Planet Zoo's ghastly hedge fund man actually seems quite reasonable, if I'm honest

Planet Zoo's ghastly hedge fund man actually seems quite reasonable, if I'thou honest

How fifty-fifty cartoon villains expect good in the Jeff Bezos infinite historic period

The human being you behold in the picture above is Dominic Myers, professional money git and, somehow, zoo owner. Dominic is the adversary of the entrada way in my beloved Planet Zoo, and he comes as a flake of a surprise. In the campaign, you play every bit a trainee zoo managing director taking his first jobs under the mentorship of warm-hearted, chuckly old geezer Bernie Goodwin. A few missions in, nevertheless, Myers comes out of nowhere, buys out Goodwin's zoo franchise from nether him, and abruptly becomes your boss.

Myers is a hedge fund manager, and an utter sod, apparently. He'd sell a truckload of tiger willies if it fabricated him a tenner, and laugh nearly it later. He'd brand a crocodile consume a big hot anvil made of poison, while people threw pennies into a hat. He doesn't care virtually animals. Far worse, he has no interest in them. But despite this, as I've been pottering along with the campaign during quiet evenings in contempo weeks, I've come to find him a strangely welcome, refreshing presence.

Since Dom is only interested in the profits his zoos are making, he begins sending you to complete shitholes when he takes the reins of the campaign: a collection of hovels on a Greek island, where depressed tortoises sprawl about on muddy tiles like a load of half-deflated beach assurance; an Indian megacasino, where gharials shiver with trauma in an inch-deep moat of piss; a windswept car park in Hull, where Myers is to be constitute lashing a week-expressionless wildebeest with a length of wheel chain and demanding information technology give him a tenner.

OK, that last one isn't true, but yous become the picture, right? Myers makes no pretense, whatever, most his antipathy for the realm of beasts. If a new rhino is born in your zoo, he will Google the sale value of its pancreas, before reluctantly releasing the funds for you to build it some kind of shelter. There is even a mission where (and I'm non exaggerating this time, I promise), the site you're building on is littered with barrels of "toxic waste product", that mysterious green liquid manufactured only past villains in cartoons.

And that's the thing: Myers is a cartoon villain through and through. He's a competent bit of writing, in the context of a simple, kid-friendly narrative campaign. And this is fine. Suffice to say, I was never expecting the complication of Iago in the baddie from a zoo construction game. Why, so, is this objectionable, pinstriped cliché of a man and so strangely dear to me?

The answer came to me, I think, when the game explained Myers' motivation for owning loads of zoos. It's non purely for coin, you see. While he wants to milk every coin he tin can from the facilities he puts you lot in charge of, that'due south merely a side-goal for Big Dom. What he really wants from his zoos is this: good publicity. He'due south in hot water for doing nasty money things, you lot see, so the Goodwin zoo empire, plus y'all, are to serve as a sort of beast welfare beard for him.

"That's the thing which staggers me; that Myers - a billionaire - actually holds concern, even fear, for the land of his image in the public eye."

And that'due south the thing which staggers me slightly; that Myers - a billionaire, let's think - really holds business concern, fifty-fifty fright, for the country of his prototype in the public eye.

What a utopian world Planet Zoo has inadvertently let us glimpse here! A earth where, for all their passionless, clamorous hunger, billionaires can conceive of the thought of consequences. A world where a scandal over something so picayune as a few knackered elephants having a weep might knock a plutocrat very slightly sideways on his perch.

Information technology looks similar paradise, really, from the vantage of a globe whose richest man just took a ten-figure joyride to the edge of infinite, and who and so, with dead optics and porcelain grinning, thanked his customers and employees for paying for it. I don't think Bezos realised quite how brutal the taunt was, to exist honest, and probably gave it no more thought than toddler might, when considering how many ants would be crushed on the empty-headed rush across the playground to a new toy.

When Jeff looked downward on the Earth, this is what he saw.

Because honestly, what possible consequence could give a man that powerful pause, before he carryied out his whims anyway? Elon Musk could stream himself forcing elephants to fight to the death, and receive only the customary 48 hours of twitter outrage: strident calls for something to happen, forgotten in moments when Richard Branson is filmed suplexing a terminally ill gorilla into a volcano.

Here'south to that brief glimpse, so, into a world whose villains not merely create issues as easy to solve equally glowing green barrels, but where they actually worry about getting into trouble because of said problems. And here's to Dominic himself: not some chilling, pharaonic animal whose rise into wealth has made him into something imperceivable every bit fully human, but simply a dickhead who wears a stupid gold sentry on his sleeve in place of his heart. Billionaires similar him, I call back I could actually handle.