It's a pal world, and we're just living in it. Since the launch last Friday of Pocket Pair's AK-powered Pocket Like, it has dominated both the charts and the discourse, and discussions and discoveries about it have been coming out faster than I can keep up with them.

But the latest developments are both discussions and discoveries, and I can't decide whether that makes it easier or harder to cover. What's going on: players in Pal World are not the only ones who are using the game's Pal sphere (which is a pokeball, see below).

The tweet above shows that streamer Connie understands this in real time. As if it were a matter of personal opinion, it is also accompanied by a nifty tooltip from the game, "On Palpargos Island, capturing humans with a Pal Ball is considered inhumane." But things take a darker turn.

As can be seen in a Palworld subreddit post by user Ashl3y95, captured humans seem to follow the same mechanism as the game's captive creatures. That is, players can put them to work in their own bases or summon them to fight on their behalf. They can even sell them on the black market. A bit much!

Indeed, the discovery of slavery in Palworld is currently the subject of extensive debate surrounding the game. Not a few people are dismayed by the fact that they can participate in actual human trafficking simply by displaying a vague warning tooltip. Many others have pointed out that everything from "Rimworld" to "Europa Universalis 4" has some sort of slavery mechanism without generating similar controversy,

which is an understandable reaction to the literal depiction of slavery.

Personally, I am not particularly offended by Palworld's implementation of a slavery mechanism, but rather am completely indifferent to it. In an article Lincoln Carpenter wrote about the game, he said that Palworld's distinctive edge is such that "Bugs Bunny has to spend hours with someone whose job it is to smoke pot. Adding slavery to that is like putting a gun in Bugs Bunny's hand. I'm not any more or less scandalous than I used to be.