Friends, Forage and Freedom: Why We Should Stop Normalizing Solitary Confinement in Horse Games and What Devs Can Do Instead

Where do horses live? What does a really nice stable look like? Many of us probably have a specific kind of image in mind: every horse has a stall, and perhaps they get to look outside over the stall door, either towards a center aisle or outside towards a yard. If the stable is particularly fancy or luxurious, there may be wood panelling on the walls, paved stone aisles and not a stalk of straw out of place... 

“Luxury Stable” (image source)

“Luxury Stable” (image source)

There’s only one glaring issue though: what does a good, fancy or luxurious stable actually look like for the horse? Splendid barn aesthetics are nice to have for humans, but what horses really need are the so-called three Fs: Friends, Forage and Freedom. Today I want to have a look at what meeting those needs looks like in real life, how they’re often neglected in favor of human priorities, and how horse-focused media – be it games, movies or other art – can play an important role in education and normalization when it comes to the question of “What should a cool, fancy, high quality stable look like?” 

What Horses Need

From a standpoint of biology and evolution, horses are flight animals that rely on their herd for safety and socialization, their bodies were made for covering a lot of ground to find food and water and to escape predators, and their digestive systems are best at eating lots of small portions throughout the day without long gaps in their food intake. 

Considering this, it should probably be quite apparent that keeping a horse separate from any herdmates, standing in a relatively small confined space and getting two big meals a day is not what makes a happy, healthy horse. Not providing the horse with ample friends, forage or freedom can lead to digestive problems like colicking, explosive outbursts of energy and all sorts of behavioral issues that endanger either the horse itself, its surroundings or any humans interacting with it.  

Cribbing – laying the front teeth against a surface and sucking in air – is one of many so-called “stable vices”. Source and further reading

Hay nets or other types of slow feeders are used to better simulate a wild horse’s tendency to eat small amounts of food over a longer period of time. (Image Source)

Horses are very social animals: being able to smell and touch other horses helps them manage stress and feel safe – some further reading on that here. Social interactions such as mutual grooming and playing are only possible with other equines, and best possible when actually together rather than just interacting across a paddock fence. 

Even if a horse’s main home is a single-horse stall, its 3F needs can be taken into account by providing a lot of turnout – that means time in a field or large paddock where they can stretch their legs, buck and run to their heart’s content, ideally in a group rather than alone – and by making servings of food last longer with the use of hay nets or slow feeders. 

Being able to see, smell and hear other horses through stall bars is better than nothing, but it’s not enough. (Image Source)

Mutual grooming is one of many ways for horses to socialize and care for each other. (Image source)

Unfortunately, keeping horses stalled for over twenty hours a day and only taking them out for work is not as rare as it should be in the real equestrian world. Some competitive riders consider their equine sports equipment to be too expensive to risk injury by giving it a social life and a space to run around in, others are convinced their horse actually loves to be inside because they’ve inadvertently trained them to expect a food reward upon entering their stall. On the other hand, there are people who have no other options than single stalls due to the available infrastructure in their region, and some horses even struggle with socialization because they never got to properly develop equine communication skills during their upbringing. 

Unfair horse stabling is a systemic problem that can’t always be solved by one individual horse owner, but I strongly believe that overall, every horse person should – within their means and options – strive towards less solitary confinement for their horses and towards keeping them outside and in a herd for as much time as is in any way feasible.

What Alternatives Can Look Like

Rather than working around the inherently suboptimal single horse stall, it is very much possible to keep horses in types of stables that are better suited to the 3F needs, without compromising on human needs all that much. In German, the term we use for this is “Offenstall” i.e. “open stable” – which doesn’t really have a commonly used English equivalent from what I can tell, so I’ll just use the literal translation. 

In an open stable, a group of horses lives together in a paddock with some shelter. A good open stable has one or several sheltered areas with bedding of some sort, a larger outside area for horses to move around in and several troughs or fountains for drinking as well as several hay racks so that all horses can comfortably eat at the same without feeling any need for aggression or resource guarding. In many places, horses still get access to grass pastures in addition, but that tends to be dependent on weather and season. 

A good open stable offers more than enough space for every horse to eat, as well as some covered, sheltered bedding. (Image Source)

One of the several bedding areas at the barn I’ve been riding at the past two years, showing Ollero and Mani having a midday nap.

Unlike the quite “standard” layout for single stall stables where stalls line a central aisle in a long rectangular building, there’s no such thing as a standard open stable layout, and usually no two of them look alike. Many open stables are also built out of existing infrastructure, by turning previously existing single stalls into sleeping areas and removing walls or widening doors to provide plenty of room for horses to come and go. 

Open stables can be further separated into smaller herds to adjust for specific social dynamics between individual horses. Image source

Example of an open stable layout: shared bedding area to the left, tack room and food storage on the right and open pen with large hay racks in the center. (Image Source)

In addition to the ordinary open stable (“Offenstall”), there’s also the more modern “Aktivstall” or “active stable” that tries to take even more of the horse’s needs into consideration by offering different types of fixed undergrounds for improved hoof health and often featuring some sort of paddock trail with feeding stations along the way, with the goal of making horses move more and more often, in order to better simulate the wild horse’s daily search for forage. Among English-speaking equestrians, such solutions might be referred to as track systems or paddock paradises. Here’s one neat video example of that!

In an active stable, points of interests for the horse (such as shelter and food stations) are arranged in some distance to one another to encourage more movement during the day. (Image Source)

“Paddock Paradise” facilities tend to arrange gravel trails around fenced off pasture areas, thereby encouraging horses to move around and preserving grass fields for when the weather and footing is appropriate. (Image Source)

In reality the situation is never quite as simple as “open stable good, single stall bad” because there’s a lot of factors to consider from an individual horse’s suitability to any particular herd, to some open stables not actually offering good footing or enough feeding stations, to the practical availability of what’s in your area. But here’s where fictional portrayals can actually lead by example: the creators of games and other media can play an important role in the education and normalization of what healthy, horse-friendly stabling should look like, while we wait for the real equestrian world to catch up. 

How To Build Horse-Friendly Stabling in Games

Now that we’ve established what a stable that prioritizes equine needs over human ones can look like, let’s explore some options about how one might include such stables in video games. 

If you want the simplest solution possible without any additional complications, my suggestion for devs would be to simply set up a paddock with some shelter, food and water and spawn your one or several horses in there. Depending on how prominently the stable is featured in your game, you may not even need complex horse AI behavior, but can get away with spawning one horse lying down in a shelter, one horse eating at a hay rack and one horse looking out over the fence, for example, and perhaps they’ve switched positions the next time the player sees them. 

And if you plan for stable upgrade mechanics, those can add paddock space and hay racks instead of adding individual stalls.

Positive example from My Life: Riding Stables 3 – horses can move around the open space. Downside in this case: the area is quite large and horses insist on moving very far away from where they spawn, making it a bit tedious to find them.

The Sims 4: Horse Ranch lets players build their own stables. Naturally, I built a shared open space like this for my horses.

If you’ve already planned for a single-stall stable layout and can’t remodel your game world enough to make space for a cool track system solution, you can take inspiration from real life barns that were remodelled to better suit horses’ needs. Any stalls with adjoining paddocks can be turned into a shared sleeping space and open living area by removing some of the walls and fences and therefore become more horse-friendly with minimal effort. 

Before and after: example of a real life stable that had individual stalls with adjoining paddocks…

…but was remodeled into an open stable, combining the stall and paddock space. (Source)

But if you have time and capacity to include these considerations in your game design from the start, there’s loads of options for how to make horse-appropriate stabling not just a visual extra, but to incorporate it into gameplay. In the fashion of games like Zoo Tycoon or The Sims, players could have to build a stable while considering shelter space, bedding types, drainage systems, feed stations, scratching posts and more, probably balancing the cost of these installations against whatever income their barn receives. While some examples exist with Horse Tales: Emerald Valley Ranch, The Sims 4: Horse Ranch and Star Equestrian, I would still argue that barn customization as a gameplay mechanic and resource sink remains underexplored in the horse game niche and I would love to see any competent indie studio’s take on the topic. 

A player building a wild horse habitat in Planet Zoo: possible inspiration for barn building tools in horse games? Source

Star Equestrian lets you customize your barn, which is cool, but there’s no option to keep horses together instead of in single stalls – the stalls just get a bit bigger if you spend more.

When it comes to the aesthetic value of horse stabling (and the possibilities for player customization and self expression that come with it), it may be a bit harder to find good examples of true luxury for both horses and humans. But if you’re curious what a very fancy horse-friendly stable might look like I can only recommend a look at the Instagram or Tiktok account of Mathilde Brandt, who’s been documenting an incredibly gorgeous stable renovation project where equine and human needs are considered and met.

Game mechanical impact

The pasture in Rival Stars Horse Racing is more about freeing up stable slots than meeting welfare considerations, but at least we get to watch our horses chill out there (Image Source)

In the horse games of the 00s, pastures had a tendency to be a bit mechanically pointless, or sometimes even negative. There’s games where your horse has a higher chance of getting sick, dirty or injured in pasture, giving you no gameplay incentive to make use of it beyond roleplay. In reality, these aren’t entirely unrealistic consequences, but in turn, horses who get enough group turnout are a lot more likely to make for happier, calmer and more balanced individuals. If your game gives players a choice for whether or not to provide horses with friends and freedom, there should be a mechanical benefit to doing so.  

While many in-game horses have food and cleanliness as meters to be kept full by the player as part of their barn management tasks, The Sims is the only game I’m aware of where every horse has a ‘social’ and ‘fun’ bar. In other horse games, the equine needs for Friends and Freedom are not represented. I presume this stems from a lack of awareness rather than a deliberate omission on behalf of most game developers, but I would sure like to see some change there.  Much like not feeding your horses, depriving it of freedom and social activity should have negative consequences in games.

Apart from the game mechanical potential of recognizing and representing these needs in horses, open stabling and group turnout also opens the way for so much cute and wonderful horse behavior and animation: Show me horses just being horses. Grazing, walking around, scratching themselves, rolling in the dirt, pairing up to swat the flies out of each other’s faces, grooming each other, playing with each other, having a nap with one leg relieved or lying down… Watching horses just chill and eat and socialize is one of the biggest joys of being an equestrian or horse owner and I really wish more games made an effort to represent that aspect of horse-loving life, rather than only focusing on feeding, grooming and competing. 

What I want to see more of: horses playing with each other (Image Source)

A sight too rare in horse games: just chilling and grazing together (Image Source)

Closing Words

I talk a lot about the genre-wide issues of horse games on here, so I am well aware that “not enough turnout for digital horses” is hardly the biggest game quality problem in our niche. And yet I can’t help but find it increasingly sad when I see new games that obviously come from a place of care and passion still default to single stalling with turnout as an optional bonus at best. 

I understand there’s technical reasons to some degree: it’s simpler to sort horses into neat little units that they’ll stay in rather than open up the can of worms that is autonomous behavior and pathfinding. But I dare say it is absolutely possible to do better, even on a budget. and I’m more than happy to help any dev brainstorm scope-friendly solutions.

I suspect that the main reason that single stalls are so common – not just in video games mind you, in movies and TV as well – is that that’s so normalized that it simply doesn’t get questioned along the way. And I think we should change that, and start actually thinking about feasible alternatives. Our pixel ponies might not suffer from a lack of the three Fs unless we specifically program them to, but “what do horses need to be happy” is a discussion worth having in art and game development precisely because media portrayal can help educate people on what horse-friendly stabling looks like. Let’s challenge what we consider good and normal, at least in the areas we can influence.