in whose work Unko is a recurring theme. Examples of this can be found in almost all "Metal Gear Solid" parts, in "Metal Gear Solid 5" shit even becomes a tactical weapon: Big Boss can maneuver his horse on command so that enemy vehicles slide on the horse droppings and Big Boss can take advantage of the resulting chaos.

Kojima takes the military misappropriation of excrement to extremes in "Death Stranding": Sam can make so-called EX type 2 grenades from his excrement by using the toilet. The poop grenades may be a nice humiliation for their victims - but they are not necessarily an ornament to their owner either. 

Golden dog poop

The use of one's own excrement as a weapon in the tower defense platform "Poöf vs. the Cursed Kitty" is only slightly more plausible. The dog that has to protect a kitten from hordes of enemies in it can produce golden dog poo. These droppings have the opposite effect as the horse droppings in "Metal Gear Solid": enemies who hit a dog poop get stuck in them and can be held up for a while. 

So while shit is surprisingly often a welcome tool in games, the disgust for excrement is rarely implemented in a playful way. The undoubtedly deterrent potential of excrement has not yet been fully exploited by computer games - with one prominent exception: In the N64 platformer "Conker's Bad Fur Day" there is a gigantic pile of shit with the Great Mighty Poo as the final boss.

In a remarkable aria, the brown villain leaves no doubt about his base motives before the fight: "I am the Great Mighty Poo / and I'm going to throw my shit at you." After he is defeated, he has to leave the big stage appropriately through the drain - an expected but humiliating end for a Great Mighty Poo, with whom he quarreled extensively: "Oh what a world, what a world!". It is a world in which the toilet flush always has the last word.