(Routledge Advances in Game Studies) Rob Gallagher - Videogames, Identity and Digital Subjectivity-Routledge (2017)

Videogames, Identity and Digital
Subjectivity
This book argues that videogames offer a means of coming to terms

with a world that is being transformed by digital technologies. As blends
of software and fiction, games are uniquely capable of representing and
exploring the effects of digitization on day-to-day life. By modelling
and incorporating new technologies (from artificial intelligence routines
and data mining techniques to augmented reality interfaces), and by dra-
matizing the implications of these technologies for understandings of
identity, nationality, sexuality, health and work, games encourage us to
playfully engage with these issues in ways that traditional media cannot.
Rob Gallagher is a Postdoctoral Researcher based at King’s College

London, UK. As part of the Ego-Media team, his research addresses
the impact of new technologies on notions of identity and practices of
self-presentation. His work has appeared in Games and Culture, Film
Criticism and The New Inquiry.
Routledge Advances in Game Studies
For a full list of titles in this series, please visit www.routledge.com.
3 Gender, Age, and Digital Games in the Domestic Context

Alison Harvey
4 The Dark Side of Game Play

Controversial Issues in Playful Environments
Edited by Torill Elvira Mortensen, Jonas Linderoth,
and Ashley ML Brown
5 Understanding Counterplay in Video Games

Alan F. Meades
6 Video Game Policy

Production, Distribution, and Consumption
Edited by Steven Conway and Jennifer deWinter
7 Digital Games as History

How Videogames Represent the Past and Offer Access
to Historical Practice
Adam Chapman
8 New Perspectives on the Social Aspects of Digital Gaming

Multiplayer 2
Edited by Rachel Kowert and Thorsten Quandt
9 Fans and Videogames

Histories, Fandom, Archives
Edited by Melanie Swalwell, Helen Stuckey and Angela Ndalianis
10 Identity and Play in Interactive Digital Media

Ergodic Ontogeny
Sara M. Cole
11 Videogames, Identity and Digital Subjectivity

Rob Gallagher
Videogames, Identity
and Digital Subjectivity
Rob Gallagher
First published 2018
by Routledge
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Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group,
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ISBN: 978-1-138-22898-6 (hbk)
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Contents
List of Figures ix
Acknowledgements xi
1 Digital Subjects: Videogames, Technology and Identity 1
2 Datafied Subjects: Profiling and Personal Data 18
3 Private Subjects: Secrecy, Scandal and Surveillance 51
4 Beastly Subjects: Bodies and Interfaces 84
5 Synthetic Subjects: Horror and Artificial Intelligence 114
6 Mobile Subjects: Framing Selves and Spaces 141
7 Productive Subjects: Time, Value and

Gendered Feelings 171
Index 205
List of Figures
2.1 Screenshot from Papers, Please. 31

3.1 Screenshot from Cobra Club. 70
6.1 Screenshot from Killer 7. 147
6.2 Screenshot from Fez. Here rotating the camera reveals
a pier, creating a route to a hitherto inaccessible island. 153
Acknowledgements
This book is part of Ego-Media, a research project addressing the

impact of new media on understandings of identity and practices of
self-presentation, and was made possible by funding from the European
Research Council. Thanks must go out to the rest of the Ego-Media team –
Becky Roach, Max Saunders, Clare Brant, Alexandra Georgakopoulou,
Rachael Kent, Stijn Peeters, Mikka Lene Pers Højholt, Leone Ridsdale
and Charlotte Wu – for creating an environment so conducive to thinking
about technology and identity, and to my colleagues and friends at King’s.
Many ideas pursued here stem from my PhD work, and the book owes
much to the dazzling erudition of Steve Connor and the arcane wisdom
of Tanya Krzywinska, my supervisors. I am also indebted to the London
Consortium faculty – in particular Aura Satz, Barry Curtis, Laura
Mulvey and Patrick Wright – and to my fellow Consortiumites. Several
chapters first took shape during my year in Montreal, working along-
side Bart Simon, Darren Wershler, Carolyn Jong, Kalervo Sinervo and
Stephen Yeager on the IMMERSe project – an opportunity for which
I am very grateful. Thanks are due to Gina Haraszti, Will Robinson,
Skot Deeming, Jen Whitson, Thorsten Busch, Pierson Browne, Forest
Scully-Blaker, Mia Consalvo, Jason Camlot and all at Concordia’s TAG
and M-labs for making me feel so welcome in Québec.
It is impossible to list everyone who has helped to shape the book here,
but those who have been particularly forthcoming with inspiration, sup-
port, editorial input and/or pdfs include Field Work’s Laurence, Lydia
and Si, Zara Dinnen, Jack Wormell, Daniel Rourke, Tom A pperley,
Ana Parejo Vadillo, James Svensson, Marc Halatsis, Paolo Ruffino,
Liz Haines, Sophie Jones, Ashley M. L. Brown, Edwina Attlee, Joe
Baxter-Webb, Graeme Kirkpatrick, Giles Richards, Andrew Burn, Ross
Exo Adams, Barry Atkins and Janina Lange. Finally, thanks to Angela
and Brian Gallagher, to Jess and Theo Peters and to Poppy Keeling.
1 Digital Subjects
Videogames, Technology
and Identity
This book makes two claims. The first is that digital technologies are
fostering new conceptions of subjectivity and identity. It holds that social
networks and smartphones, augmented reality interfaces and biometric
sensors, artificial intelligence systems and, indeed, videogames are all
changing how we see ourselves, both as individuals and as human sub-
jects. The second claim is that digital games have emerged as a fictional
form uniquely equipped to address these changes. If videogames are of-
ten framed as symptoms or drivers of a shift towards digital subjectivity,
then critics tend to be less willing to acknowledge that they might also
be expressive works with things to say about this shift. Across close
contextual readings of a wide range of titles, this book makes that case,
showing how games get to grips with the implications of digitization in
a range of complex and imaginative ways. Like other fictional forms,
videogames use words and images, sounds, symbols and spatial meta-
phors to communicate. But they also ask players to cultivate an under-
standing of the rules and probabilities, interfaces and economies that
structure their virtual worlds. They are simultaneously ludic systems,
digital architectures and expressive fictions. If, as fictions, they adapt
techniques, scenarios and figures familiar from literature, cinema, the
visual arts, pop culture and myth, as software systems they incorporate
or model a range of other digital forms (by, say, simulating social net-
works, mimicking smartphone interfaces or integrating image editing
tools and digital shopfronts). By, for and about denizens of those parts of
the overdeveloped world that have most enthusiastically adopted digital
technologies, the particular games that this book addresses dramatize
the effects of new technologies in ways that traditional media cannot,
letting us playfully engage questions of identity and nationality, privacy
and embodiment, work and space. What does this mean in practice?
It means roleplaying games about becoming a reality TV star, gothic
mysteries about haunted smartphones, social networking simulations
set aboard space stations, augmented reality apps which project ador-
able monsters into everyday spaces, text adventures about training bio
mechanical horses and critiques of government surveillance in which we
lock ourselves in a bathroom to take explicit selfies – to describe just a
few of the games the book covers.
2 Digital Subjects
Defining Digital Subjectivity
In arguing that fictional forms, media technologies and models of the
subject develop in symbiosis, this book is hardly without precedent. Ian
Watt (1959) long ago argued that the emergence of the novel, for exam-
ple, is intimately bound up with the rise of the modern subject and bour-
geois individualism, both recording and helping to effect ‘the transition
from the objective, social and public orientation of the classical world
to the subjective, individualist and private orientation of the life and
literature of the last two hundred years’ (176). Nor do critics like Crary
(2001) consider it a coincidence that cinema should have been roughly
coeval with the psychoanalytic subject. Jonathan Beller (2006) goes so
far as to argue that ‘the unconscious is cinema’s product’, proposing that
film provided a ‘precursor of and model for the unconscious as it has
been theorized during the twentieth century’ (17, 18). The storytelling
strategies and the forms of subjectivation that the novel and the feature
film favour were already being challenged before videogames entered
the frame. With the advent of television, moving images began to invei-
gle themselves into audiences’ domestic spaces and quotidian routines.
Soaps and serials drew viewers into prolonged, open-ended engagements
with fictional people and places as discrete beginning–middle–end nar-
ratives were subsumed within the general televisual ‘flow’ (Warhol 2003;
Williams 2004 [1974]). Advertisements and, later, music videos pio-
neered forms of address calculated to elicit affective attunement rather
than rational comprehension. With cable and satellite came the rise of
channel hopping – embraced by theorists of postmodernity as the perfect
metonym for a culture felt to be schizophrenic or attention deficient –
and a more ‘interactive’ relationship with media (Featherstone 2007, 5).
Home shopping channels, Ceefax and Teletext, video diaries and reality
TV began a blurring of fiction and reality, production and consumption
that would be accelerated and exacerbated by the Internet. With changes
to intellectual property law and the emergence of media conglomerates,
meanwhile, came a new emphasis on extending ‘transmedia storyworlds’
across comic books, movies, novels, TV shows, toys and merchandise,
web portals, stage shows, live events and tourist attractions (Ryan and
Thon 2014).
In the process, videogames have emerged as a fictional form parti
cularly well equipped to help us understand how digital technologies are
redrawing the contours of subjectivity and identity. If games retain and
remediate techniques familiar from prior media forms, this only makes
them better qualified for this task, reflecting the fact that cultural shifts
are neither smooth nor sudden, that digital subjects continue to orient
themselves using what might seem like obsolete or anachronistic con-
cepts even as they embrace new ones. What, though, is a digital subject?
While the nature of digital subjectivity should be clearer by the end of
Digital Subjects 3
the book, there are six propositions I want to advance at this stage –
propositions that will give a sense of why videogames have a special
claim when it comes to capturing important dimensions of contempo-
rary experience.
1 Digital subjects belong to a culture of data collection and demo

graphy, which treats individuals as ever-expanding masses of infor-
mation waiting to be aggregated and analysed. In the 1990s, the
emergence of the Internet fuelled liberal fantasies of ‘colour-blind’
tolerance and post-structuralist dreams of polymorphous identity
play. Today, however, digital subjects are perpetually being sorted
and ‘cyber-typed’ along lines of gender, sexual orientation, ethnic-
ity, nationality, age, taste, socio-economic status and medical history
(Nakamura 2002; Galloway 2011, 135–137). In the process, the
biography, which narrates the individual life as a developmental arc
following a logic of cause and effect, is being superseded by the pro-
file, a collection of taxonomic and behavioural data, which becomes
a basis for constructing new categories and speculating about future
actions. Some profiles deal in fixed, objective and/or empirically veri-
fiable characteristics (height, blood type, eye colour and so on), others
in characteristics that are subjective, qualitative or subject to change
(tastes, political affiliations, age); in some cases (as with a Facebook
page or a LinkedIn profile) individuals will fill in and maintain their
own profiles, while in others (as with the profiles Google assembles
on the basis of users’ browsing habits or the kill lists given to US
drone pilots) this profiling will be automatic and covert.
2 Digital subjects express themselves via ‘autobiographical perfor-
mances’ and playful acts of self-presentation, from selfies, blogposts
and tweets to videogame ‘Let’s Play’ videos (Papacharissi 2015, 98).
These activities manifest an understanding of the self as a reflexive
project pursued before an audience of potential followers, subscrib-
ers, lovers, employers and contacts. As Alexander Galloway (2011)
argues, digital culture is founded on a perhaps unlikely combination
of ‘romanticism and cybernetic systems theory’ (26, 28); where the
influence of romanticism can be seen in online culture’s celebration
of ‘creative’ spontaneity and its emphasis on personal perspectives,
its debt to systems theory is manifest in the multiplication of feed-
back mechanisms (likes, follows, subscriptions, replies, retweets)
which sort social winners from losers. But where Romantic poets
disavowed charges of egoism by pleading fealty to higher callings –
divinity, nature, art, liberty and so on – digital culture inherits post-
modernity’s suspicion of grand narratives, transcendent signifieds
and hoary traditions, prizing innovation, improvisatory élan and the
capacity to adapt oneself to new roles, styles and contexts. Flexibility
4 Digital Subjects
becomes a key attribute: as consumers, digital subjects are expected
to seek out new products and experiences; as professionals, they are
required to adapt to the changing needs of a volatile labour market;
as performers they are expected to keep their personal brands fresh
and relevant.
3 The digital subject is very much embodied. That body, how-
ever, is increasingly understood in cybernetic terms, by way of
‘human-computer metaphors’ that frame it as a form of ‘wetware’
or a quasi-Cartesian vehicle requiring technocratic management
and maintenance (Franklin 2015, xv). As these ideas have gained
traction, familiar notions of interiority and psychological depth
have come under strain. Where Enlightenment philosophers ar-
gued that ‘man’ was essentially rational, and where Freud posited
an unconscious realm to which unacceptable memories, wishes and
ideas were banished, in the era of the ‘new unconscious’ attempts
to explain (and indeed to influence) our behaviour are more likely
to draw on cybernetics, behaviourism, big data, game theory, ge-
netics, neuroscience and evolutionary biology (Galloway 2011, 28).
Subjects become ‘black boxes’, signal-processing mechanisms whose
workings are knowable only to the extent that given stimuli reliably
elicit given responses (Galloway 2012, 242; Franklin 2015, 92–93).
These developments have important repercussions for our under-
standing of agency. For transhumanists, new technologies promise
to grant digital subjects greater choice and control, enabling us to
transcend the limits and circumvent the ‘bugs’ evolution has be-
queathed us. Behind these fantasies, though, lie fears of being out
of control or subject to another’s control, of technologies being
used to circumvent our rational decision-making faculties and trick
us into behaving against our best interests. If we can be patched
and upgraded like digital systems, can’t we also be hacked and
(re)programmed? Such fears are intensifying as more authority is
granted to human-engineered but increasingly autonomous algo-
rithms and artificial intelligences. Where it was once possible to see
technology as a means of prosthetically extending human capacities,
Mark B.N. Hansen (2015) argues that today this is no longer the
case (221); rather, digital subjects must share their sovereignty with
nonhuman agents whose modes of apprehending and acting upon
reality are often very different to ours.
4 The digital subject is networked, a node linked to other nodes by
strong or weak ties to form the ‘social graphs’ that are superseding
more established models for understanding relationships and com-
munities. While this emphasis on collectivity and connection might
seem to be at odds with my claim that digital culture is individual-
istic, Wendy Hui Kyong Chun (2016) explains that the brilliance
of what she calls ‘N(YOU) media’ lies in their capacity to address
Digital Subjects 5
a ‘you’ that hovers between the singular and the plural (3–4). In
digital culture, personal success entails expanding and effectively
mobilizing one’s contacts, and the winners are those who learn to
navigate networks confidently. Digital subjects often express them-
selves through avatars, mouthpieces and aliases, using templates
and stock formats (catchphrases, hashtags, fonts, memes) to mediate
between the personal and the collective in ways calculated to foster
connections and collective identities. As we will see in Chapter 3,
they also seek to avoid ‘context collapse’ by tailoring their behaviour
to the norms of the spaces in which they find themselves – be those
spaces online, offline (or, as is increasingly the case) layered, hybrid
environments (Marwick and boyd 2011).
5 For the digital subject, work and play may be hard to separate – a
prospect by no means as utopian as it might sound. For K irkpatrick
(2013), videogames are a product of the shift towards a more ‘ludic’
model of capitalism, a shift which saw employers attempting to ad-
dress growing dissatisfaction with the stultifying monotony and
rigid hierarchies of the Fordist workplace by recasting work as
more creative, fulfilling and flexible (27–30). This entailed capi-
talizing on the capabilities of information technologies to reorient
overdeveloped economies away from industry and towards forms
of immaterial, intellectual and affective labour in the creative and
service sectors. The promise was of entrepreneurial individuals
liberated to pursue forms of ‘passionate work’ suited to their abi
lities, interests and personal commitments (McRobbie 2016, 36).
The reality, however, has been one of aggressive deskilling, greater
precarity, fiercer competition and widening inequality, as training
programmes, jobs for life, opportunities for advancement, pension
funds and employment benefits are scrapped or curtailed along with
the other perks and concessions put in place to reconcile workers
to the Fordist order of things. As this suggests, while ‘ludic capi-
talism’ might sound more agreeable than its forebears, it is not just
about ‘paidiac’ playfulness and creativity but also the drive to game
the system, maximize advantages and exploit rivals’ weaknesses
(Caillois 2001 [1958], 27). Whether they are scrabbling for the
next pitch, gig or short-term contract, striving to survive the next
downsizing or attempting to build a lucrative personal brand, dig-
ital subjects are always playing the game. Meanwhile data mining
has turned what were once leisure activities into a form of unpaid
work, allowing companies like Google, Microsoft and Netflix to
extract value from activities like browsing the web, playing games
or watching movies. If videogames promise an escape from the
stresses of professional life they also recapitulate ludic capitalism’s
logic of productivity and entrepreneurial endeavour – as we shall
see in Chapter 7.
6 Digital Subjects
6 Finally, digital subjects play digital games. Where videogames were
once a comparatively niche pursuit, today this is no longer the case.
Retirees play Scrabble with family members via Facebook; commut-
ers while away their train journeys with rounds of Candy Crush;
Norwegian prime ministers are caught playing Pokémon GO in the
middle of parliamentary debates (Cresci 2016). But while most peo-
ple now have some experience of playing digital games, this does not
necessarily mean they would describe themselves as ‘gamers’. It’s to
this distinction and its implications that I want to turn now.
Ludo Ergo Sum

When I refer to ‘gamers’ and ‘gamer culture’, I am talking about sub-
jects who have made digital gaming a core part of their lives and identi-
ties. The term gamer brings with it a range of associations, and like all
collective identities, it fits some of those it is applied to more snugly than
others. Gaming enthusiasm also comes in many flavours: devotees of
certain genres and platforms might spurn others, and passionate subcul-
tures and fan communities often form around franchises and practices in
which the majority of gamers might have no interest. There are, however,
some important traits and tendencies that have long been characteristic
of ‘gamer culture’ as a whole – or, at least of Anglophone gamer culture,
on which this book focuses. Here Graeme Kirkpatrick’s recent work on
the genealogy of the ‘gamer’ archetype and of gaming as a cultural field
becomes useful. He proposes that one of the key concepts around which
gamer culture coalesces is that of ‘gameplay’, held to be the key quality
that elevates some games above others and differentiates videogames as
a form from other media (2013, 78–81). To appreciate ‘good gameplay’
is to appreciate digital games as finely tuned ludic structures, platforms
for competition and opportunities to acquire and demonstrate a mas-
tery of technology. As this suggests, while gamers certainly appreci-
ate lore and trivia, pretty graphics, catchy soundtracks and memorable
character designs, gamer culture is (as I discuss in Chapter 6) highly in-
vested in the idea of seeing through the interface to discern the systems
and mechanics that lie beneath. Gamer culture is also Janus-faced: rife
with nostalgic affection for ‘retro’ games that become ciphers for lost
childhoods, it also enthusiastically embraces new technologies, showing
an unwavering faith in the ability of new hardware to open the way to
play experiences more involving and rewarding than those that have
come before. Beyond its privileging of gameplay, its fascination with
new technologies and its nostalgic investment in the ‘retro’, however,
gaming culture’s key defining trait is its intimate but awkward relation-
ship with the figure of the ‘geeky’ white, middle-class male (Thornham
2011, 50, 71; Kirkpatrick 2012; Shaw 2014, viii). For a long time, digi-
tal games were dismissed as the preserve of children, or else of nerds and
Digital Subjects 7
loners seeking consolation for their empty ‘real’ lives in fantasy worlds
full of spaceships, sports cars, talking mushrooms and buxom ninja
princesses. Significantly, K irkpatrick (2012) shows that while we might
have expected videogame enthusiasts to balk at the medium’s ongoing
association with juvenility, sexual inadequacy, flawed masculinity, ‘so-
cial isolation and addiction’, in fact the truth is more complex. Over
its history, gamer culture has veered between rejecting and (more or
less ironically) embracing these associations, which continue to shape it
today. Indeed, I would argue that the ‘constitutive tensions’ and ‘consti-
tutive ambivalences’ that K irkpatrick highlights have only become more
pronounced over the period this book covers (ibid.; 2013, 91).
That period begins in 2001. If the September 11 attacks on the World
Trade Centre and the Pentagon were a cultural turning point in all sorts
of ways, there are, as Chapter 2 discusses, good reasons to see them as an
important watershed for digital culture in particular. In gaming terms,
meanwhile, 2001 saw an event that, while hardly as cataclysmic as 9/11,
came as a blow to many gamers: the discontinuation of Sega’s Dreamcast
console and their withdrawal from the videogame hardware business.
A forward-looking platform in many ways (and even an ‘avant-garde’
one (Montfort and Consalvo 2012)), the Dreamcast’s demise capped
a Cambrian decade for the games industry, a decade which saw new
technologies driving an explosion of new genres, styles and concepts.
Games colonized the third dimension, and play moved online. Budgets,
production values and studio sizes ballooned in step with processor
speeds and storage capacities. Control pads mutated rapidly, sprouting
strange new appendages and assuming unwieldy shapes. With the Play-
Station 2 (PS2) and the Xbox, however, the ‘core’ or ‘triple A’ games
industry1 began to settle into the shape it retains today (as, indeed, did
console control pads). Having vanquished the Dreamcast, the PS2 would
go on to become the best-selling console ever released, boasting a raft of
influential titles that sought to integrate gaming’s staples of combat, ex-
ploration, puzzle solving and traversal into unprecedentedly ‘cinematic’
narratives and sprawling open worlds. The Xbox, meanwhile, was signi
ficant as an American incursion into a console sector that had been
dominated by Japanese companies since the 1980s, and began a process
which would see the hitherto fairly distinct spheres of console gaming
and Western PC gaming becoming increasingly intertwined. To compare
the 2001 entries in the Halo, Grand Theft Auto or Metal Gear Solid se-
ries with their most recent counterparts is to see the extent to which the
game industry has been content to refine the same core concepts for the
same ‘gamer’ audience over the intervening years.
At the same time, however, the period since 2001 has seen the emer-
gence of new platforms, genres, interface technologies and distribution
channels that have radically expanded gaming’s demographic reach
while flaunting triple A orthodoxies. Nintendo’s Wii, with its simple,
8 Digital Subjects
family-friendly games and its gesture-based interface proved hugely
popular, fostering an image of gaming as an activity open to all ages
and a means of cultivating togetherness and physical well-being; smart-
phones and tablets connected to online stores have removed the need
for specialist hardware and fostered pick-up-and-play game concepts
suited to touchscreen interfaces and the stop-start rhythms of contem-
porary life; the integration of gaming and social networking has made
games seem like less of a lonely pursuit, while cheap, free and free-to-
play2 games have lowered financial barriers to entry (though, as we’ll
see, players of such games end up paying in other ways, using data,
attention and contacts as proxy currencies). Juul (2010) frames these
developments as part of a ‘casual revolution’ that has profoundly altered
the games industry, proving that simple, upbeat, technologically primi-
tive games can reach larger audiences (and generate bigger profits) than
the photorealistic story-driven adventures, expansive ‘open worlds’ and
mechanically intricate competitive multiplayer games favoured by those
who define themselves as gamers.
Another challenge to the status quo has come from a florescence of
‘indie’, avant-garde and DIY game development, facilitated by new de-
velopment tools and distribution platforms. Where triple A games are
the product of large teams of professionals, with tens of millions of dol-
lars behind them, working with publishers to produce technologically
accomplished experiences meant to last players weeks if not months, ‘in-
die’ games, alt-games, artgames and notgames (to use a few of the terms
which have gained momentum in recent years) adopt different approaches
and address different audiences. The many forms these titles take speak
to the ways in which gaming culture has developed and diversified over
the last decade or so: some cater to a self-appointed ‘hardcore’ who feel
that mainstream games have become too forgiving, or introduce inge-
nious mechanical wrinkles into familiar genres; some aim to stir nostal-
gia in veteran players or to address audiences turned off by the pervasive
violence and/or the aesthetic conservatism of mainstream games; some
tackle experiences of economic exploitation, gender dysphoria or mental
illness; some function as toys, creative tools, stress relievers or artistic
statements rather than ‘games’ per se. As gaming culture has expanded
and diversified, however, it has also fragmented. We can see as much
from the frequent, often fractious debates about what counts as a ‘real’
game and who counts as a ‘real’ gamer that have followed in the wake of
Juul’s casual revolution – debates that resonate throughout this book, but
which are particularly central to Chapters 3, 6 and 7.
Like all identity work, the construction of gamer culture involved its
fair share of othering and ‘symbolic violence’ (Kirkpatrick 2013, 91):
in order to forge an image of ‘gamers’ as ‘young, male and “cool”’ sub-
jects who ‘appreciate gameplay and are good at it’, early gaming cul-
ture began to define itself in opposition to those who did not meet these
Digital Subjects 9
criteria. If this meant jokes at the expense of women and older people,
it also meant striving to differentiate gamers from enthusiasts next to
whose truly nerdy hobbies (hobbies like trainspotting, stamp collecting
or tabletop gaming) digital gaming could be considered exciting and
subversive (ibid. 87). More than that, though, it entailed mockery of
insufficiently skilled would-be-gamers, and of would-be-gamers wont
to prize dazzling graphics or an absorbing plot above that ineffable but
all-important criterion of compelling gameplay (ibid. 80). This kind of
sniping continues today, and has become more visible and arguably more
vituperative thanks to social media. ‘Hardcore gamers’ denigrate ‘casual
gamers’; PC gamers make fun of console owners; Xbox fans tease Play-
Station fans; connoisseurs and collectors tut at ‘jock’ and ‘bro’ gamers
who buy the same creatively bankrupt shooters and sports games year
after year; right-wing gamers castigate leftists, liberals, hipsters and
‘social justice warriors’ for being pretentious or puritanical. The 2014
#gamergate farrago represented an alarming escalation of this tendency.
As Golding and van Deventer (2016) recount, the controversy grew
out of online gossip concerning indie designer Zoe Quinn. Amidst a
welter of rumour and recrimination, orchestrated in part by Quinn’s
ex-boyfriend Eron Gjoni and amplified by Breitbart News and Adam
Baldwin (who helped to propagate the hashtag), #gamergate became the
rallying cry for a ‘movement’ which claimed to be fighting against jour-
nalistic corruption and what they saw as underhand attempts to force a
liberal, progressive agenda on an unwilling games industry. In practice,
this entailed bullying, harassing and issuing rape and death threats to
female developers, academics, cultural critics and journalists accused
of attempting to emasculate gamers and ‘ruin’ videogames (a claim it is
hard to credit given how fond the triple A gaming sector remains of cars,
guns, gore and gratuitous titillation).
The image of the gamer as a white, straight, cisgendered, middle-class
male has never told the whole story, even in the days when gaming cul-
ture had a much narrower demographic reach (Shaw 2014, viii). Today
it would be absurd and inaccurate to claim that all gamers are men,
misogynists, addicts, adolescents or hermits. But it would be equally
absurd to deny that, whatever individual gamers might feel about it,
triple A videogaming in particular remains a bastion of hegemonic white
heteromasculinity. Nor is there any point in denying the cultural pur-
chase that the stereotype of the gamer as an overinvested male loner
retains. Made by designers of various nationalities, ethnicities, gender
identities, ages and sexualities, the games this book discusses can all
be seen as reckoning with this notion of ‘the gamer’ in one way or an-
other. And, whether they embrace this archetype, challenge it, queer it
or seek to transcend it, their modes of doing so have consequences for
our understanding of identity that resonate far beyond the confines of
gamer culture. Indeed, one of the arguments this book makes is that
10 Digital Subjects
the figure of ‘the gamer’ also serves a number of important functions
in digital culture, providing a pattern for how digital subjects ought,
or ought not, to be. ‘Gamification’ evangelists see gameplay in terms of
problem solving and teamwork, even as others associate it with solipsism
and shiftlessness; gamers are sometimes portrayed as skilled operators
of sophisticated technologies, sometimes as addicts at the mercy of de-
vious cybernetic honey traps; on certain occasions, they embody digital
culture’s tendency towards playful exploration, experimentation and
roleplay, while on others they incarnate its ruthlessness, its cynicism, its
concern with statistics over stories.
Studying Games Today

But perhaps we could forget about gamers for the moment and get back to
games? Admittedly, this suggestion goes against the prevailing tendency
in game studies. The discipline’s early years have long been cast as a
struggle between ‘narratologists’ for whom games were cultural texts
amenable to critical methodologies adapted from film studies and literary
theory and ‘ludologists’ adamant about the need to develop new modes
of analysing and discussing videogames as ludic systems. If this frame-
work has been criticized for reductively and inaccurately framing the
field as a tug of war (Frasca 2003), one of the things it obscures is the ex-
tent to which both sides of the debate were focused on games rather than
their players. As Miguel Sicart argued in a 2011 critique of Ian Bogost’s
(2007) notion of ‘procedural rhetoric’ – an influential bid to advance a
critical framework capable of accounting for games as both expressive
works and ludic systems – early game studies was often focused ‘on how
the designer or design team creates experiences by means of designing
systems’ rather than ‘the presence of the player and play’ (emphasis in
original). In the years since Sicart’s intervention there has arguably been
a movement in the other direction, with many scholars focusing on how
players use games as a basis for forging communities, constructing identi-
ties and originating new forms of play and creative expression that go be-
yond anything designers can have foreseen. While I draw liberally on this
work, this book is primarily about videogames rather than their players.
More than that, while it is alive to the many other things that video
games are (commodities, hobbies, systems, communications platforms,
economies and Trojan horses for data mining software, to name a few), it
mostly addresses them as fictions in which to play is to affect not merely
the balance of a ludic system but also the conditions of a fictional world.
This may seem counterintuitive to many in game studies. It is, as
such, worth explaining why I am taking this stance. The first thing to
note is that I am less concerned with games as vehicles for more or less
linear plots than I am in how they work as what Barry Atkins (2003)
calls ‘game-fictions’ (20) – how they present scenarios that render ludic
Digital Subjects 11
outcomes significant or evocative. Some of the titles I analyse are more
game than fiction, others (like the visual novels and text adventures ad-
dressed in Chapters 3, 4 and 7) are arguably more fiction than game. In
both cases, though, it is what happens across that hyphen – be it graceful
or awkward or complex – that renders them noteworthy as commen-
taries on digital subjectivity and identity. Atkins coined the term game-
fictions in his book More Than A Game, released right in the middle
of the putative ludology/narratology conflict. Revisiting it today, one is
struck by its tone of exasperation and embarrassment, feelings tempered
by the hope that perhaps games will grow into a form worthier of serious
study. Towards the end of the book Atkins observes
there is something truly radical here, something significantly novel,

something that demands that we rethink the ways in which we view
the artwork … until, that is, we boot the computer, insert the CD
and confront the banality of what is currently realized within an
intersection between text and technology that promises so much and
delivers so little.
(Ibid. 53)
Such statements are a reminder of another thing that ludologists and

narratologists had in common: both were embarrassed by videogames’
attempts at storytelling. For the former, stories were irrelevant anyway,
an extraneous wrapper that stood in the way of a mature understand-
ing of the videogame’s true function and its significance as a cultural
form; for the latter, meanwhile, there was something profoundly dis-
appointing about the way that game designers ‘remain[ed] fixed in nar-
rative traditions’, making clumsily conservative attempts to ape extant
narrative forms when they could have been attempting a ‘truly radical
break with the ways in which we have previously told ourselves our sto-
ries’ (ibid. 10). Since 2003, many fascinating and accomplished game-
fictions have been released. Independent and avant-garde designers have
experimented with more radical storytelling strategies, while with more
experience, bigger budgets, more capable hardware and the help of pro-
fessional actors and writers, triple A developers’ attempts to ape and
incorporate older narrative forms have become more assured. But if I am
arguing for the validity (and indeed the importance) of studying games
as fictions, it is not because the problem of reconciling gameplay and
storytelling has suddenly been ‘solved’, nor because games’ attempts at
storytelling have stopped being awkward or embarrassing – far from it.
In fact, the games I will be analysing succeed as accounts of identity and
subjectivity precisely because, whether knowingly or inadvertently, they
witness the tension between the modes of organizing and understanding
experience familiar from traditional narrative forms, and those which
are emerging in digital culture.
12 Digital Subjects
Here it is helpful to step back a bit. As we will see in the next chapter,
s cholars like Lash (2002) argue that narrative has long faced competition
from information as our dominant form of ‘cultural inscription’ (130–137).
Furthermore, while game studies is wont to frame the tussle between
story- and system-oriented approaches as an in-house affair, the ludology/
narratology debate is really a symptom of a much larger epistemological
brouhaha. As I’ve already remarked, for thinkers like Alexander Galloway
(2012), the post-Second World War era can be characterized by its em-
brace of a cybernetic ‘black-box epistemology’ informed by ‘behaviourism,
game theory, operations research’, systems theory and information theory
(241). As Galloway argues, this shift has had enormous implications for
our understanding of ‘critical inquiry’, which has traditionally been seen
as a matter of ‘objects [being] unveiled or denaturalized to reveal their
inner workings’ – a description that holds true for Descartes, Kant, Marx,
Freud and all their innumerable followers (ibid. 241–242). Today, however,
this methodology is under increasing threat from an ‘approach to know
ledge … that abdicate[s] any requirement for penetration into the object
in question, preferring instead to keep the object opaque and to make all
judgements based on the object’s observable comportment’ (ibid. 242). In
short, while game studies was busy arguing about the validity of apply-
ing techniques from literary theory, cultural studies, critical theory, philo
sophy and film studies to videogames, others were questioning the validity
of hermeneutics and qualitative analysis tout court.
Inevitably, these ideas have begun to shape vernacular understandings
of the self. But if behaviourism, neuroscience and evolutionary biology
have become readier-to-hand as means of accounting for our actions and
experiences, and if one index of the success of neoliberalism is the way
that all aspects of life can now be understood in terms of the entrepre-
neurial individual’s struggle to realize her potential, this does not mean
that humanist philosophy, cod-Freudian pop psychology, Romantic indi-
vidualism and eugenicist pseudo-science have entirely lost their purchase
as frameworks for understanding selfhood and subjectivity, for better or
worse. Thus, while Atkins’ (2003) complaint that videogames have ‘not
made the same kind of radical departure from nineteenth-century realism’
that other artforms have remains true (144), I would argue that the way
that games cling to obsolescent and outmoded models of subjecthood and
storytelling even as they incarnate the logic of technoculture makes them
more, not less rewarding as objects of study. This book holds that there
is still value in close contextual analyses of individual videogames, the
expressive strategies they employ and the aesthetic effects they produce. It
also acknowledges the shifts Galloway highlights, however. Drawing on
game studies, and on work on literature, film and visual culture, it also
engages closely with the work of scholars whose accounts of digital cul-
ture and new media represent attempts to develop forms of critical inquiry
suited to the cybernetic culture in which games play an important role.
Digital Subjects 13
Structure
Following this introductory chapter, the remainder of the book is divided
into three sections, each consisting of two chapters. The first section con-
cerns profiling and privacy. Chapter 2, Datafied Subjects, addresses three
games about collective identity and security: in Sega’s Valkyria Chroni-
cles, we are the captain of a squad of soldiers defending their homeland
from foreign invaders; in Lucas Pope’s Papers, Please, we are a passport
inspector in a fictional 1980s Eastern Bloc state; in Mitu Khandaker-
Kokoris’ Redshirt, we must escape an embattled space station by using
social media to make powerful friends. H ighlighting the differences be-
tween biographical narratives and data-based profiles as modes of ex-
pressing identity, these games show that videogames’ often awkward
attempts to reconcile storytelling with simulation need to be understood
in the context of a cultural shift away from stories and towards informa-
tion. Chapter 3, Private Subjects, considers two games about smartphone
use and secrecy: the gothic mystery Silent Hill: Shattered Memories and
Robert Yang’s Cobra Club, a playful ‘dick pic simulator’ with a serious
message about government surveillance. The games put forward very dif-
ferent understandings of privacy and subjectivity, understandings that can
help us to unpack what is at stake in critical debates about online privacy.
The second section of the book looks at a range of games that use
evocative figures – animals, robots, spectres, zombies and monsters –
to allegorize the relationship between gamer and game, the embodied
digital subject and their tech. Both chapters expand on the idea that ‘the
gamer’ remains a cipher for fears of technologies duping or enslaving us.
Chapter 4, Beastly Subjects, looks at games in which players are put in
command of animal bodies, so that player, avatar and hardware become
the poles of a ‘cybernetic triangle’ (Pettman 2011, 5). The action game
Tokyo Jungle aims to create a seamless (or seamless-seeming) connection
between the player and a range of agile zoo creatures; Octodad and its se-
quel use an intentionally unintuitive control scheme to foster a hands-on
relationship with an octopus struggling to ‘pass’ as a human paterfamilias;
Tom McHenry’s interactive fiction Horse Master puts a human-animal
relationship at the centre of a remorselessly bleak cyberpunk satire. All
three pose questions about embodiment, immersion, identity, agency and
control. Chapter 5, Synthetic Subjects, addresses the ‘survival horror’
genre. Where critics have traditionally turned to film theory and Freudian
psychoanalysis to understand survival horror games’ unsettling qualities,
I take a different approach. Tracking the course of the genre from 2001’s
Silent Hill 2 through the Siren/Forbidden Siren series to 2014’s Alien:
Isolation, the chapter argues that a key aspect of survival horror games
is the way that they draw players into close relationship with networks of
artificially intelligent nonplayer characters, using gothic tropes to mediate
anxieties about our place in a culture of autonomous machines.
14 Digital Subjects
The final section of the book addresses the digital subject’s experience
of space and time. In Chapter 6, Mobile Subjects, space takes precedence.
While gaming’s history is often understood in terms of a progression
from abstract two-dimensional mazes to photorealistic three-dimensional
gameworlds, this misrepresents the variety of styles, techniques and rep-
resentational traditions with which game designers engage – not to men-
tion the range of subject positions that games accommodate. This chapter
turns to Killer 7, Fez and Pokémon GO to offer a more nuanced account
of how games frame space and orient players within it. Foregrounding
the extent to which gaming has been shaped by a dialogue between Japan
and North America, these games also show how rapidly and radically
new media have transformed the digital subject’s experience of space.
Chapter 7, Productive Subjects, tackles questions of time. Drawing on the
work of cultural theorist Lauren Berlant and feminist narratologist Robyn
Warhol, it uses the networked shooter Destiny and the smash smartphone
game Kim Kardashian: Hollywood to show how modern videogames
encourage players to understand and manage the flow of time, incorpo-
rating play into their everyday lives and cultivating gendered habits of
feeling. The chapter concludes with two texts that articulate alternative
understandings of gaming, habit, value and time: Porpentine’s interactive
fiction Skulljhabit and Dennis Cooper’s novel God Jr.
It is impossible to do justice to the full range of experiences that
now exist under the banner of ‘videogames’, and the selection of ti-
tles considered over the course of the next six chapters is no doubt
skewed by both my preoccupations as a researcher and my preferences
as a gamer. These caveats notwithstanding, the book covers a wide
array of platforms, genres and modes of production, attending to the
particular conjunctions of circumstances (technological, cultural, eco-
nomic, etc.) from which particular games arise rather than attempting
to account for ‘videogames’ in general. It looks at DIY, indie and triple
A games, Japanese, European and American games, ‘casual’ and ‘hard-
core’ games, multiplayer and singleplayer games, 2D and 3D games,
free, ‘free-to-play’ and commercial games. The titles it addresses engage
with a wide range of genres, aesthetic traditions and fictional forms,
drawing on science fiction, high school drama, reality TV, cyberpunk
anime, slasher cinema, poliziotteschi movies, gothic literature, sitcom
and surrealism. They also incorporate or model social networks, pho-
tography apps, online message boards, digital marketplaces, profiling
algorithms, targeted advertisements and artificial intelligence routines.
Many address questions of digital subjectivity and identity directly,
offering comparatively realistic portrayals of characters using digital
devices and platforms. Others take a more roundabout approach. In
both cases, they tend to be striking less for their smooth integration
of these multiple influences and elements than for arresting anach-
ronisms, jarring switches in register and bathetic juxtapositions that
Digital Subjects 15
witness gaming’s status as a protean and promiscuous cultural field
while also speaking to the tensions and contradictions at the heart of
digital subjectivity.
Notes
1 Essentially the industry’s equivalent of Hollywood in terms of budgets, pro-
duction values and orientation towards a mass audience.
2 That is, games with no upfront costs, funded via advertising or optional
‘microtransactions’.
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2 Datafied Subjects
Profiling and Personal Data
Contemporary digital culture is born of two catastrophic collapses. This,

at least, is the contention of Geert Lovink (2011). The first is the collapse
of the World Trade Centre on 11 September 2001, an event which ‘gave
rise to a global surveillance and control industry’ to which ‘Web 2.0
tactically responded’ by encouraging users to share their real names and
faces online (39). The second is the collapse of the dot com investment
bubble, which pushed web businesses towards a new business model,
whereby users would ‘pay’ for services like search engines or social net-
works not with money, but by providing personal information (ibid.). As
Lisa Nakamura (2008) observes, these shifts are often narrated in terms
of a ‘transition from an early 1990s understanding of the Internet as a
utopian space for identity play, community building and gift economies
to a more privatized, profit-driven model’ (3). Both she and Wendy Hui
Kyong Chun insist, however, that the fantasy of cyberspace as a utopia –
and especially of ‘the Internet as a raceless space’ open to people of all
colours, creeds and nations – was never much more than a liberal fantasy
(Chun 2016, 106). For Chun, the shift from the web of the 1990s to that
of today is better described as a transition from one dubious fantasy to
another, with visions of a web where ‘freedom and empowerment al-
legedly stemmed from an anonymity that was no anonymity’ ceding to
visions of a web where ‘authentication and authenticity notionally save
users from dangerous strangers’ (ibid. 103). Google played a key role
in orchestrating this shift. Having revolutionized web search with their
Page Rank algorithm, the company went on to inaugurate the era of
what Shoshana Zuboff (2015) dubs ‘surveillance capitalism’ by realizing
that they could sell the ‘data exhaust’ generated by users to data brokers
keen to know more about consumers’ predilections, habits and interests,
while also making this data available ‘to state security and law enforce-
ment agencies’ (75). The result is a culture where individualistic con-
sumer capitalism has become thoroughly enmeshed with the surveillant
practices of national security agencies, with considerable overlap bet
ween the techniques used to identify new target markets and those used
to predict putative threats to national security, a process that involves
dredging the Internet and profiling users by comparing their behavioural
Datafied Subjects 19
patterns against ‘some stereotype or summary of what a criminal is sup-
posed to be like’ (Jordan 2015, 116).
Where do videogames figure in this conjuncture? And how might
they help us to understand it? These are the questions that animate
this book. This chapter pursues them in relation to three games about
profiling, national identity and personal data. Beginning with an ana
lysis of the Japanese strategy roleplaying game Valkyria Chronicles, it
goes on to address two ‘indie’ games, Mitu Khandaker-Kokoris’ Star
Trek-referencing social networking simulation Redshirt, and Lucas
Pope’s Papers, Please, which casts players as an immigration officer in
a crumbing 1980s Eastern Bloc state. Each of these games uses comedy
and caricature to probe the relationship between individual identities
and national and ethnic ones, posing questions about belonging, secu-
rity and identification. Whether players are engaged in war, romance or
bureaucracy, they quickly come to appreciate the importance of clas-
sification and calculation, learning to recognize nonplayer characters’
(NPCs’) distinguishing traits so that they can predict and shape their
behaviour. To play these games, in other words, is to engage with an
important question: on what terms is it possible – and to what ends is
it permissible – to reduce people to data? Across the three games, vari-
ous ways of framing selfhood numerically and mathematically emerge,
from logging vital statistics like weight and height to the modelling of
individuals’ tendencies and dispositions as probabilities to ‘quantified
self’-inspired attempts to express happiness and erotic attraction as per-
centages. When they interact with NPCs in these games, players are also
engaging with these systems – and, as such, with the relationship bet
ween data and identity. For this reason, I refer to these games as works
of ‘procedural caricature’. I am, of course, playing here on Ian Bogost’s
influential notion of ‘procedural rhetoric’, the idea that games can (and
necessarily do) make arguments about the systems and processes they
model or simulate (2007, 98). One might, indeed, object that insofar as
every simulation simplifies the systems it models, all simulations could
be considered caricatures. I think the term is particularly apt in these
cases though, serving to emphasize two things that these games in parti
cular do: firstly, the way that they use computational processes to gen-
erate comic characters and/or imbue NPCs with ‘personality’; secondly,
the way that they present scaled down, satirically inflected versions of
activities like checking a passport or browsing a social networking site.
These games use procedurality to create caricatures while also carica-
turing procedures, selectively omitting or exaggerating certain features
of the interfaces and operations that they represent in order to advance
particular understandings of digital systems.
Beyond their status as ludic commentaries on datafication and profil-
ing, these titles also afford us a window on the notoriously vexed topic
of videogame narrative. Placing players in charge of a squad of eccentric
20 Datafied Subjects
soldiers defending their homeland, Valkyria Chronicles wants us to be-
lieve that individual identity and national identity, digital play and linear
storytelling can be reconciled. While it fails to make a convincing case,
this failure is a telling and instructive one. Casting players as put-upon
menial workers and eschewing spectacular action in favour of simulating
banal everyday activities, the two indie titles offer a more critical stance
on the issue of the datafied self, though here, too, there are ambiguities
and ambivalences which speak to the complexity of both digital identity
and digital games as a cultural form. Initially, Papers, Please seems like
a straightforward procedural elaboration of the idea that reducing indi-
viduals to data in the name of national security is inhumane. Ultimately,
though, the game functions less as a polemic against datafication than
a demonstration of how technologies and techniques meant to generate
order end up bringing into being new grey areas, zones of ‘fuzzy experi-
ence’ and forms of ‘dark matter’, revealing the irrationality at the heart
of notionally objective systems (Fuller and Goffey 2012, 11; Browne
2015). In Redshirt, meanwhile, we are presented with a vision of the
future in which social networks seem to have fostered a cosmopolitan
paradise, with liberal individualism trumping factionalism and preju-
dice. It quickly becomes apparent, though, that this paradise can equally
be seen as a neoliberal nightmare teetering on the brink of disaster.
Ethics and Informatics

As anyone even distantly acquainted with the field of game studies will
know, the subject of games and stories is a contentious one. The na-
scent discipline’s early years were defined by a series of energetic de-
bates that were framed, perhaps rather reductively, as a battle between
‘narratologists’ (for whom games were a storytelling medium to which
tools of textual analysis could be fruitfully applied) and ‘ludologists’
(for whom games were first and foremost ludic systems which required
new analytic frameworks and techniques, distinct from those of film
theory and literary criticism). In recent years, attitudes have softened
somewhat, and there is a sense that, rather than tackling these issues in
the abstract, it may be more fruitful to address the relationship between
‘rules’ and ‘fiction’ (Juul 2005) on a case-by-case basis. There is a read-
iness to acknowledge that different games and gaming genres may place
more or less of a premium on telling stories and on affording players
freedom of choice; that stories can be structured, emergent or spatial;
that games are often part of larger transmedia ‘storyworlds’ and that
players and player communities participate in constructing, interpret-
ing and elaborating games’ narratives (Jones 2008; Ensslin 2014; Ryan
and Thon 2014). Meanwhile, designer Clint Hocking’s (2007) coinage
‘ludonarrative dissonance’ has become a watchword for critics, scholars
and developers alike. Implying that play and story are not fundamentally
incompatible but may be difficult to synthesize satisfactorily, the term
has helped to create a context in which games are often assessed as more
or less harmonious blends of narrative and ludic components. Ian B ogost
(2009) has argued that the problem with the ludology/narratology di-
chotomy is that it posits a choice between two formalisms; in both cases,
games are abstracted from their material contexts, obscuring the techno
logical, economic and cultural factors that inform how they are made
and played. In a similar vein, I would argue that the game narrative de-
bate needs to be put in the context of a more general cultural and techno
logical shift away from narrative and towards data, a shift that is already
having profound effects on our understanding of selfhood and subjecti
vity. In such a context, it is precisely games’ messy multi-modality, the
parlous alliances they establish between different modes of representa-
tion, simulation and play that render them worthy of study.
By telling stories about characters who also exist as data (digital im-
ages and models, statistics and percentages), games ask us to address the
implications of the shift towards understanding individuality in terms of
information rather than narrative. As Scott Lash (2002) argues, ques-
tions of storytelling and characterization can only be adequately ad-
dressed if we take into account technologies of ‘cultural inscription’ and
the understandings of time and selfhood with which they are bound up.
Building on Walter Benjamin’s 1936 essay ‘The Storyteller’, Lash identi-
fies three successive stages in the human understanding of temporality,
manifested in three modes of ‘cultural inscription’: the premodern tale,
the modern novelistic narrative and the postmodern order of informa-
tion. The novel, with its ‘quintessentially modern’ understanding of tem-
porality, has tended to deal in narratives which concern the subjective
experiences of psychologically complex individuals whose characters are
formed over the course of ‘a single narrative with beginning middle and
end’ (ibid. 132, 130). This remains the model adopted by most ‘serious’
narrative works, whether novels, plays, movies or TV series. Lash ar-
gues, however, that prior to the development of this modern conception
of time another mode of understanding temporality held sway, expressed
in another privileged mode of cultural inscription – ‘the tale’ (ibid. 130).
Rooted in tradition, in ‘habitus and habit’, tales stress and seek to en-
sure continuity (ibid. 132). Where modern narratives are concerned with
development, progress and decline, tales see time in terms of the cycli-
cal, the perennial and the perpetual. In tales, character is understood
typologically, and individuals are assumed to correspond to universal,
essentially atemporal ‘types’. While these older forms remain capable of
speaking to us today, Lash argues that the privileged form of ‘cultural
inscription’ in contemporary society is neither the tale nor the novelistic
narrative but ‘information’ (ibid. 134, emphasis in original). Under the
regime of information, temporality becomes a matter of ‘speed’, simu
lation and generalized ‘simultaneity’: ‘the past, digitized and stored,
is available all of the time, and the future – that is techno-capitalism’s
future – is omnisciently and algorithmically and more or less probabilis-
tically predictable’ (ibid. 135–137). As Lash states, the goal, under this
order of cultural inscription, is to position ourselves ‘outside of time’
(ibid. 137). This does not mean, however, that we simply return to a syn-
chronic or atemporal understanding of selfhood; rather, selves come to
be seen as diachronic patterns and parabola, traced across vast numbers
of past and possible, simulated and recorded timelines. If the temporal-
ity of speed is ‘a temporality of indifference’, then this is partly because
it posits past and present, virtual and actual, as essentially interchange-
able in as much as all can be reduced to ‘units of information’, vectors
through possibility space (ibid. 135, emphasis in original).
Of course, the regime of information is not monolithic – the analogue
bureaucracy represented in Papers, Please and Redshirt’s ‘Spacebook’
social network, for example, both belong to the regime of information,
though they adopt different approaches to generating, collating, ana-
lysing and mobilizing personal data. Nor has information simply ren-
dered other ways of understanding time and the self obsolete – plenty of
people still read novels, after all. Information-based understandings of
identity are, however, becoming increasingly widespread and influential,
especially in realms such as marketing and homeland security. As Seb
Franklin (2015) argues, works of fiction present us with opportunities
to observe how traditional understandings of time and identity, causality
and intentionality have come under stress in the new ‘control episteme’
inaugurated by information technologies (175). As he asks,
if popular narrative forms that observe the spatially constituted

‘beauty’ of beginning, middle and end are imbricated with dominant
concepts of depth, linearity, causality and finitude, then what would
be the contours of a narrative form centred on the programmable
objects of the control episteme?
(Ibid.)
How, in short, does one tell stories about individuals understood not
as sovereign subjects but in terms of programmability, permutation
and probabilistics? Franklin opts to explore this question by looking
at how ‘traditional’ narrative forms (from plays to cinematic thrill-
ers) have grappled with the new models of subjectivity emerging from
cybernetics and ‘control’ culture, addressing ‘noninteractive forms that
allegorize the digital or digitized subject in ways that produce tortuous,
conflicting syntheses with the already established conventions of those
forms’ (ibid. 175–176). He also acknowledges, however, that these ques-
tions and tensions are fundamental for videogames. As a multimedia
form that attempts to integrate storytelling techniques from film and
fiction into ludic simulations, the videogame shows how older modes
of understanding temporal experience and individual identity survive
alongside information-oriented constructions of the self, and how they
come into tension.
These tensions are evident in the three games this chapter analyses.
They trade in comedy and caricature, and remain loyal to the under-
standing of character expressed in the tale: NPCs are often represented
as easily recognizable types who are amusing precisely because they
remain vain or dopey or self-pitying regardless of what befalls them.
Insofar as these games serve as vehicles for linear narratives in which
characters develop or reveal new facets of their personalities, however,
they also attest to the continuing influence of cultural forms like the
bildungsroman, the Hollywood movie and ‘quality TV’, forms in which
psychologically ‘deep’ characters follow developmental ‘arcs’. At the
same time, these games are computer software, products of the emerg-
ing regime of information; to play them is to intervene in a simulation,
to engage with NPCs on the basis of statistics, probabilities and permu-
tations. These titles attest, in short, to the fact that studying videogame
expression in terms of the relationship between story and play is not
enough; we need to recognize that digital games are hybrids that bring
together different media forms, genres and representational traditions
but also different understandings of time, subjectivity and selfhood.
While this often works against games when they are assessed according
to the standards usually applied to classical narratives, it also renders
them perfect mediators of the conflicts and tensions occasioned by the
emergence of the information paradigm.
The Sorrows of Young Gunther

For evidence of how videogames divide their loyalties between incom-
patible conceptions of identity we need look no further than Sega’s
Valkyria Chronicles. A tactical roleplaying game set during the ‘Sec-
ond Europan War’, it casts us as the commander of a squad of soldiers
defending the principality of Gallia from invasion by the East Europan
Imperial Alliance. Like many triple A videogames – and unlike the other
games I address in this chapter – it promises to put players at the centre
of a heroic life or death struggle. The player’s activities become part of a
grand story in the sense that Lash uses the term: a linear narrative over
the course of which psychologically complex individuals’ personalities
and relationships develop. As this précis suggests, Valkyria Chronicles
takes inspiration from cinematic depictions of World War II (though
aspects of its storyworld, including the kinds of military hardware port
rayed, are more reminiscent of the early twentieth century). Where this
might lead us to expect a sombre visual style, the game’s cel-shaded
graphics, its vivid tints and stark black outlines, create an effect that is
equal parts watercolour painting and Studio Ghibli animation. With its
quaint cobbled squares, its lush pastures and its rococo palaces, Valkyria
Chronicles offers a romantic vision of Europe that follows in the stylistic
footsteps of manga, anime and videogame properties like The Rose of
Versailles (Ikeda 1972), Revolutionary Girl Utena (Saito 1996) and the
Sakura Wars series, a strategy game-cum-dating sim franchise on which
many members of the Valkyria Chronicles development team worked.
This setting provides the backdrop for the protagonist Welkin
Gunther’s bildung, which mostly plays out in noninteractive ‘cut scenes’
inserted between the game’s missions. Beginning as a mild-mannered
naturalist, Gunther gradually becomes a trusted leader and admired tac-
tician, proving himself worthy of his father (a Gallian general) as he
leads his squad to victory while undergoing formative experiences of
love and loss. Themes of racial, ethnic and national identity are central
to this plot. In concordance with the trope, dating back to Shakespeare’s
Henry V, of presenting a squadron of solders as ‘a virtual microcosm of
the nation’ (Champion 1980, 148), Welkin’s squad 7 is a heterogeneous
band of brothers (and sisters) who function as a synecdoche for Gallia.
Comprising citizens male and female, young and old, queer and straight,
squad 7 is made up of larger-than-life ‘types’, from kind-hearted strong-
men to absent-minded style mavens and taciturn misanthropes. There’s
one respect, however, in which the squad falls short of liberal ideals:
some members are prejudiced towards Darcsen, a people marked out
by their dark hair and eyes, who have long been subject to persecution
thanks to a legend that holds them responsible for starting a calamitous
war many centuries ago. Here, too, squad 7 stands in for Gallian so-
ciety in general, its divisions mirrored in the tension between Rosie, a
hot-tempered shocktrooper, and Isara, Welkin’s Darcsen adoptive sister.
The narrative is punctuated by three events which dispel the prejudices
and resentments that divide squad 7: first, they learn that the Imperial
Alliance has been hunting Darcsen like animals, before working them to
death in labour camps; then Isara proves her worth by inventing a smoke
shell that masks the shocktroopers’ whereabouts from the enemy artil-
lery, only to fall prey herself to a sniper’s bullet; finally, the squad dis-
covers that it was, in fact, the Valkyrur race who plunged the continent
into war generations ago, before opportunistically distorting history to
put the blame on the Darcsen. By the close of the game’s plot, the im-
portance of togetherness, tolerance and diversity has been resoundingly
affirmed, and squad and nation alike are united.
Derivative and more than a little melodramatic, aspects of this plot
are also in dubious taste: if using the history of European anti-Semitism
to lend thematic heft to a war game is questionable enough, by locating
the story in ‘Europa’ the writers also dodge the awkward question of
Japanese mistreatment of Korean nationals and Allied prisoners during
World War II. We might also ask why the game feels the need to kill
its most prominent Darcsen character while exonerating the Darcsen
race – how much better, after all, is it to persecute people for something
their ancestors did do in the past than for something they didn’t in fact
do? The plot’s weaknesses, however, are ultimately less interesting than
the tension between the understanding of personality it advances (one
where characters have their values and beliefs tested as they experience
situations that are of a great emotional and psychological moment) and
the way that Valkyria Chronicles’ characters are presented during ac-
tual gameplay. Here, Noah Wardrip-Fruin’s (2009) distinction between
the ‘data’ and ‘process’ aspects of digital games becomes useful (7–8).
On the data level, Valkyria Chonicles’ characters are presented to us
through animated three-dimensional models, speech samples, written
text and other ‘precreated media’; the process level comprises the invisi-
ble ‘lists and tables of information’ that determine how these characters
will behave in a given combat situation (ibid.). Where the noninterac-
tive scenes through which Valkyria Chronicles relates events like Isara’s
death are pure data, a matter of video files being played back at the
appropriate moments, during actual gameplay process and data work in
tandem to convey a sense of the characters’ personalities. Each of squad
7’s members is distinguished by eccentricities and preferences, strengths
and weaknesses that literally ‘come into play’ during the game’s battles.
In its portrayal of these traits (known as ‘potentials’), the game maps
characters’ personality quirks to their statistical propensities, approach-
ing ‘individuality’ in terms amenable to procedural expression. To take
an example, the character Hermes Kissinger has a ‘potential’ that means
he receives a boost to his defence when standing on grass. On a data
level, we are told that this is because he is ‘a child of the open field’
more at home in the countryside than in urban environments; in proce-
dural terms, this manifests as an increased probability that he will dodge
enemy attacks. Hermes also gets claustrophobic in cramped spaces
(expressed as a decline in the average amount of damage done by his
attacks), but is more likely to hit his target if he is stationed close to fe-
male squadmates because, we are told, he is a show-off and a flirt. While
the development team’s artists, writers and voice actors express Hermes’
identity through how he looks and what he says, the programmers ex-
press it by determining how he is likely to behave under the influence of
particular variables – proximity of female allies, the type of surface he
is on, etc. Essentially, the game weights various dice in order to increase
the likelihood of procedural outcomes consonant with the character in
question’s being a dandy, a loner, a den mother, a scatterbrain, a bump-
kin and so forth. As Welkin, the squad’s commander, players must com-
pose teams suited to the mission at hand, drawing on their knowledge
of individual squad members’ potentials. (It’s a bad idea, for example,
to send someone with a pollen allergy out to fight on a grassy plain, but
a good idea to send Hermes). We also need to take into account the way
that these potentials interact and cascade: if we station Hermes, who
is always trying to impress female squadmates, next to Cherry Stijnen
(whose main interests, according to her in-game profile are ‘trends and
pretty boys’), each will receive a performance boost; if, however, Cherry
is stationed next to Ramona Linton (a fellow fashionista who once mod-
elled for Ramona’s beloved ‘Gallian Girl’ magazine), the two are likely
to start gossiping, adversely affecting their accuracy. As these examples
demonstrate, Valkyria Chronicles employs some fairly hoary stereotypes
and shows little concern for political correctness. At the same time, the
game insists that all of these ‘types’ have a place in squad 7 and, by ex-
tension, the national culture that they are trying to protect.
As with Redshirt’s romance system, discussed later in the chapter,
Valkyria Chronicles’ potential system is essentially a means of introduc-
ing unpredictability and suspense into the game (will the sniper defy the
odds to make a shot that could change the course of the battle?). But
the system also advances a particular understanding of identity – one
that, I would argue, is not entirely compatible with the understanding
we would receive were we simply to stitch the game’s cut-scenes together.
In fact, the game simultaneously subscribes to at least three different un-
derstandings of character and characterization, which can be mapped to
Lash’s account of the tale, the story and information as modes of cultural
inscription. In this respect, it reflects the way that multiple competing
(and even contradictory) discursive paradigms exist within digital culture
and suggests how understandings of ‘personality’ are shifting under the
influence of new technologies. Valkyria Chronicle’s first mode of framing
character is consonant with the novelistic conception of personalities that
develop over the course of a sequence of testing or telling dramatic events.
In its representation of a cast of larger-than-life types (the valley girl, the
camp muscleman, the absent-minded kook), however, the game is more
in line with understandings of individuals as belonging to definable cate-
gories and possessing fixed traits and characteristics. As Lash notes, this
is the way in which folktales, rooted as they are in the cyclical temporal-
ities of habit and routine, portray character. It also remains the way in
which comic characters tend to be portrayed – such characters are funny
because they don’t alter their behaviour to conform to the norms govern-
ing the situations they find themselves in. And, in the course of playing
Valkyria Chronicles, we also see evidence of a third, information-based
means of understanding of character, whereby a personality emerges
over time as we begin to recognize patterns of behaviour from which
probable future behaviours can be extrapolated. This recognition process
depends on a high level of redundancy: it is because we witness broadly
similar scenarios over and over again across hours of play that we are
able to calculate what is typical, characteristic and predictable and what
is incidental or anomalous for a particular character.
On balance, Valkyria Chronicles is better at comedy than it is romance
or tragedy. Where the drama of the game’s noninteractive scenes,
in which the protagonists become better people by witnessing the hor-
rors of war, rings hollow, the characters’ consistency on the battlefield
proves funny and even moving, as different contexts invest the same old
speech samples and patterns of behaviour (or surprising deviations from
those patterns) with a sense of futility or irony, pathos or poignancy. The
game’s success, in other words, stems from the way ‘hardwired’ traits
and habits are at once implicitly compared to and expressed by way of
computer code imprinted on a game disc. While the game’s soldiers can
enter into new combinations and scenarios, the scripts and routines that
constitute their ‘personalities’ determine how these are likely to play
out – though, importantly, they do not render them totally predictable.
Videogame characters are necessarily going to be somewhat mechanical;
by using procedural caricature to present its cast as comical creatures of
habit Valkyria Chronicles finds an ingenious way around this problem, so
that repetition becomes not an alienating marker of their inhumanity, but
an indicator of the very human tendency to fall into predictable patterns
of behaviour, to betray preferences, biases and unconscious orientations.
Valkyria Chronicles asks us both to identify and to identify with its
characters on the basis of the foibles, arbitrary preferences, somatic
proclivities and ingrained behavioural routines that ‘make them them’.
Digital media have played an important role in encouraging us to un-
derstand individuals on these kinds of terms. As Mark Hansen (2015)
argues, where ‘recording technologies like cinema and even video’
shaped subjectivity by mediating
reflective experience and memory … what gets stored by today’s me-

dia are no longer human experiences themselves but bits of data that
register molecular increments of behaviour and that do not in them-
selves amount to a full picture of integrated human ‘lived experience’.
(50–51)
Data mining techniques identify patterns of choice and action char-

acteristic of particular demographics, framing identity in terms of
preferences, purchasing habits and probable desires, and while social
networking technologies can, of course, be used to address weighty is-
sues and make momentous announcements, they are more often used as
vehicles for short, informal updates as to our moods and movements.
In such contexts, the everyday takes precedence over the exceptional,
continuity over dramatic change. With the diffusion of lifelogging and
quantified self technologies, meanwhile, we are offered a window on our
habits and routines, the unconscious tendencies and typical patterns that
are arguably at least as constitutive of identity as the one-off decisions,
conscious beliefs and unforgettable experiences we might rather have
define us. In short, while Valkyria Chronicles might trot out stereotypes
and storylines that would have felt overfamiliar decades ago, it also
shows how games can put us in touch with the modes of understanding
the self that digital media are helping to perpetuate.
Saleable Selves
Of course, if squad 7 are fictional entities who body forth particular per-
spectives on human character, they are also assets and articles of intel-
lectual property created and owned by Sega. The Valkyria Chronicles
property is now a transmedia franchise spanning multiple sequels, re-
makes and crossover games, an anime series, various manga and all man-
ner of merchandise. As Hiroki Azuma (2009) argues in his analysis of
‘otaku’ culture (the Japanese term for obsessive fans of anime, manga and
games), it is more than a ‘temporal coincidence’ that digital games have
attained cultural prominence at a time when intellectual property holders
are increasingly focused on extending media properties across movies,
books, comics, toys and trading cards; for him there is a ‘deep relation-
ship between the development of computer games and the development
of postmodernity’, both of which posit an image of the world as a ‘data
base’, a library of bits and pieces which can be abstracted from their
original contexts, modulated and reconfigured to form new assemblages
(80). Videogames have helped to create a transmedia ecosystem where the
characters that thrive are those that – due to the coherence and legibility
of both their personalities and their visual forms – prove themselves to be
exportable, literally and imaginatively available for relocation from their
original narrative context and insertion into other scenarios.
As Azuma stresses, such characters suit the needs of a digitized medi-
asphere in which ‘the recycling of files is desirable by necessity, not only
because of the streamlining of the production process but also because of
… limits on the capacity of recording media’ (ibid.). The ease of copying,
editing and exporting digital assets means that once a character model
has been fully fleshed out, it is comparatively straightforward to tweak
or recontextualize it. Thus certain popular characters from Valkyria
Chronicles were made available as bonus playable characters in Valkyria
Chronicles II, even when – as with Isara, who dies during the first game’s
story – it didn’t make narrative sense for them to be there. By prioritizing
fans’ fondness for particular characters above the principle of linear nar-
rative, the developers of Valkyria Chronicles II were acting in accordance
with what Azuma sees as a general tendency within Japanese pop culture.
For him, otaku have become content with derivative works which offer
appealing characters in place of complex plots or coherent worldviews,
works that essentially amount to aggregates of familiar components
drawn from a cultural ‘database’, and which are themselves designed to be
ripe for spin-offs, reimaginings, homages, bootlegs, merchandise and fan
art1 (ibid. 39–41). As reservoirs of ‘assets’ (images, animations, textual
fragments, music files etc.) which are algorithmically selected and com-
bined over the course of branching narratives, Azuma sees videogames as
paradigmatic manifestations of these tendencies (ibid. 79–80) – something
that is clear from the other two games this chapter analyses, both of which
use procedural generation techniques to generate new characters and sto-
rylines from libraries of components.
Azuma’s account suggests that while it is important to address games
in terms of their production contexts, the generic traditions they partici-
pate in and the cultural histories they engage (a point Chapter 6 takes up
in more detail), it is also possible to see American and Japanese games,
indie and triple A games alike in terms of the changes that Lash describes.
Making comic types the protagonists of a serious story that requires them
to come to terms with tragic and traumatic events, Valkyria Chronicles
often feels tonally disjointed. It is this disjointedness, though, that makes
the game a useful example of the strained relationship between ‘the linear
and the permutational’ in contemporary culture (Franklin 2015, 176),
a relationship that affects both media portrayals of fictional characters
and contemporary understandings of identity and individuality. Having
looked at how Valkyria Chronicles struggles to reconcile the linear with
the permutational, we are better placed to understand how Papers, Please
and Redshirt explore identity. Where Valkyria Chronicles is upbeat and
action-packed, portraying a just war through which its characters forge
a unifying collective identity, these titles are at once more cynical and
more experimental, upholding the indie sphere’s reputation as a space
where designers can challenge the ludic and narrative conventions that
govern the triple A industry. Using procedural generation techniques to
create NPCs who are at once unique and generic before asking players
to make plans and projections on the basis of these characters’ profiles,
Pope and Khandaker-Kokoris help players to acquire a critical grasp of
the implications of data-based understandings of identity.
Risky Business
Set over 31 days in late 1982, Papers, Please takes place in Arstotzka,
a fictional authoritarian state. Casting players as an official manning a
security checkpoint, the game foregrounds the distinction between time-
bound, narrative models of identity and abstract, atemporal ones. As
new arrivals from neighbouring countries file past our booth, we receive
glimpses of hundreds of characters who, in most cases, exist for us purely
as bodies that we must ensure correspond with the descriptions offered
in the identity documents they carry. At the same time, the protagonist is
playing out his own story, and it is up to the player to juggle his conflicting
obligations (to his country, to his family, to his conscience, to his fellow
human beings) as they make choices that dictate his course through the
game’s branching narrative. The game, in short, asks players to compare
embodied subjects with their paper profiles while also weighing up the
potential costs of following or breaking particular rules. On a more ab-
stract level, it also invites us to compare Arstotzka with real polities, past
and present. Pope has stated that he purposefully left the game’s setting
somewhat vague, frustrating the impulse to map the diegetic milieu to any
particular regime, place or ideology (‘Anytime there’d be something that
would nail it down as Soviet or “this is definitely the Berlin Wall”, I would
leave it out, wouldn’t do it or [would] smooth it over’ (Cullen 2014)). What
mattered to him was placing the player at the mercy of ‘some kind of bu-
reaucracy where the rules just come down from the top and boom, that’s
your job’ (ibid.). While many aspects of the game evoke Cold War Eastern
Europe, it is clear that Pope is also interested in contemporary concerns
over the erosion of individual liberties in a networked, post-9/11 world.
Like the texts critical race theorist Simone Browne (2015) addresses, in
which the airport becomes a ‘security theatre’ wherein conflicting ideas
of nationality, ethnicity, gender and class are played out, Papers, Please
recognizes international border crossings as key sites for the performance
and policing of identities and ideologies (131).
At the crux of the game is a simple risk/reward trade-off: we want
to process as many would-be entrants as possible in order to earn more
money and provide shelter, food, heat and medicine for our family; our
pay will be docked, however, if we fail to spot forgeries, smuggled contra-
band or other violations. We must be quick but thorough, developing an
efficient routine. Taking place at a time when the biometric verification
of identity could not yet be automated, the game requires us to internal-
ize and enforce the rules governing transit into Arstotzka, rules which
shift day by day in relation to unfolding events (epidemics, diplomatic
summits, bombings). Developing an efficient routine involves learning to
aggregate and cross-reference different data sources, flitting between the
three sub-windows into which the screen is divided (see Figure 2.1). The
game’s central mechanic, inspection, is based on direct comparison: in
order to query, detain or search an individual we have to discover a dis-
crepancy, highlighting two data which contradict one another – perhaps
the person’s face does not seem to match their photograph or the gender
stated in their passport; perhaps their work permit’s expiry date falls be-
fore the date shown on our calendar; perhaps the weight stated on their
identity card does not match the readout from our scales (which could
mean that they have weapons or contraband taped to their body, but may
simply mean that they have put on weight since the card was issued).
Our work, in short is all about proving what Paul Ricoeur would call
‘idem-identity’, establishing a direct correspondence between the indi-
vidual and their data (1992, 2). As Btihaj Ajana explains, idem-identity
is grounded in ‘sameness’ and the status of the ‘body as a constant entity
that can be compared to other entities outside time variants’ (2013, 86).
Figure 2.1 Screenshot from Papers, Please.
Within an idem-identity paradigm, identification is understood in ‘the

sense of reidentification of the same, which makes cognition recog-
nition …’, and the individual in terms of her ‘whatness’, as an object
susceptible to quantification and objective description (Ricoeuer 1992,
116; Ajana 2013, 86). As Ajana observes, this is the model of identity
that underpins biometric identification technologies, which aim to es-
tablish a 1:1 correspondence between an individual and a description
of that individual. In order to do this biometric technologies abstract
live bodies into patterns, which, depending on the technologies used,
might be based on fingerprints, facial proportions, retinal vasculature,
DNA, or, in the case of gait recognition, how a particular person walks.
Ricoeur opposes idem-identity to ‘identity in the sense of ipse’, which
‘implies no assertion concerning some unchanging core of the person-
ality’ (1992, 2). As Ajana puts it, ‘ipse-identity is about selfhood and
involves the biographic, embodied, temporal and narrative dimension of
who someone is’ (2013, 87). Understanding individuals in terms of their
‘whoness’, statements of ipse-identity invite identification in the sense of
empathic projection and imaginative investment. Thus, while an individ-
ual’s idem-identity can be ascertained by a machine, the recognition of
ipseity can only occur in a fellow human – indeed, it is here, for Ricoeur,
that ‘the ethical plane unfolds’ (ibid.). Ajana argues that it is, as such,
profoundly worrying that digital technologies tend to privilege whatness
over whoness, idem over ipse (ibid. 89).
Papers, Please is about the consequences of reducing individuals to
information, reimagining the 1980s in ways that speak to the contem-
porary proliferation of ‘biometric information technologies … through
which the body, or more specifically parts, pieces, and, increasingly,
performances of the body are mathematically coded as data’ (Browne
2015, 109). Just as importantly, though, it is also about the consequences
of reducing individuals to processors of information. The amount of
information players are expected to process increases steadily over the
course of the game. By its final phases, a single individual might pres-
ent us with five pieces of paperwork to assess. The ongoing introduc-
tion of new protocols (not to mention the scams, plot and dramas that
we become implicated in) ensures that players always feel harried and
at the limits of their capability. And yet, the fact that players always
feel overwhelmed attests to our capacity to adjust, to internalize the
regulations and develop forms of best practice. We begin to remember
which cities are in which states; we develop reflexes, routines and muscle
memories, becoming more deft in our juggling of desk space. The game
forces players to cope with information overload by cultivating forms of
‘hyper-attention’, which quickly become second nature (Hayles 2012,
69). Indeed, it’s surely no accident that Pope (who confesses to being
passionate about ‘user interface kind of stuff’ (Cullen 2014)) centred the
game on the player-character’s desktop; devised by Xerox in the late
1970s and popularized with the 1984 launch of the Apple Macintosh,
the graphical user interface convention of the ‘desktop environment’ re-
mains a potent symbol of an information technology revolution which
required workers to acquire all manner of new skills and habits, a key
example of how interface designers levy existing knowledge through
skeuomorphic design and iconographic shorthand. As the game pro-
ceeds, the protagonist’s desk becomes increasingly cluttered, both with
new tools (additional stamps, a drawer for storing confiscated passports,
a tranquilizer gun) and with various objects left there by NPCs who
figure in the game’s multiple plotlines – football pennants, wads of bribe
money, coded messages from revolutionaries, digital watches held as
guarantees, business cards, fliers for gyms and brothels, crayon draw-
ings by the protagonist’s son, lockets entrusted to us by colleagues who
have begged us to grant their sweetheart entry. The kiosk becomes an
object lesson in how the introduction of new technologies and protocols
meant to increase productivity has a tendency to create clutter and con-
fusion instead. How can we hope to defend Arstotzka from undesirables
when we can’t even keep our own desk tidy?
But if Papers, Please swamps players with certain kinds of informa-
tion, it also keeps us in the dark in other important respects. Bombarded
with paperwork, we are told very little about the world around us.
Caught up in scanning for discrepancies, we are not given time to think
through the implications of our actions. As Mark Hansen (2015) has ar-
gued, digital games often see players ‘operating at extremely fine-grained
temporal micro-intervals’, learning to ‘execute moves that cannot be
premeditated and that emerge without cognitive awareness playing any
operational role whatsoever’ (175). Playing a fast-paced game, we be-
come aware of ‘the slow resolution time of human attention’ as we are
forced to delegate the decision-making process to bodily faculties that
operate ‘beneath’ the level of conscious thought (ibid. 56). The impli-
cations of this experience are considered in more depth in Chapter 4.
For now, though, I want to argue that Papers, Please shares Hansen’s
interest in using games to think through questions of automatism, infor-
mation processing, interpretation and ‘resolution’ – and also shares his
reservations about the way that conscious deliberation is being sidelined
in an era of algorithmic automation and biometric monitoring of pre-
conscious responses. Asking us to rapidly scan low-resolution images in
the attempt to verify idem-identity and penalizing us if we fail to register
discrepancies, Pope’s game uses procedural caricature to suggest how
coarse and inflexible even comparatively high-resolution representations
of idem-identity are. At the same time, its branching storyline invites us
to imagine and explore possible narrative resolutions for our character,
thinking in terms of their ipse-identity. Playing off these different modes
of framing identity and of interpreting information, Pope shows how the
technological drive towards efficiency and clarity opens up ethical grey
areas and fresh ambiguities, for better or worse.
Grey Areas, Dark Matters and Resolution

In the sense of pixel density, resolution has long been an obsession for
gamers. In the mid-1980s, the Nintendo Entertainment system could
display 25 colours simultaneously at a resolution of 256 × 240 pixels;
today, owners of top-of-the-line PCs are gaming in 3, 840 × 2, 160 ‘ultra
high definition’. At the same time, many indie developers have turned
to ‘retro’ pixel graphics, whether in the interest of keeping development
costs low, evincing a hip disdain for the technologically bleeding edge or
tapping into a rich seam of nostalgia (Juul 2014). In the case of Papers,
Please, the low-resolution graphics, while more detailed than anything
that could have been achieved on a typical PC in 1982, also help to set
the ‘period’ tone. More importantly, though, they serve as a reminder
that digital data always represent more-or-less granular samplings of
reality. However high the resolution of the image, one can never cap-
ture everything – something that remains true even of contemporary
biometric identification technologies. As Browne (2015) notes, while
such technologies are defined by their ability to register infinitesimally
minute details, ‘recognition’ nevertheless remains necessarily a matter
of very high probabilities rather than absolute certainties (116). These
technologies also have serious blindspots, betraying assumptions of
‘prototypical whiteness … [a]s well as prototypical maleness, youth, and
able-bodiedness’ by failing to recognize ‘bodies and body parts’ which
defy their expectations of how bodies should be (ibid. 110). Through
these moments of failure such devices create new ethical dilemmas and
new kinds of ‘dark matter’ – Browne’s term for ‘those bodies and body
parts that fail to enrol’ and consequently can be identified only in terms
of their illegibility (ibid. 114).
As Ahm (2016) argues, Papers, Please raises questions of legibility,
ambiguity and ‘granularity’ by offering a very fine-grained simulation
of the process of reviewing and stamping documents while rendering
its diegetic world and its characters in ways that are both literally and
figuratively coarse-grained. The game might ask players to make fine
discriminations, but it also deploys low-resolution sounds and images,
offering only a vague sense of the world in which those players find them-
selves. Rendering NPCs’ faces as blobs of mauve, pink, ochre or greyish
green onto which blockily exaggerated features are drawn, it puts the
onus on us to ‘read’ these faces as sly or nervous, serene or desperate,
innocent or guilty. By inventing countries, meanwhile, Pope discourages
players from importing real world affiliations, associations or prejudices
into the gameworld. We do not know the histories of Kolechia, Obristan
or Arstotzka, nor why diplomatic relations between these countries are
so strained. While we might learn certain methods of distinguishing bet
ween these states in the course of our work as an inspector, they remain
more or less interchangeable, and it proves impossible to separate truth
from rumour and misinformation (is Obristan really a better place to
live or is that just what jingoists and propagandists want us to think?).
Where much contemporary ‘security theatre’ highlights the prejudicial
treatment of black and brown subjects by comparison with white ones,
Pope’s decision to randomly assign NPCs skin colours (rather than, say,
assigning certain RGB values to citizens of certain nations) means that
Papers, Please more or less sidesteps this issue. As an expressive strat-
egy, this has advantages and drawbacks. On the positive side, it enables
Pope to suggest the arbitrariness of racial discrimination and the folly
of ascribing character traits to individuals on the basis of nationality,
ethnicity or appearance. And, given that the world of Papers, Please
is modelled on the Eastern Bloc, it makes sense that the game would
place less emphasis on skin colour than other kinds of difference that,
while perhaps less immediately visible, can be equally divisive (not that
race – which is after all a cultural rather than an ontological category –
can necessarily be discerned by eye). Insofar as Papers, Please aims to
make players think about border control in the contemporary global
north, however, it arguably underplays the importance of skin colour
as a dimension of identity, missing an opportunity to highlight the
way in which notionally objective, empirically grounded protocols and
technologies propagate racist (il)logic (Chun 2016, 58). On the whole,
though, having players compare NPCs’ faces against the still-grainier
monochrome images in their passports proves to be a highly effective
means of highlighting the extent to which recognition depends on filling
in gaps and resolving ambiguities, and the way that often unconscious
assumptions and biases shape this process.
In other words, if Papers, Please is drab and blocky, it is because these
aesthetic choices serve Pope’s interest in ethical and hermeneutic grey
areas. Critics like Austin Walker have proposed that the game’s muted
palette conveys the bleakness of a system that prizes conformity and
homogeneity over individualism (Walker 2013). While this is surely a
legitimate reading, I prefer to address this greyness in relation to Fuller
and Goffey’s (2012) analysis of ‘grey media’ in Evil Media, a book that
shares with Papers, Please a keen interest in ‘the irreducibly constitu-
tive role of machines, techniques, [and] technologies in the problem-
atic axiology of power’ (6). This category of grey media encompasses
‘types of writing connected to the bureaucratic world’, from documents,
memos and manuals to presentation software and digital databases
(ibid. 15–17). For Fuller and Goffey, there is a bitter irony in the fact that
even as such media purport to bring order and clarity, enlightenment
and consensus, their proliferation ‘facilitates and amplifies the creation
of troubling, ambiguous social processes, fragile networks of susceptible
activity, opaque zones of non-knowledge’ (ibid. 10–11). By confronting
users with ‘a troubling opacity and thickness’, grey media fuel ‘feelings
of dread, fear and foreboding’ which, in turn, heighten the desire for
simplicity and Manichean certainty (ibid. 5, 10–11). They hold that such
media are evil inasmuch as they feed a desire to believe that there are
such things as good and evil, ‘help[ing] to legitimate simplistic injunc-
tions against malice in all its real or imagined forms’ (ibid. 10). Steeped
in stifling greyness, we come to long for a black and white world, a
world of scapegoats and quick fixes, where everything can be blamed
on migrants, dissidents or enemies of the state. This notion of evil helps,
I think, to clarify what is at stake in Papers, Please. Other interpreters
of the game have invoked Hannah Arendt, suggesting the game stands
as a procedural illustration of her famous ‘banality of evil’ hypothesis,
the argument that those responsible for the Holocaust were just doing
their jobs, ‘performing … the duties of a law-abiding citizen’ in a chill-
ing spirit of quiescence (1994 [1963], 135). (Indeed, a TV Tropes user
describes Papers, Please as ‘essentially The Banality of Evil: The Game’
(Psyclone 2015)). Pope’s account of the game, however, evokes Fuller
and Goffey’s world of troubling greyness as much as Arendt’s account
of functionaries complacently obeying inhuman protocols. As Pope has
said, ‘this was one of the things I tried to capture in the game, this kind
of ambiguity and this vagueness to everything, not knowing for sure
what anybody is saying is true and not knowing who to trust’ (Cullen
2014). Following orders does not necessarily mean we will keep our job;
nor can we be sure that by contravening orders or helping the rebels try-
ing to topple the government we will be doing the right thing – if, indeed,
there is a right thing.
Like Fuller and Goffey, Pope appreciates that greyness need not be
understood in terms of a black/white binary (‘it can be equal propor-
tions of red, green and blue in the RGB colour model’ (Fuller and Goffey
2012, 20)). As with the muddy but evocative RGB faces that appear
before us in Papers, Please’s kiosk, the sort of greyness they are inter-
ested in ‘calls for a kind of suspicious attentiveness, the cultivation of a
sensibility able to detect minor shifts of nuance, hints of contrast where
flatness would otherwise be the rule’ (ibid. 21). Attention to Pope’s grey-
est of games reveals that it too is more nuanced than it might appear to
the inattentive observer. To be sure, the game mounts a critique of bu-
reaucratic systems that attempt to suppress our tendency towards empa-
thy, compassion and identification with the other’s ipseity, affirming the
importance of the faculties of ‘conscious deliberation’ that, for Hansen,
have been put at risk by big data, biometrics and algorithmic intelli-
gence (2015, 55–60). And yet the game’s message is neither as binary
nor as didactic as to be reducible to the proposition that story-based
models of identity are preferable to information-based ones. It is true
that to play Papers, Please ‘well’ (that is, in line with the regulations
that we are issued) is to close our ears to emotive testimonies, cultivat-
ing forms of quasi-machinic objectivity and efficiency that foreshadow
contemporary biometric technologies’ framing of identity as a matter
of ‘hyper-empirical and objective programmatic Boolean operations of
true/false and positive/negative’ (Ajana 2013, 80). It is also true that, to
the extent that doing our job ‘well’ does not preclude terrorist attacks
(which are often carried out by people with the proper documentation),
the game is suspicious of claims that tighter controls lead to greater
security. Playing ‘well’ is not the only option, however; we can also
bend the rules, ‘flouting stable, well-configured expectations’ and ex-
ploiting the loopholes that result from the ‘superposing of multiple rules
and the conflict between the universes of reference they unfold’ (Fuller
and Goffey 2012, 186). We may do so out of charity or idealism (ex-
ercising mercy, colluding with revolutionaries), but we may also do it
out of selfish motives (exploiting the vulnerable, accepting bribes). And,
in attempting to do good, we may end up setting in motion chains of
profoundly unfortunate events. As this suggests, Pope is aware that al-
lowing humans more autonomy and interpretive leeway does not always
produce more humane results. He is also aware that the mercilessly bi-
nary world of data and the emotive realm of stories are often more
entwined than they might appear. Indeed, security and surveillance in-
frastructures tend to be underpinned by emotive narrative appeals: it is
not that the Arstotzkan authorities disdain storytelling per se, it is just
that they want us to block our ears to certain kinds of stories (refugees’
pleas for clemency, rebels’ promises of a better tomorrow) while fold-
ing bureaucratic discrepancies into projective narratives about potential
terrorists threatening national security.
The game itself depends upon the player’s ability to extrapolate stories
from hints and ciphers. As I noted earlier, one of the ways in which Pope
attempts to invest our actions with a sense of consequence is by giving
the protagonist a family who will fall ill and die if we do not provide
for them. References to this family, though, are almost entirely confined
to the status screens that appear at the end of each in-game day, where
our earnings and outgoings are tallied. All we know about ‘our’ wife,
son and uncle is whether they are cold, hungry or sick. In keeping with
the game’s preference for coarse-grained narration, very little effort is
made to present these family members as people who deserve our sym-
pathy (as if this is why people love their families); instead we are left
to infer that the protagonist would probably be inclined to put their
needs before those of strangers. Our interactions with NPCs, too, often
involve drawing inferences which we have no means of corroborating.
Certain characters play a role in the game’s branching linear narrative,
or star in subplots that might develop across an in-game day or two; in
other cases, however, characters are nothing more than algorithmically
assembled composites, procedural caricatures fleetingly brought into be-
ing by the software only to disappear once their documents have been
processed. Even knowing this, it is hard to suppress the urge to specu-
late, to concoct narrative rationales for arresting combinations of values
and components – how did this man with the sideburns and the deep-
set squinting eyes, whose fingerprints match those I have on file, come
to look so different from his passport photograph? Starvation, surgery?
These randomly created characters, composed from scraps of data, are
at least as important to the game’s critique of the idem-identity paradigm
as those who figure in its main plotline, perhaps more so. When, after a
body scan, a gamine woman with bobbed hair and a bonnet turns out to
have male genitalia, the game inadvertently opens onto the question of
how ‘nonbinary, gender nonconforming, mixed race, intersexed or trans
people fit into the algorithmic equation’ of contemporary biopolitics,
and of the terms on which trans subjects are considered assimilable to
the nation-state, limning a storyworld far vaster and more variegated
than it can directly represent (Grabham 2011; Browne 2015, 114). Where
have these characters come from? Where are they going? Narrative pos-
sibilities suggest themselves but there is nothing to discover; these char-
acters have no backstory, no past or future and their plots will never be
‘resolved’ beyond our letting them through or turning them away. They
remain dark matter, illegible within the frameworks at our disposal.
If, in such cases, we may become oriented towards these fictional
individuals on the basis of prurient curiosity, identification, sympathy
or attraction, the dominant framework we are encouraged to adopt
remains one of suspicion. Charging us with defending the homeland
against incursions by dissidents, drug smugglers, undocumented work-
ers and carriers of infectious diseases, Papers, Please highlights what
Ajana sees as an increasingly pervasive habit of understanding identity
‘in terms of risk’ and ‘as being at risk, the risk of fraud, the risk of crime,
the risk of terrorism, the risk of illegal immigration, the risk of illegal
working’ (2013, 79, emphasis in original). Representing a bureaucratic
machine fuelled by paranoia, prejudice and propaganda, Papers, Please
proposes that the notionally empirical realm of risk assessment cannot
be securely separated from an essentially narrative drive to imagine the
consequences of risky behaviour and a tendency to exaggerate threats
to our safety (as Browne notes, citing Ursula Franklin, security and sur-
veillance entail not just the development of ever-more complex and in-
vasive technologies, procedures and policies but also the production of a
‘credible enemy’ whose malice, zeal and cunning justifies their existence
(2015, 115)). Even when we reach the end of the game, the fact that there
are nineteen other possible endings means resolution remains deferred,
with multiple trajectories through possibility space taking the place of
a single well-wrought narrative arc. These twenty endings encompass
possibilities ranging from escape to incarceration and execution to
revolution, but almost all of them end with the line Glory to Arstotzka
(or Glory to the New Arstotzka if the revolutionaries take command).
With this statement the game elicits one final act of comparison, asking
players to hold the low-resolution caricature that is Arstotzka, with its
paper-based identification protocols, up against our own place and time.
Whether we then recognize the game as a critique of big government or
of punitive immigration policies, as a homily on the evils of greed and
corruption or as a paean to ‘post-ideological’ inclusivity, is up to us – the
greyness is the point.
On Spacebook Everyone Can Watch You Network

Like Papers, Please and Valkyria Chronicles, Redshirt is interested in
how people are rendered as data, and in how that data can become a ba-
sis for processes of extrapolation and calculation. The games also share
a concern with how people from different countries and cultures (or, in
Redshirt’s case, planets and species) get along. And, like Papers, Please,
Redshirt casts us as a menial worker whose fate is shaped and whose
freedom of movement is curtailed by conflicts and political intrigues into
which they have no insight. Where Papers, Please uses the passport as a
vehicle for thinking about the datafied self, however, Redshirt uses the
social media profile. Described by its designer Mitu Khandaker-Kokoris
as ‘a sci-fi comedy simulation game all about the intrigue and drama of
social networking’, the game asks players to work their way up the so-
cial hierarchy of the space station Megadolon 9 using the social network
‘Spacebook’ (2015, 87). Redshirt is played entirely via the Spacebook
interface, through which we can send messages, make wall posts, shop,
apply for jobs, issue friend and relationship requests and organize and
RSVP to events. As the game’s title suggests, we begin at the bottom
of the pile. 2 Beginning as a janitor, we are tasked with extending our
network, finding love, furthering our career and, ultimately, leaving the
station for astral pastures greener.
By comparison with Arstotzka, Megadolon 9 hardly seems dysto-
pian, at least at first. After all, it harks back to Gene Rodenberry’s Star
Trek, with its ‘utopian vision’ of a twenty-fourth-century society that
has transcended racial prejudice and socio-economic inequality (Barrett
and Barrett 2001, 89). Portraying a literally cosmopolitan crew’s en-
counters with alien cultures, Star Trek allegorically engaged issues such
as slavery, genocide, Civil Rights, Vietnam and the Cold War, always
affirming an unwavering faith in the virtues of secular liberal human-
ism and the ‘value of individuality’ (ibid. 111). Redshirt, too, initially
seems to portray a future where tolerance and equality are the rule, a
world where humans, gelatinous blobs, androgynous ‘emoids’ and cyclo
pean cephalopods all work, fraternize, date and experience ‘Virtuo-
Augmento simulations’ together. While its storyworld is not entirely free
from bigotry (unless, that is, we set it to be this way in a pregame op-
tions screen), in general Redshirt portrays a culture where skin colour,
sexuality and species seem less important as markers of identity and
affiliation than individuals’ jobs, tastes and hobbies. Each character has
three main interests – from fitness and self-improvement to music and
‘xenogastronomy’ – and is more likely to get along with characters who
share them. Indeed, the game might be said to present a world that has
made good on the hopes of early cyberutopians like Harold Rheingold
(2000 [1993]), for whom the Internet promised to bring Licklider and
Taylor’s 1968 vision of computers fostering communities based on ‘com-
monality of interests and goals’ rather than ‘accidents of proximity’ to
glorious fruition (9).
If its storyworld is characterized by inclusivity and diversity (at least
in the main), Redshirt also challenges essentialist notions of gender
and sexuality in the way that it simulates interpersonal interaction and
models gender and sexuality. On the character creation screen, gen-
der is rendered as a literal sliding scale rather than a binary, and we
can choose for our avatar to be heterosexual, homosexual or bisexual.
The game also takes an innovative approach to modelling attraction.
As K handaker-Kokoris has argued, dating sims and roleplaying games
too often reduce love to a matter of picking the correct dialogue op-
tions and proffering the requisite gifts, giving the impression that ‘saying
the right combination of things … leads to a desirable sexual outcome’
(Khandaker-Kokoris 2015, 86). As other scholars have also observed,
such systems not only make for boring gameplay, but by taking a ‘do
X, Y and Z, and the girl is yours’ approach to romance, reinforce the
kinds of crudely masculinist framings of sexual relationships propagated
by pickup artists and ‘young men … [who believe] that an accumulation
of nice deeds and moments of emotional support for women in their
lives entitles them to sex’ (Kelly 2015, 57; Ware 2015, 227). In Redshirt,
by contrast, random number generators are used to determine which
characters will become attracted to one another, meaning there are no
set recipes for romantic success. As Khandaker-Kokoris writes, she had
initially experimented with a more complex system, which would have
matched characters on the basis of compatible traits, behaviours and
tastes. Ultimately, though, it proved easier and more elegant to levy the
human ability to interpret coincidences and contingencies in imaginative,
irrational ways; like Papers, Please, Redshirt does very little to define,
develop or differentiate most of its characters. Instead, it relies on us to
impute motivations to NPCs, rationalize random outcomes, invest coin-
cidences with meaning and string isolated data points into speculative
narratives, maintaining the illusion that there is a real (fictional) person
‘behind’ the Spacebook profile. Any sense that we are interacting with
other individuals quickly breaks down, however, as we begin to recog-
nize all the NPCs as procedural variations on the same few themes and
to see identical jokes and comments cropping up in our Spacebook feeds
again and again. Of course, this could be interpreted as a commentary
on the prevalence of plagiarism and groupthink on social media, but it
hardly helps to promote the idea that Redshirt’s NPCs are autonomous
individuals. In this as in other respects, the game often seems uncertain
as to how bleak a satire it wants to be, and exactly what its targets are.
Is the game poking fun at the naive idealism of Star Trek? Is it a critique
of the inanity of most online interactions? Is it comically chastising us
for our failure to live up to liberal values that it nevertheless endorses?
Or is it suggesting that the way that digital media frame interpersonal
interaction is somehow pernicious?
Misery Loves Company

The answers to these questions prove elusive. For while Redshirt both
represents a world of tolerance and inclusivity at a data level and sug-
gests a commitment to these values at a process level, it also suggests that
even in a future where race, religion, sexuality and gender are held to be
less important than individuals’ hobbies, pleasures and personalities, so-
cial harmony can be hard to achieve. In this it echoes the critiques of on-
line culture offered by scholars like Debra Ferreday and Lisa Nakamua.
Ferreday has little time for web platforms which involve ‘performing
an identity in which the individual is constructed through categories
such as [their favourite] colour, flavour … song, and so on’, arguing
that by grounding identity in taste, style or other ‘acceptable’ differ-
ences rather than ‘other, more “problematic” kinds of difference’ like
‘gender, race, or class’, such sites and services obfuscate rather than ad-
dressing social divisions, masking the realities of inequality, segregation,
prejudice and difference (2009, 132, 128, 72–75). As Ferreday observes,
these notionally universal and inclusive web platforms often expect us-
ers to share reference points, values and cultural competencies, while
grounding identity in consumption. Nakamura (2008) likewise argues
that the commercial web’s rhetoric of ‘colourblindness’ should be read
not in terms of tolerance but as unwillingness to acknowledge inequality
and diversity (3).
Once we get past its utopian veneer, it is clear that Redshirt shares at
least some of these authors’ qualms. Even as we fritter away our time
socializing on Spacebook, the planet that Megadolon 9 orbits is being
fought over by the Geldar and the Scalians in a war that is putting the
station at risk. For most of the game this clash of cultures remains in
the background, registering only in terms of notifications informing us
that such-and-such an ambassador is paying a visit, notifications that
are easy to miss amidst the updates, event invitations and flirtatious
quips that populate our feed. These updates are enough, however, to
hint that social networks have not enabled Redshirt’s universe to tran-
scend factionalism and interspecies enmity altogether, and to suggest
how social media can distract users from real political issues. As the
game progresses and the political situation escalates, it becomes increas-
ingly clear that it would be a very good idea to leave Megadolon 9 as
soon as possible. The only people allowed to leave, however, are officers,
their partners and staff. This means that to escape we either need to
work our way up the station’s career ladder, find someone to bribe (and
enough money to bribe them with) or seduce somebody with clearance
to depart. All of these options entail keeping tabs on NPCs’ likes and
dislikes, rivalries and affiliations, working out which skills and relation-
ships to cultivate and how best to invest our character’s time and money.
In this way, the macro-scale political upheavals going on in the back-
ground and the day-to-day interpersonal politics of the space station’s
inhabitants (as mediated via Spacebook) come together, providing our
character with a strong motivation for plotting, calculating and climbing
the social ziggurat.
The impending threat of death also brings home the fact that
Megadolon 9’s inhabitants barely have lives anyway, seeming to spend all
their time at work or in front of their computers. The fact that the entire
game is played via the Spacebook interface is itself a satirical jab at the idea
of new media ‘addicts’ remaining glued to their screens as ‘real’ life passes
them by. In the Redshirt player’s case, things are even worse than that:
we are not just playing a game when we could be doing something ‘real’,
we are playing a game about social networking when we could be playing
a ‘real’ game or browsing ‘real’ social media. In ‘real’ triple A games like
Alien: Isolation and Dead Space players escape doomed ships, shuttles
and space stations by shooting and sneaking their way through realisti-
cally portrayed three-dimensional environments; here we essentially play
as our avatar’s avatar, stabbing people in the back via Spacebook in what
the game portrays as a no-less-bloodthirsty struggle for survival. Where,
in the late 1990s, Janet Murray (1997) took inspiration from Star Trek’s
holodeck to set out principles for creating immersive ‘cyberdramas’, in
Redshirt we only experience activities like our character paying a trip to
the ‘Virtuo-Augmento deck’ by reading about them on their Spacebook
profile. As a further satirical wrinkle, we are only allowed to perform a
set number of actions each in-game day – a system borrowed from free-to-
play games, in which players quickly run out of ‘energy’ which can only be
replenished by waiting, paying real money or encouraging friends to sign
up (a system addressed in more detail in Chapter 7). The Spacebook inter-
face also offers a running tally of how healthy, wealthy, happy and popular
our character is, positing a future where quantified self technologies have
been fully integrated into users’ social networking profiles. Where, how-
ever, those technologies are sold on the promise of making users happier,
healthier and more productive (Rettberg 2014, 63), Redshirt suggests that
these goals are not always compatible. It is particularly effective as a pro-
cedural illustration of how social media can fuel misery, not least for those
too poor to have fun. Spending our character’s action points on activities
that will make them more popular or advance their career prospects re-
quires money; by staying in and saving money, however, we risk making
them sad, diminishing their charisma and their effectiveness at work.
By presenting players with these kinds of dilemmas Redshirt makes the
point that social media respond to, without necessarily rectifying, anxiety
and unhappiness (Bauman and Lyon 2013, 25). It also foregrounds the
ludic dimensions of social networks, the way that they turn social interac-
tion into a competition. Benjamin Grosser (2014) contends that Facebook
draws on our deeply ingrained ‘desire for more’, compelling us to

reimagine friendship as a quantitative space, and … asking us to
evaluate the metrics of our friends while at the same time internaliz-
ing our need to excel quantitatively.
Rewarding those who post frequently and respond quickly with greater
visibility, the platform mobilizes quantification to ensure ‘that [users]
stay active within the system, producing the content it needs to survive’
while also ‘making [them] easier to categorize and market to’. Red-
shirt merely exaggerates the ludic aspect of social networking, making
good on Graeme Kirkpatrick’s (2013) observation that digital gaming is
‘deeply isomorphic’ with ‘contemporary forms of life’ in which old mod-
els of ‘progress’ are being replaced by an emphasis on ‘playing the game
well today’ – where ‘playing well means maintaining popularity levels on
Facebook, or establishing new connections on LinkedIn’ (25–26).
Limiting our actions per day and establishing the Damoclean prospect
of destruction, Khandaker-Kokoris hyperbolically amplifies this logic,
encouraging players to see life as a series of opportunities to invest their
resources (money, actions, etc.) in ways that will provide the maximal
return (in terms of likes, happiness, health, experience points, command
of skills valued by employers, connections) and hasten their escape from
the station. At some point in my playthrough, it became apparent that the
quickest route off of Megadolon 9 for Algis, my character, was to curry
favour with an NPC called Elizabeth Ericksen. A friend of a friend with
similar interests, Elizabeth also happened to be in charge of vetting appli-
cants for the game’s top job, commander’s assistant. By chance, she had
also taken a liking to Algis. Consulting the game’s careers interface, I dis-
covered that the smitten Elizabeth would be willing to give Algis the job if
he met just one of the criteria outlined in the job description. Abandoning
my plan to take the straight and narrow path off the station, I began
calculating the quickest way to become qualified. Of the four criteria –
a level six pedigree in fooling your boss, level ten in schmoozing, level
four in pandering to authority and level six in delusions of heroism – the
pandering requirement looked easiest for Algis to meet, especially if I pur-
chased a ‘Felathian charisma fountain’ from Spacebook’s shop, an item
which would add fifteen points to Algis’ ranking in this ‘skill’ every day.
Saving up the 5,000 credits needed to buy the device while ensuring that
Elizabeth retained her high opinion of Algis wasn’t easy; I had to strike
a balance between putting money by for the fountain and splashing out
on romantic dinners and zero-g yoga sessions for two, lest she abandon
the relationship. Eventually, however, I was able to buy the fountain.
Upon getting the job, the game presented me with a dialogue box, asking
whether I wanted Algis to escape now or to stay behind and work out a
way to bring Elizabeth along too. Assuming that I could revert to an ear-
lier save to try the second option later, I opted to escape, and was treated
to an image of the station exploding – before discovering that the game
had overwritten my previous save, condemning E lizabeth to a fiery death.
By eliciting outcomes like this, Khandaker-Kokoris suggests how
blurry the distinction between peers and rivals can become in a ‘com-
petitive, productive and individualist’ culture like Redshirt’s – or our
own (Berardi 2009, 99). Franco Berardi argues that contemporary so-
ciety encourages us ‘to perceiv[e] others according to the rules of com-
petition, that is to say as danger, impoverishment and limitation, rather
than experience, pleasure and enrichment’, while McRobbie contends
‘the idea of “romance” has been deflected away from the sphere of love
and intimacy and instead projected into the idea of a fulfilling career’ for
many today (ibid. 80; 2016, 91). While social media might cloak these
processes in terms of chasing your goals and dreams, ignoring haters,
doing what you love and making the most of each day, for these theorists
the reality is rather uglier. Where social media platforms might claim
to counteract atomization and anomie by connecting people (and it is
worth acknowledging the role they have in enabling forms of networked,
affiliation, sociability, creativity and activism), Redshirt shows how
their emphasis on quantification also aids the diffusion of a logic of cal-
culation and competition into every area of life – as Khandaker-Kokoris
puts it, ‘love [is] a part of one of the many other types of interpersonal
politics that happen on the station’ (2015, 90). The game also addresses
one of Berardi’s (2009) main objections to the culture of competition:
its insistence that success is available to anyone willing to work for it,
and its concomitant refusal to acknowledge that ‘there is no competition
without failure and defeat’ (99–100). As we shall see in Chapter 7, games
play a part in promoting these ideas by presenting worlds where every-
one can reach the top if only they invest the necessary hours (or pay to
use shortcuts); Redshirt, by contrast, presents a world where our gain is
definitely someone else’s loss, showing how downright antisocial users
of social media can be.
Conclusion
Playing Papers, Please in tandem with Redshirt we can gain a sense
of how profiling and tracking techniques initially developed in clinical,
carceral and colonial contexts have developed into the forms of profil-
ing underpinning contemporary technoculture – a genealogy that tracks
from the literal branding of slaves to forms of online self-branding
(Pugliese 2012, 69; Browne 2015, 123–128). In the shift from A rstotzka
to Megadolon 9, we experience a version of what Deleuze (1992)
famously theorized as the transition from societies of discipline to ones
of control. D
isciplinary regimes like the ones Papers, Please caricatures
depended on strategies of ‘enclosure’ and top-down institutional con-
trol; Redshirt, by contrast, resembles Deleuze’s vision of a future where
new technologies enable forms of ‘ultrarapid, free-floating’ control pre-
mised on electronic tracking and numerical calculation, promising a
‘new freedom’ even as they place limits on personal autonomy ‘equal to
the harshest of confinements’ (ibid. 4). Where, in Papers, Please, profil-
ing is bound up with state coercion, Redshirt’s caricature of contempo-
rary social media practice suggests how sites like Facebook foster ‘DIY
surveillance’ or ‘peer to peer surveillance’ by encouraging users to share
their personal data (Lyon 2007, 191).
Addressing these games in tandem enables us to move beyond critiques
of profiling grounded in the complaint that, say, identity documents fail
to capture what is special or significant about individuals; while this is
doubtless true, the social web has enabled new forms of exploitation
precisely by eliciting forms of information and kinds of interaction
which feel truer to individuals’ ipse-identities. Sean Cubitt argues that if
‘Databasing renders the person as a “data-image”, a statistically coher-
ent version of the messy human self’, this process is ‘not at all a reduction
of the full, “real” self to “mere” writing but the construction of a new,
statistical and distributed self, a deconstructed, fully textual, rewritable
file’ (Cubitt 1998, 20). Rather than complaining that communications
technologies fail to fully capture or account for the complexity of bod-
ies, identities and subjectivities, we should think about what is gained
and lost when new modes of framing selfhood emerge – and about how
the superposition or interoperation of different frameworks might pro-
duce zones of greyness and new categories of dark matter, opening up
new aesthetic and political possibilities even as it forecloses others. Pa-
pers, Please shows that determining identity by imposing predefined tax-
onomic frameworks from the top down can be cruel; failing to take into
account the dimensions of the self that cannot be abstracted into facts
and statistics, the assumptions and prejudices that inform the construc-
tion of these frameworks also mean that certain bodies fail to fit or can
be made to fit only through violence. At the same time, the very rigidity
(or, as we might conceive of it, low resolution) of these structures makes
possible tactical responses and the exploitation of loopholes, whether
for principled or cynical ends. Redshirt, by contrast, suggests how pro-
files maintained by networked individuals enable identity categories to
emerge from the bottom up: individuals share information about their
activities, tastes, routines and social lives, allowing data miners and se-
curity agencies, through processes of recursion and analysis, to abstract
salient patterns from the flux of online activity. Safety and pleasure are
purchased at the expense of one’s data. U ltimately, though, Redshirt
suggests that the effect of such systems is to refine networks of control,
helping to close the loopholes the A rstotzkan system exhibited and driv-
ing individuals to exploit themselves and others ever more ruthlessly,
instrumentalizing or commodifying aspects of the self once considered
private (Bauman and Lyon 2013, 31–32). At both a ludic and hermeneu-
tic level, these games involve us in processes of comparison, calculation
and prediction. Using visual caricature to present NPCs who beg to be
read as incarnating this or that social ‘type’, they also demonstrate how
games can convey meaning through procedural caricature, simulating
processes like checking a passport or currying favour with a colleague
on Facebook. They speak, as such, to the rise of a ‘ludified’ culture of
information (Raessens 2006), in which the spoils go to those capable of
reading others and of making themselves legible in favourable terms –
but they also equip us to recognize and contest this logic.
Cubitt’s advice about datafied profiles also proves instructive when
it comes to thinking about videogames. Rather than deriding them for
their failure to offer ‘deep’, rounded characters or well-made plots (a fail-
ure to live up, in short, to the notions of time and identity which Lash
associates with forms of cultural inscription like the novel and cinema)
we might instead address them as texts that bring not just multiple me-
dia, but also multiple cultural logics and representational traditions into
(often uneasy) alignment. All three games analysed in this chapter offer
the choice between a ‘story mode’ and a mode in which play is divorced
from any narrative trajectory: Valkyria Chronicles has a ‘Skirmish’
mode (where we can select particular missions from a menu to be re-
played again and again), while Redshirt and Papers, Please have ‘end-
less modes’. These modes highlight the gap between storytelling as a
process of configuring causal chains and sequences of events that move
towards a conclusion and videogame design as a matter of tuning lu-
dic systems capable of generating new permutations, scenarios and out-
comes from a finite range of rules, roles and moves. But the problem of
reconciling stories with systems is not, of course, the exclusive preserve
of game designers; in a culture where information is overtaking nar-
rative as the privileged form of cultural inscription, it is hard to find a
branch of human endeavour indifferent to such questions. In such a con-
text, games emerge as a form qualified to address the vexed relationship
between stories and software, and to highlight its political implications.
By removing the excuses and exigencies, the ‘states of exception’ that
justify our actions in story mode (the threat of impending destruction
in Redshirt, the promise of revolution or escape in Papers, Please), for
example, these endless modes suggest the extent to which our engage-
ments with technologies that obey a permutational logic are inflected by
the human tendency to think in terms of A-B plot arcs (Agamben 2005).
As will be apparent by now, I find Papers, Please and Redshirt more con-
vincing than Valkyria Chronicles in their handling of questions of identity,
community and the datafied self. Like many commercial triple A games,
Valkyria Chronicles invites players to take part in a graphically sumptuous
story of individual heroism in a universe of Manichean moral certainties.
Papers, Please and Redshirt, meanwhile, suggest how the emergence of
an ‘indie’ sector has created space for games that portray activities and
scenarios that most commercial publishers would dismiss as too boring
while advancing arguments and posing ethical questions they would likely
consider too complex or depressing. As procedural models of the logic of
profiling, these games offer striking, albeit low resolution, caricatures of
real protocols and processes. Valkyria Chronicles, though, remains curi-
ously beguiling as a vision of how datafication ought to work. Casting us
as a benign authority figure who uses the available data to configure teams
suited to the circumstances, it asks us to make good on the promise that
given enough data we could recognize everyone’s value, find a place for
them and maximize their potential. Valkyria Chronicles is also striking for
the way that it locates habit at the core of character. Its framing of person-
ality as a matter of underlying, inflexible ‘code’ resonates with the concep-
tion of comedic character that Henri Bergson develops in his essay on the
comic, which proposes that laughter is a means of reasserting the difference
between persons and mechanisms, of highlighting and censuring ‘a certain
mechanical elasticity, just where one would expect to find the wideawake
adaptability and the living pliableness of a human being’ (1984 [1900], 67).
Bergson’s text belongs to a time when the mechanization of industry and
the birth of automated entertainments such as the cinema had raised ques-
tions about humans’ more machinic tendencies. But, as Lury and Lash ar-
gue, his account of habit, attention and gesture remains compelling in an
era of networks, computer-generated animation and artificial intelligence
(2007, 93–97). They make particular claims for Bergson’s relevance to
contemporary character-driven branding and marketing, claims that are
at least as applicable to videogames. Especially, germane is Lash and Lury’s
observation that it is their status as comic ‘types’ that renders certain char-
acters so amenable to being ‘re-embedded in other spaces, other times, in
play’ (ibid. 97). They also stress comic characters’ antipathy to narrative
progress or character development (ibid. 93), a factor that perhaps explains
the failure of Valkyria Chronicles to satisfactorily integrate its characters
into a story. Valkyria Chronicles could, indeed, be seen as a demonstration
of the videogames’ suitability to portraying what Bergson terms ‘automa-
tism … the ready-made element in our personality, that mechanical ele-
ment which resembles a piece of clockwork wound up once and for all and
capable of working automatically’ (1984, 155–156, emphasis in original).
It is this inflexibility that is, for Bergson, at the heart of all comedy – and,
indeed, of character itself (‘In one sense it might be said that all character is
comic …’ (ibid. 156)). Here again, we see how, by attempting to yoke data
to process, ‘the order of the story and its irreversible time’ to digital systems
based on calculation and permutation (Lash and Lury 2007, 184–185),
games can open new expressive possibilities – with the effect, in Valkyria
Chronicles’ case, of suggesting the extent to which personality is rooted in
habit, an aspect of selfhood that many traditional narratives gloss over. For
Chun (2016), it is only by ‘inhabiting the habitual’ that we can understand
the terms on which individuals interact with new media and the conse-
quences for their sense of self: she places habit at the heart of ‘the complex
relationship between what is allegedly public and private, intimate and so-
cial’ today (xi) – a relationship to which the next chapter turns.
Notes
1 Valkyria Chronicles’ character designer, Raita Honjou, began his career
producing doujin works of this kind.
2 The term ‘redshirt’ originated among fans of the first series of Star Trek,
in which red-shirted security personnel were often introduced only to be
killed off for dramatic effect, and, as such, carries the sense of being an ano
nymous and expendable extra in someone else’s story.
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3 Private Subjects
Secrecy, Scandal and Surveillance
Let’s cast our minds back to the heady days of the mid-2000s, and to the
launch of two devices that were to have a profound impact on digital cul-
ture: Nintendo’s Wii, released in November 2006, and Apple’s iPhone,
released in the summer of 2007. Both products announced a break from
convention by way of their interfaces: the Wii’s motion-sensing con-
troller, quickly dubbed the ‘Wiimote’, translated players’ gestures into
in-game actions, sparking a craze for games with ‘mimetic interfaces’
(Juul 2010, 5); the iPhone, meanwhile, did away with keys in favour of a
touchscreen activated via taps, pinches and swipes. Less immediately ap-
parent than these innovations, if ultimately more important, was the way
that these devices combined a number of familiar technologies (WiFi,
i nfrared and Bluetooth, capacitive touch, accelerometers and gyro-
scopes, digital cameras and GPS sensors) in such a way as to reconfigure
public and private space, creating new frameworks for social interaction,
new gestural vocabularies and new resources for identity performance.
In their account of the Wii, Jones and Thiruvathukal (2012) credit the
system with shifting the attention of the games industry away from the
production of ‘ever-more realistic, immersive game spaces’ in which sol-
itary players could lose themselves and back towards the ‘space between
the player and the screen – a space mediated by a network of peripheral
devices and imagined as a possibility space where social interactions are
the ideal context for gameplay’ (5–6, 4). Rather than attempting to draw
players into the screen through visual verisimilitude, Nintendo sought to
involve them through kinaesthesis, establishing a correspondence bet
ween offscreen and onscreen bodies. By equipping consumers with net-
worked, sensor-packed handheld computers, meanwhile, Apple opened
the way to on-the-go video calls, real-time navigation, hook-up apps,
geotagged tweets, augmented reality games, quantified self software and
ride-sharing services, all of which have played a part in transforming
social and spatial practice to a greater or lesser extent.
All but coeval, the Wii and the iPhone speak to a wider interest in
developing new means of tracking, monitoring and reading users of digi
tal technologies. Jones and Thiruvathukal (2012) single out Wii Fit, one
of the Wii’s best-selling titles, as exemplary of this ethos. Less a game
52 Private Subjects
than a piece of lifestyle software, it came with a ‘balance board’ players
could use to monitor their weight and improve their posture, affirm-
ing Nintendo’s interest in looking beyond traditional interfaces to ex-
plore new kinds of ‘haptic-somatic feedback loops’ (86). This interest
quickly spread to the rest of the games industry, inspiring a wave of new
voice-, touch- and gesture-based interface technologies that took novel
approaches to mediating the player’s body. Successive iterations of the
iPhone, meanwhile, have become capable of capturing more and more
data about users; tracking locations and browser histories; recognizing
fingerprints and faces; registering orientation and inertia and capturing
audio, images and video. Concerns over the amount of personal data
such devices collect and the terms on which that data can be made public
have been raised by incidents like the 2014 iCloud hack (which saw nu-
merous celebrities’ intimate pictures being published online) and a 2016
court case in which the FBI ordered Apple to create a digital ‘back door’
allowing them access to locked iPhones. Such concerns also find a voice
in the games that this chapter discusses. The Wii game Silent Hill: Shat-
tered Memories and Robert Yang’s PC and Mac game Cobra Club are
both about smartphone-wielding subjects left exposed by digital techno
logies. Both games, moreover, pose questions about privacy, technology
and identity by making use of metalepsis, breaching the boundary sep-
arating the gameworld from the real world to implicate the player in
dramatic plot twists. As we will see, however, these games also advance
very different understandings of privacy – understandings that reflect
their very different ways of framing digital subjecthood.
That Shattered Memories and Cobra Club have conflicting notions
of privacy should not surprise us. Their differences of opinion reflect a
more widespread debate as to the meaning, and indeed the continuing
viability, of concepts of public and private in the online era. This debate
is complicated by the fact that questions of privacy are inevitably bound
up with assumptions about identity, subjectivity and sociability. As Tim
Jordan (2015) notes, discussions of networked privacy tend to take as a
given the idea of the individual as a ‘citizen of modernity with inner being
that is theirs to distribute’, presuming that what is at issue is that citizen’s
right to decide the terms on which ‘information about the inner self’ cir-
culates (123). This model of subjectivity is, however, open to question.
For psychoanalysts, subjects are impelled by subconscious drives that
remain more or less opaque to them; for deconstructionists, subjectiv-
ity is fragmentary, contradictory, contingent and culturally constructed;
for behaviourists, the individual’s ‘inner self’ is an irrelevance; from the
perspective of affect theory, meanwhile, it is necessary to account for
a pre-personal realm of contagious intensities that operate beneath the
level of conscious thought or rational analysis. Then there is the implicit
whiteness, masculinity, heterosexuality and neurotypicality of the West-
ern citizen of modernity to whom Jordan refers; if pundits mourn the
Private Subjects 53
demise of the Habermasian public sphere and the co-option of platforms
for political debate by private interests, many leftists and feminists would
argue that this public sphere was only ever open to white bourgeois men
in the first place (Papacharissi 2010, 34–39). As Wendy Hui Kyong Chun
(2016) reminds us, privacy law was first developed as a means of pro-
tecting (putatively) vulnerable white middle-class women from exposure,
corruption and shame – and, as such, is bound up with questionable and
outmoded assumptions about race, gender and technology (147–148).
Moreover, as Jordan (2015) further observes, to engage questions of on-
line privacy at the level of the individual is to forget that social networks
are not interested in individuals per se but in how single nodes become
connected to other nodes, forming the social graphs from which compa-
nies like Facebook profit. Privacy, as such, must be thought of at the level
of ‘networked publics’ rather than discrete individuals (121–129).
It is not just that digital media have made it harder to maintain one’s
privacy, in other words; rather our very definitions of public and pri-
vate are being transformed by technologies like smartphones and so-
cial networks. How, then, do we begin to talk about privacy today? For
Zygmunt Bauman, one answer is to focus on secrets. He holds that
secrecy draws and marks, as it were, the boundary of privacy –

privacy being the realm that is meant to be one’s own domain, the
territory of one’s undivided sovereignty, inside which one has the
comprehensive and indivisible power to decide ‘what and who I am’.
(Bauman and Lyon 2013, 28)
If privacy is in crisis, Bauman proposes, it is because we have ‘lost the

will to persist in the defence of such rights’, having reached the point
where ‘a betrayal or violation of privacy’ now frightens us less than ‘an
absence of avid listeners’ (ibid.). While there are aspects of this analysis
with which we might take issue, Bauman’s interest in the circulation of
secrets (shared with scholars like Jodi Dean (2002) and Clare Birchall
(2011)), undoubtedly offers a useful way to approach the two games un-
der consideration in this chapter – and, through them, broader issues of
networked identity and personal privacy.
Rooted in detective stories and gothic mysteries, and in notions of
the subject drawn from the discourses of therapy and psychoanalysis,
Shattered Memories understands secrecy as a matter of clues and symp-
toms, of seemingly innocuous objects, words, images and actions which
open onto hidden scenes, states and stories if only we can interpret them
correctly. As Ewan Kirkland (2015) observes, the Silent Hill games are
‘explicitly themed around issues of trauma, psychological breakdown,
repressed memories, perversion and familial dysfunction’, and feature
‘uncanny monsters, womb-like spaces, devouring mothers, and dream-
like cut-scenes … designed to unsettle, disgust and traumatise [their]
54 Private Subjects
players’ (164). It is understandable, as such, that Kirkland concludes that
the Silent Hill series can be ‘productively examined through reference
to principles of Freudian psychoanalysis’ (ibid.). Kirkland’s analysis of
the games is compelling, particularly in its account of mediation and
memory. He is surely right, moreover, to single out Shattered Memories
‘as a game which, even more than other [Silent Hill titles], foregrounds
the series’ … psychoanalytic preoccupations’ (ibid. 161). I would argue,
however, that Shattered Memories is interesting less as a demonstration
of the continuing relevance of Freudian ideas than for what it has to say
about the role of digital technologies in fostering other conceptions of
subjectivity, identity and behaviour. Like the games addressed in the last
chapter, these games witness the friction generated by the shift towards
epistemologies grounded in information and computation.
In many ways, Shattered Memories remains faithful to ‘a theoretical
model, or paradigm, for the construction of knowledge, which quietly
emerged toward the end of the nineteenth century’ (Ginzburg 1980, 7). Se-
ductively expressed in Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes stories and Freud’s
psychoanalytic case studies, this paradigm also informed m ethods across
the ‘human sciences and the natural sciences’, from medical diagnosis
to art history and literary criticism (ibid. 7, 11). As Alexander Galloway
(2012) has argued, however, this kind of hermeneutic analysis, founded
on the conviction that ‘tiny details provide the key to a deeper reality’
(Ginzburg 1980, 11), is falling from favour today, along with the depth-
based models of the self with which it is bound up. Like the other survival
horror titles analysed in Chapter 5, Shattered Memories sees psychoana-
lytic ideas coming into conflict with the epistemological alternatives that
underpin contemporary technoculture, alternatives rooted in cybernetics,
network analysis, graph theory, cognitive behaviourism, data science and
information theory (Galloway 2012, 243). While the game remains faith-
ful to the idea that by attending to surface details we can find our way
to buried truths, Shattered Memories also demonstrates the difficulty of
reconciling gothic and psychoanalytic conceptions of the subject with
those that hold increasing sway in digital culture – a struggle particularly
apparent in its attempt to implement a player profiling system which as-
certains the player’s personality type on the basis of their in-game actions.
Cobra Club, by contrast, shows little interest in psychological ques-
tions. As I will argue, Yang’s game offers an account of secrecy and
identity best understood within the epistemological frameworks that
Galloway believes are supplanting hermeneutics. Where Shattered
Memories is about plumbing the subject’s subconscious to reveal their
deepest-seated neuroses and obsessions, Cobra Club treats the subject
as what information theorists would call a ‘black box’: inputs go in,
outputs come out, but what happens in the meantime remains obscure.
Moreover, where Shattered Memories sees identity in terms of individual
experience, Cobra Club shows how subjects participate in communities
Private Subjects 55
and construct collective identities, consciously affiliating themselves
with others through shared languages, practices, values and aesthetics.
Where Shattered Memories is about delving beneath the surface, Cobra
Club leaves interiority to one side to focus instead on tracing the circuits
and networks that connect individual ‘black boxes’ to networks of peers.
For Shattered Memories, secrets represent the inevitable return of the
repressed; for Cobra Club, secrets are data that leak into new contexts
to produce unexpected effects.
The very different models of subjectivity, identity and secrecy at work
in these games notwithstanding, they do have one important thing in
common: both play on the videogame’s status as a medium with dis-
tinctly fuzzy boundaries to stage twists that draw our attention to the
similarly vague outlines of the twenty-first-century private sphere. As
both ludic activities and computational simulations of fictional worlds,
videogames are inherently slippery. On a ludic level, gameplay can be
thought of as occurring within the ‘magic circle’ that Johan Huizinga
argues separates play from the rest of human activity (2002 [1949], 11).
As videogame scholars have shown, however, it is difficult to determine
just how we should define this circle (which is sometimes understood as
‘a psychological bubble’, sometimes a ‘social contract’, sometimes a ‘spa-
tial or temporal cultural site’ (Stenros 2012, 14)), let alone where it might
be said to stop. As simulations, meanwhile, videogames stand at ‘the
threshold between two realities’: the ‘human sphere and the computer
sphere’ (Jørgensen 2013, 108). This threshold, too, is far from stable: for
Jørgensen the game interface is fundamentally ‘liminal’, characterized
by an ‘ambiguity’ that has to do with the way it ‘combines informa-
tion from different frames of representation; it is both the content with
which the player interacts and the medium; it addresses the player some-
times as a fictional character, sometimes as a player and sometimes as a
software operator’ (ibid. 108–109). She holds that ‘games are laminated
or layered situations in which several frames operate at the same time’
(ibid. 114, emphasis in original). Game studies has primarily addressed
this layering in terms of how designers handle the relationship between
the ludic and fictional elements of a game. As Jørgensen notes, differ-
ent games take different approaches as ‘to whether the HUD [heads up
display] should be understood as exclusively ludic or as having fictional
reality status’ (ibid.), for instance. She offers Crysis as an example of a
game with an interface that attempts to seamlessly meld the fictional
and the ludic: here ‘the HUD is established as part of the avatar’s helmet
through several cues early in the game’, signalling that ‘the player is sup-
posed to think of it as existing in the fictional universe’ (ibid. 114). She
also observes however that certain elements of the Crysis HUD make no
sense in a fictional context, so that friction between what Galloway calls
the ‘operator diegetic’ and the ‘operator nondiegetic’ spheres persists
(2006, 8). The same is true of Shattered Memories, in which our avatar
56 Private Subjects
is equipped with a smartphone with which we perform both ‘operator
diegetic acts’ (like taking photographs and making phonecalls) and ‘non-
diegetic operator acts’ (like saving our progress or altering the bright-
ness). Where in the first case we are acting as the protagonist, in the
second we are acting as a player. But while we might see such slippage
between roles and frames as a ‘problem’, Jørgensen (2013) insists that
ambiguities can be an asset, affording designers a certain ‘flexibility’ in
how they address players – and players a certain flexibility in how they
interpret games (108).
Shattered Memories and Cobra Club offer examples of designers
making a virtue of this slipperiness. Are we acting in/on the game world
or the real world? Are we acting ‘as’ the avatar or as ourselves? And will
our answers to these questions tally with those of someone watching us
play? Like Redshirt – which, as we saw last chapter, gives us access to its
fictional world via a scaled-down procedural caricature of Facebook –
these games capitalize on the ability of digital games to not just represent
but also model digital systems and technologies. This capacity is parti
cularly powerful in a world where games are increasingly played on the
same devices we use to work, socialize and relax (and here we should
acknowledge the role of the iPhone in making the idea of needing to own
separate, specialist gaming hardware seem quaint, as well as the Wii’s
attempts to present itself as a networked media hub with functions be-
yond gaming). Digital games, in short, are characterized by overlapping
frames and unstable stratifications. In a world where labour and leisure,
‘cyberspace’ and real space are increasingly interwoven, this makes them
a perfect medium for stories about the boundaries of the private realm
and the networked self.
Gaming Going Public

In analysing these games it is also important to acknowledge some of
the ways in which gaming culture has changed in the last decade or
so. By the early 2000s a handful of publishers, platform holders and
retailers were exercising considerable influence over the games industry.
Understandings of gaming’s public, meanwhile, had sedimented into the
stereotype of the ‘hardcore’ gamer: a young adult male willing to invest
serious time and money in mastering complex, technically demanding,
often violent games. While the triple A gaming sector remains largely
faithful to this idea of what games ought to be and who they ought to
be for, the twenty-first century has seen the rise of independent games,
experimental games, alt-games, artgames, casual games and DIY games,
forms which deviate in key ways from the triple A template, addressing
and witnessing the existence of different gaming publics. The Wii and the
iPhone play key roles in this story. For Jesper Juul (2010), Wii games like
Wii Sports, iPhone games like Angry Birds and free-to-play Facebook
Private Subjects 57
games like FarmVille constituted the three prongs of a ‘casual revolu-
tion’ which opened gaming up to new audiences. With their novel and
intuitive interfaces, their emphasis on sociability and their privileging of
the mechanically straightforward and the aesthetically upbeat, these ti-
tles attracted players who would never have picked up a PlayStation 3 or
an Xbox 360, systems sold to the hardcore as platforms for deep, dark,
technologically cutting-edge shooters and action adventures.
As Keogh (2015) shows, this casual revolution unfolded in step with a
surge in independent and DIY game development driven by many of the
same factors. Wireless broadband, networked gaming devices, the emer-
gence of smartphones and tablets and new development tools have made
it possible (and economically viable) for small teams to create games
that deviate from the triple A template – whether by being more accessi-
ble, more challenging, more aesthetically or mechanically experimental
or more interested in ‘trying to say something through the medium of
games’ than in ludic complexity or commercial appeal (159). If overlaps
and ambiguities can make it difficult to know just where particular titles
and creators sit within Keogh’s scheme of triple A, casual, indie and DIY
development, his analysis remains useful as a portrait of a cultural field
in flux, one that has spent the last decade rethinking not just how games
are made and who they are made by and for, but also what counts as a
videogame in the first place. Auriea Harvey and Michaël Samyn (2010)
of Tale of Tales, a studio who see themselves as artists rather than game
developers, and whose work sits somewhere between the definitions of
DIY and indie outlined by Keogh, assert that they make ‘notgames’,
appropriating aspects of videogaming’s expressive vocabulary while
looking beyond the superficial pleasures of ‘obeying rules and receiving
rewards’; Rainer Sigl (2012), however, vehemently contests the idea that
videogames not based on winning and losing aren’t ‘really’ videogames
at all, arguing that the term ‘notgame’ ‘robs the whole medium of its
avant-garde’. In a less constructive vein, the ‘gamergate’ movement’s
harassment of journalists, developers and scholars who have called for
gaming to become more diverse, artistically ambitious and politically
progressive is also a response to shifting understandings of what counts
as a game and who counts as a gamer. Perceiving these changes as threats
to gaming culture and ‘gamer’ identities, it is significant that gamergate’s
response involved anonymous or pseudonymous individuals coordinat-
ing campaigns of public harassment and attempts to obtain and weapon-
ize private data and purported secrets. Elaborating ludicrous conspiracy
theories about government-sponsored militant feminists infiltrating
academia (Chess and Shaw 2015, 211–213), gamergaters have also
sought to intimidate and silence perceived enemies of ‘gamer culture’ via
‘doxxing’, hacking targeted individuals and publishing sensitive personal
data online (Golding and van Deventer 2016). Foregrounding some of
the more troubling implications of digital technology’s rearticulation of
58 Private Subjects
the public/private borderline, such incidents also attest to the epistemic
purchase of conspiracy theories as a form which promises to locate or-
der and agency amidst the apparent contingency and confusion of net-
worked culture (Dean 2002; Andrejevic 2013).
Prescient Memories
Such contexts are important for understanding the games this chapter
analyses and their attitudes to privacy and identity. Cobra Club’s creator
Robert Yang is a queer designer and academic affiliated with New York
University’s Game Centre, who gave the game away for free as a response
to Edward Snowden’s revelations about the American National Security
Agency’s PRISM surveillance programme. His game shows how, in the
era of DIY development, games can be more personal even as they seek
to intervene in public and political life. The way that Cobra Club was
received online, meanwhile, says much about gaming culture in the era
of gamergate, showing how debates over what games should look like
connect to notions of identity, sexuality and gender. Shattered Memories,
meanwhile, is the product of a triple A publisher attempting to respond
to the impact of the Wii and the iPhone. An anomaly at the time of its
release, it now reads as prescient in its anticipation of trends in inde-
pendent game design, coming across as an ancestor of critically feted
‘walking simulators’ like Dear Esther, Gone Home and Everybody’s
Gone to the Rapture – games that gamergaters have criticized (and which
Tale of Tales would presumably commend) for ‘not being real games’.
Like those games, Shattered Memories explores themes of memory and
identity through spatial storytelling (Carbó-Mascarell 2016). Shattered
Memories’ writer and lead designer, Sam Barlow, went on to make the
acclaimed interactive mystery Her Story, while its psychological profiling
system finds an echo in Karen, a story-driven smartphone app created by
Blast Theory, a collective with a long history of work at the intersection
of games, new media and theatre and performance. Shattered Memories,
however, is not quite a notgame. A reimagining of Silent Hill, a pioneer-
ing ‘survival horror’ title regarded as something of a flawed classic, the
game attempts to strike a balance between remaining faithful to the Silent
Hill series’ conventions and capitalizing upon the affordances of the Wii
hardware to provide new kinds of gameplay experience. More downbeat
and more mechanically demanding than typical ‘casual’ games and yet
more approachable than many ‘hardcore’ games, Shattered Memories’
attempt to reinvent the Silent Hill formula now stands as an intriguing
artefact from a period of rapid transition for game design, while its con-
cern with profiling players has acquired new resonance in the context of
the games industry’s enthusiastic embrace of user surveillance.
For all that it changes, Shattered Memories leaves Silent Hill’s basic
premise untouched: players control American everyman Harry Mason,
Private Subjects 59
who regains consciousness after a car crash to find that his seven-year-
old daughter Cheryl has disappeared. As in the original game, players ex-
plore the eponymous town, solving puzzles and piecing together the plot
in the hope of being reunited with Cheryl. Shattered Memories departs
from its source text, however, by doing away with combat, removing a
barrier to enjoyment for less dexterous players and those averse to vio-
lence. Yet, Climax are unwilling to entirely do away with enemy encoun-
ters as a source of tension and challenge, and punctuate the plot with
scenes where players are forced to escape from hallucinatory, ice-bound
environments patrolled by aggressive humanoid creatures – scenes that
the game’s muted colour palette, confusing map system and poorly ex-
plained gestural cues conspire to make as frustrating as any of the boss
battles in the 1999 version of Silent Hill (for this player at least). Here,
as elsewhere, attempts at inclusivity and innovation are undermined by
questionable execution and a reluctance to entirely let go of established
notions of survival horror gameplay.
The game’s gestural controls, however, do represent a break with tradi-
tion. Where Silent Hill and its sequels saw players navigating the shadowy,
fog-bound town by torchlight from a variety of cinematic third-person
viewpoints, in Shattered Memories we play from an over-the-shoulder
perspective, directing the torch’s beam with the Wiimote. The Wiimote
also stands in for Harry’s phone: when NPCs contact Harry their voices
are relayed through the speaker built into the device, requiring the player
to hold it up to her ear – a conceit which reflects the then-prevalent idea
that mimetic interfaces could heighten ‘immersion’ by closing the kinaes-
thetic gap between player and player-character. Equipping Harry with a
smartphone also enables Climax to integrate features that would once have
been accessed via extradiegetic menu screens into the game’s world and
fiction. Players check the map (accessible in previous games via the pause
menu) by looking at Harry’s phone, which also provides access to the text
messages, photos and voicemails that take the place of the notebooks, po-
laroids and VHS cassettes players collected in previous Silent Hill games
(items which were themselves descendants of the letters, lockets and dia-
ries discovered by protagonists of eighteenth century gothic novels). Most
striking, though, is the way that the game presents the phone’s camera.
Developing the earlier Silent Hill games’ interest in the gothic qualities
of media and communications technologies (Kirkland 2009), Shattered
Memories invests Harry’s smartphone camera with literally supernatural
properties, turning it into a means of ‘reading’ objects and spaces to re-
cover the secrets they harbour. By framing certain scenes with the camera,
it essentially becomes possible to look back into the storyworld’s past –
a gameplay mechanic that, as I’ll argue in the next section, offers a means
of posing questions about memory, technology and privacy.
Shattered Memories’ other key innovation is its psychological profil-
ing system, which attempts to classify the player and tailor the game to
60 Private Subjects
play on their personal anxieties, obsessions and insecurities. Where the
phone camera serves as a symbol of how digital technologies can enable
and empower users by helping them to read the word around them in
new ways, the profiling system shows how those same technologies can
leave those same users vulnerable to the unwanted scrutiny of others.
Here, too, Climax were building on tradition. From its inception, Silent
Hill had differentiated itself from Capcom’s genre-defining Resident
Evil series by claiming to offer a more sophisticated and ‘psychological’
brand of survival horror. Prior games had heavily implied that players
were exploring realities warped by the protagonists’ twisted psyches,
encountering terrifying projections of their neuroses. With Shattered
Memories’ profiling system, Climax sought to tap into the player’s sub-
conscious as well as the protagonist’s, perhaps taking inspiration from
the Wii’s status as a system founded on the idea of reading gamers in
new ways. The game opens with a screen warning ‘this video game psy-
chologically profiles you as you play. It gets to know who you really
are then uses this information to change itself. It uses its knowledge
against you, creating your own personal nightmare. This game plays you
as much as you play it’. This screen is followed by a scene of a patient
entering their analyst’s office for a therapy session, implying that what
we play is the story Harry is recounting to his psychotherapist. Each
chapter of the game begins with this psychotherapist character perform-
ing psychological tests that establish the sequence’s key themes while
yielding responses from the player, which the profiling system uses to
tune the game. I will have more to say about these attempts to read the
player’s psyche presently. First, though, I want to say something more
about how Shattered Memories enlists us in reading its gameworld, a
world that turns out to be saturated with personal stories accessible via
Harry’s smartphone.
Personal Effects
With the exception of the aforementioned pursuit sequences, S hattered
Memories takes place in mundane, monsterless suburban reality. Tension
comes not, as in other entries in the series, from the knowledge that de-
ranged devil worshippers or otherworldly creatures might be just around
the corner, but from the eerie anonymity of everyday spaces. As we tra-
verse these environments we periodically encounter shadowy forms and
bursts of static. This audiovisual ‘noise’ directs us to spots where Harry’s
smartphone allows him to look into the past. By holding up the phone
we are able to capture images of and receive messages from hitherto
invisible ‘ghosts’. As these images and messages are threaded together
in Harry’s inbox they implicate otherwise banal sites and objects in a
range of personal stories and unhappy memories, from the relatively in-
consequential to the tragic and traumatizing. We learn that a drowning
Private Subjects 61
boy clung to this pump station grating, that a sexual assault took place
in this parked car and that a child first began to suspect her parents
might be divorcing in this corner of the shopping mall. In some cases,
these transmissions yield clues to the puzzles we must solve to progress;
in others, they are simply there to develop the game’s themes of family,
memory and secrecy. In both cases, they help to bring out the gothic
dimensions of digital mediation, portraying smartphone use in terms of
possession and haunting, invocation and exorcism. Where, however, in
games like Fatal Frame (which sees players fighting off attacking spirits
with a magical camera), the gameworld is scary because it is haunted, in
Shattered Memories the truly scary prospect is a world that is not satu-
rated with stories from the past. The game implies that it is better to see
even a harrowing or traumatic sight than to be confronted with a scene
that remains devoid of human significance, refusing to yield its secrets.
Like scarier cousins of the cute creatures in Niantic’s augmented reality
smartphone game Pokémon GO (discussed in Chapter 6), the ghosts
conjured by Harry’s camera populate spaces and invest them with per-
sonality, imbuing an all-too prosaic material world with cultural, even
spiritual, meaning. If Harry is searching for Cheryl, he also has another
mission – that of making objects and spaces surrender stories and bear
witness, of recovering meaningful messages and signals from what had
seemed like incomprehensible noise. By coaxing sites and objects into
giving up their ghosts, his phone invests them with a quality akin to the
‘affecting metonymic power’ that, for Terry Castle (1995), is character-
istic of objects in Ann Radcliffe’s gothic novels, the mysterious ‘capacity
to make loved ones “present” again in memory’ (126, 92).
This preoccupation with memory and identity is a signature of the
series: Silent Hill and Silent Hill 3 tackle questions of individual and
collective identity, obliquely addressing Japanese culture’s dramatic tran-
sition from a collectivist ethos of ie to one of ‘democratic individualism’
(Balmain 2008, 146) through stories of suppressed cults resurfacing to
resurrect a malign god; Silent Hill 2 addresses the gap between objective
and subjective views of reality by casting players as a wilfully deluded
protagonist whose story (as Chapter 5 argues) is in part a parable about
‘immersion’ and videogame addiction. In Shattered Memories, the focus
is on how objects and places become invested with personal meanings,
accreting associations and layers of narrative scaffolding, and on how
digital technologies are changing the terms on which these meanings can
be shared, interpreted or made public. Many puzzles involve discovering
melodies, colour patterns, names, dates or phrases that hold a personal
significance for the ghostly characters we commune with via Harry’s
phone, providing a ‘key’ to unlock repressed memories. The game also
interrogates the desire to incarnate and ‘own’ valorized archetypes (high
school sweetheart, star athlete, happy family), suggesting that this mi-
metic impulse has as its flipside the horror of ‘becoming a statistic’ (as the
62 Private Subjects
discourse of public safety information puts it), of falling prey to contin-
gencies indifferent to individuality and becoming another tragic story.
Keith Thomas (1971) has famously suggested that, in an era prior
to organised systems of law enforcement, ghosts figured the wish for a
monitory intelligence concerned with rooting out and correcting injus-
tice (713, 717). In Shattered Memories ghosts serve another purpose,
specific to the information age: that of helping us to convert the material
world into data while simultaneously suggesting the survival of some-
thing irreducible to code and beyond rational understanding. Shattered
Memories blurs the lines between the digital and the spiritual, seeking to
reconcile the allure of information with the desire to retain notions of the
inexplicable or sacred. To this extent, the game can be said to reflect the
way that ‘digital information has divorced tangibility from permanence’
(Chun 2011, 5) and to echo contemporary discourses which present shar-
ing and ‘transparency’ as an ethical and political good (Bauman and
Lyon 2013, 26; Birchall 2014). These interpretations are supported by
the game’s ending, which centres on a therapeutic breakthrough that is
also a narrative twist: we return to the analyst’s office only to discover
that Harry died in the car crash with which the story begins, and that,
eighteen years later, it is Cheryl, not Harry, who is undergoing analysis.
It transpires that Harry’s quest is nothing more than a figment of Cheryl’s
imagination, an attempt to piece together an idea of who her father was.
The ghostly messages Harry tunes into, meanwhile, are in fact transmis-
sions from Cheryl’s troubled past. Depending on the choices we make
and our in-game behaviour, Cheryl will arrive at a different understand-
ing of her father’s identity, and a different ending will be shown to the
player. Many of the endings expose unpleasant secrets, revealing Harry
to have been an alcoholic, a womanizer or a coward. As this suggests,
while the game is in some respects positive about the capacity of digital
technologies to connect us with each other and with the past, promoting
empathy and understanding, it also presents disclosure as a threat – not
least through its psychological profiling system, which plays on fears of
surveillant machines by threatening to expose the player’s private psy-
chological quirks to public view. It’s to this system that I turn now.
Looking Back
As D.A. Miller (1988) observes in his study of the Victorian mysteries
to which Shattered Memories is indebted, there is only the smallest dif-
ference between a ‘totally intelligible’ world and a ‘totally suspicious’
world (29–30). With its profiling system, Shattered Memories conjures
the disturbing prospect of such a world, a world where the traces players
leave, in turn leave them vulnerable to exposure. In this, it differs from
the mystery novel, the appeal of which, for Miller, lies in the reader’s
exemption from being looked back at. With a novel, ‘the reading subject
Private Subjects 63
remains safe from the surveillance, suspicion, reading, and rape of oth-
ers’ while getting to watch these fates befall the novel’s characters; even
‘our most intense identification with characters never blinds us to our
ontological privilege over them: they will never be reading about us’
(ibid. 162). Shattered Memories, however, does subject players to sur-
veillance, suspicion and reading. Through the framing narrative of an
interview between a psychologist and a patient, it undertakes an analysis
of the player that spurs us to reflect on how new media cast consumers
as sources of information (via data mining and metrics) and/or potential
criminals (through Digital Rights Management and antipiracy measures
which covertly monitor their behaviour), and on the methods games use
to ‘read’ users – from controllers and cameras to infrared sensors and
demographic profiling algorithms.
Earlier in the chapter, I cited Jørgensen (2013) as to the difficulty of
determining where a game’s interface ends and its gameworld begins.
Where we tend to understand health bars, navigation arrows and am-
munition counts as belonging to the interface layer of a game, Jørgensen
shows that almost anything in a videogame environment can be consid-
ered a part of the interface insofar as it helps to convey information to
the player and witness the state of the simulation (60–61). In the case of
Shattered Memories, things become even more complex, as the game-
world changes depending on the profiling system’s interpretation of the
player’s personality. Even as we are invited to ‘read’ the spaces of Silent
Hill and solve the mystery of Cheryl’s disappearance, Shattered Memo-
ries is reshaping those spaces on the basis of its reading of us, configur-
ing variables according to the personality profile it has built up. Limited
by the capabilities of the Wii, these profiling mechanisms are in fact
rather primitive; as the game’s technical director Gwarred Mountain
(2010) confesses, the warning screen that introduces players to the pro-
filing system is less a true reflection of its capabilities than an initial step
in the process of ‘getting inside [the player’s] head’:
We’re building this suspense and the players play along with it and
get involved with it, so even though they don’t understand all the
very limited things we can do with the computer behind the scenes,
they believe in it and that’s the experience they get.
The screen is more than a bluff, however; drawing on various systems for
classifying psychological ‘types’ (from the Jungian taxonomy proposed
by Katharine Cook Briggs and Isabel Briggs Myers to the influential
‘Five Factor Model’ (ibid.)) the game really does assess players and alter
the content it presents to them based on its inferences. The first action
players perform in the game is to fill out a slightly modified Myers-Briggs
questionnaire, marking statements such as ‘I make friends easily’ and
‘I have never cheated on a partner’ true or false. During interludes set in
64 Private Subjects
the psychotherapist’s office, they are then presented with further yes/no
questions and simple sorting exercises (divide the Rorschach blots into
categories, arrange the characters in a story on a scale from most to least
culpable etc.). The game also monitors the player’s behaviour within the
gameworld, logging ‘where they go, what they look at, how long they
spend in specific areas’ (ibid.). Paying attention to sexualized images of
women or lingering in locations associated with domesticity and child-
care, for example, will inform the way the game ‘sees’ our Harry. On the
basis of this information, the game assigns players to one of four typo-
logical categories, providing access to different spaces and scenes. The
locations that are accessible, the characters’ personalities and costumes,
the narratives told by the ‘ghosts’ we encounter, Harry’s relationships
with NPCs and, ultimately, the story’s conclusion are all affected by
what the player ‘reveals’ to the game.
This mode of customizing the gameplay experience is particularly in-
teresting in a Wii game. As we have seen, the system was sold on the
promise of making gaming more sociable and having players engage with
gameworlds in new ways. One of the ways Nintendo sought to achieve
these aims was by inviting users to create ‘Miis’, doll-like 3D caricatures
who would represent them in games and online social spaces. Where
designing a Mii involves making conscious choices as to how we repre-
sent ourselves to others, Shattered Memories takes a different approach.
What it presents is less a portrait of the gamer (though Harry’s appear-
ance does shift) than an account of what they are personally blind to
and what they fixate on. The game selectively deploys the contents of the
DVD to construct a world, characters and a plot that reflect the player’s
proclivities, tendencies, habits and attitudes, just as search results and
online advertisements reflect the portrait of the user built up by profiling
and data mining technologies. Between Miis and Shattered Memories
we see not just different approaches to customized content and configu-
ration, but also different notions of what constitutes identity. Is identity
a matter of those aspects of the self we have the power to recognize,
change or choose? Or is it a matter of those things beyond our control,
of subjective dispositions and subconscious investments that we may not
even be aware of?
As Mountain observes, in seeking to determine ‘how the AI perceives
the player’, Climax were faced with a problem: ‘Do we try and work
out how they wiggle the stick, how they move the joystick, how they
press the button? It’s very difficult to do’ (2010). And indeed, Shattered
Memories’ profiling system never quite managed (at least in my case) to
generate the uncanny frisson of self-recognition that Mountain intended
it to – just as the Wii’s mimetic interface, which can only recognize a
limited palette of gestures, failed to deliver on dreams of one-to-one cor-
respondence between the player’s movements and those of their avatar.
For some it might be flattering and reassuring that such technologies
Private Subjects 65
struggle to register and interpret the subtleties of human thought and be-
haviour. Such complacency would be ill-advised, however, both because
systems designed to read and profile users are quickly becoming more
sophisticated and because these systems’ limitations can exert a powerful
influence, encouraging users to behave in ways that render them more
easily legible. For some Shattered Memories players, the game proved
enduringly appealing as an opportunity to explore an (admittedly crude)
automated profiling system. Various fan-authored online guides attest
to the degree of fascination fans found in reverse engineering, second-
guessing and interpreting the game’s profiling techniques. Where most
videogame walkthroughs list battle strategies, item locations and puz-
zle solutions, these Shattered Memories guides take the form of ex-
planations of the software and directions for representing a particular
personality type to it. Want the ‘Sleaze and Sirens’ ending? Then you’ll
have to accrue sufficient sexual ‘personality inventory’ points (‘Follow
Lisa. If you want more sexual PI, stare at her ass while walking. When
you get to the apartment, you can choose to sit and watch TV or check
out Lisa while she’s changing’ (Kellexx 2010)), playing the voyeur while
the system spies on your performance.
Shattered Memories remains unusual in turning player surveillance
into a core gameplay mechanic. It is, however, now entirely common-
place for games to record, analyse and attempt to interpret player be-
haviour. As Nintendo were first promoting the Wii, Microsoft were
pushing their Xbox 360 console, a system that Alex Dean Cybulski has
argued spearheaded a drive to harvest more information about gamers,
utiliz[ing] a polyphony of surveillant systems as forms of governmen-

tality to shape the behaviour of users, transforming them from play-
ers into subjects who are mined for data and ultimately, shaped by the
gaze of the videogame system to suit Microsoft’s financial interests.
(2014, 7)
With the Xbox 360’s successor, the Xbox One, Microsoft had planned
to go even further, making the console inoperative unless it was con-
nected to the Internet and their Kinect 2.0 peripheral. Developed as a
response to the runaway success of the Wii, the first Kinect had been
sold as an add-on for the 360, and used microphones, infrared sensors
and cameras to offer controller-free mimetic interface gaming, respond-
ing to players’ movements and voice prompts. The enhanced Kinect
2.0 was held to be capable not just of recognizing faces and voices, but
also of registering pupil dilation and pulse rate. While the gameplay
applications of these biometric capabilities were not always clear, the
benefits to Microsoft – who would be able to sell data about viewers’
preconscious responses to products and promotions, and to implement
digital rights management measures like disabling media playback if
66 Private Subjects
too many people were in the room – were obvious. In a post-Snowden
environment, however, some users proved averse to the idea of having
a cutting-edge, always-online sensor array in their living rooms (Gera
2013), and Microsoft were forced to backpedal – if only to the extent
of making an Internet connection and the use of Kinect optional rather
than mandatory.
As Bart Simon and Jen Whitson (2014) argue, it should not surprise
us that digital gaming and surveillance have become bedfellows. To the
extent that game design is a matter of creating ‘ordering devices that
produce a finite range of meaningful actions’, they argue that the ludic
level playing field is always already a surveillant enclosure (310). If this
‘makes games especially amenable to digitization’ (ibid.), it also makes
digital games particularly suited to surveillance; as Casey O’Donnell
(2014) writes, ‘in a way videogames cannot help but surveil the user: it
is how a game reacts to its player’ (350). And, as he goes on to observe,
‘it makes sense that games would serve as a kind of siren’s call to parties
interested in bringing shape and form to algorithmic surveillance. Why
simply surveil when you can shape or influence those being surveilled to
behave “properly”?’ (ibid. 355). As Bauman notes, many users of new
media are aware that a trade-off is in effect, that their access to iPhones,
Xboxes and the like is contingent upon their willingness to surrender
personal data. Increasingly, the only alternative to participating in such
‘post-panoptic’ infrastructures is life on the wrong side of the
ban-opticon [which] guards the entrances to the parts of the world

inside which DIY surveillance suffices to maintain and reproduce
‘order’ … bar[ring] entry to those who possess none of the tools of
DIY surveillance (of the credit card or Blackberry kind).
(Bauman and Lyon 2013, 63)
Beyond coercion and cost–benefit analysis, though, Whitson insists that

there are other reasons why users submit to surveillance. Drawing on
the work of John McGrath (2004), she argues that we should not un-
derestimate the role of ‘seduction and desire’ in conscripting users into
complicity with surveillant technologies, noting that that there can be
considerable pleasure in playfully performing for their gaze (2013, 164).
Whitson’s observation is important. For while it is both easy and cor-
rect to portray the videogame industry’s embrace of surveillance as sin-
ister, cynical and dangerous, we also need to acknowledge the benefits
and pleasures that it can bring. From the users’ perspective, the Xbox
360’s data collection mechanisms undergirded social features like the
popular ‘gamerscore’ system discussed in Chapter 7. It also allowed de-
velopers to fine-tune gameplay, rebalancing games, patching out bugs
and glitches and rooting out cheaters and hackers. Moreover, in an in-
creasingly reflexive, image-oriented society which sets great store by
Private Subjects 67
playful performances of the self (Papacharissi 2015, 108), it is not sur-
prising that users should be interested in how technologies see them,
and in how those technologies might help them to see new aspects of
themselves. Shattered Memories plays on this desire while departing
dramatically from the flattering frameworks within which technologies
normally portray users. Rather than reflecting the user back to him/
herself as a switched-on tastemaker, a skilled gamer or a dedicated fit-
ness enthusiast, its profiling system renders them visible as a compulsive,
pathological subject, purporting to publish their psychological hang-ups
and quirks. It is perhaps a relief, then, that Shattered Memories is not
networked. While one of the game’s subplots concerns college students
using smartphone cameras to expose a teacher having an affair with a
student, the game itself does not, for example, post bulletins online as
to whether ‘our’ Harry turned out to be an alcoholic, a sex addict or
a dupe. It does, however, suggest how the fears of shameful exposure
played on by the Victorian mystery story (so often predicated on black-
mail, scandal and breaches of privacy) translate into our ‘always on’
society, in which the production of self-publicizing web content is more
or less obligatory. For all its failings, Shattered Memories does succeed
in capturing digital culture’s ambivalent attitude to questions of privacy,
vacillating between the desire for a world rendered totally transparent
by technological mediation and the fear of the same. Even as it drives
us to collect and interpret data, decoding and hypothesizing, recovering
meaning from the ostensibly meaningless, the game also suggests that
the world would be unbearable if devoid of secrets.
Networked Privates
Where Shattered Memories is angsty and inward-looking, Cobra Club is
more playful, more pragmatic and more explicitly political in its take on
privacy. It is concerned not with an intrepid analyst plumbing a damaged
individual’s psyche, but with a community of consenting adults sharing
pictures of their genitals – or, to give Jordan’s phrasing a risqué twist,
with ‘networked publics and [their] networked privates’ (2015, 121).
Where Shattered Memories questions technology’s ability to reveal who
we really are beneath the surface, Cobra Club is about avatars and ‘as-if’
attitudes, poses and performances that carry different meanings for dif-
ferent communities in different contexts. A topical, story-driven game
which eschews win/loss conditions and was released online for free, it is
also a product of the new gaming landscape of indie games, art games,
DIY games, serious games and ‘newsgames’, a landscape that was still
emerging at the time Shattered Memories was released.
Variously described by Yang as a ‘dick-pic simulator’ and a ‘photo
studio game’, Cobra Club was inspired by Jon Oliver’s Daily Show in-
terview with Edward Snowden, in which the comedian asked Snowden
68 Private Subjects
to break down the NSA’s surveillance infrastructure in terms of whether
‘they [can] see my dick’ (Yang 2015a). Like the games discussed in
Chapter 2, Cobra Club uses what I’ve called procedural caricature. De-
ploying procedural generation to mimic the experience of online inter-
action with an array of comical characters, the game uses humour to
draw players into a scenario designed to highlight the NSA’s disregard
for privacy. Casting the player as a member of the titular photo-sharing
site, Yang invites us to produce images of our avatar’s hairy, slightly
tubby male body via an Instagram-style interface. We are then prompted
to trade these snapshots with NPCs who are presented as fellow mem-
bers of the club. Through the circulation of these explicit selfies, Yang
addresses questions of online power and protocol, control and consent.
If these questions have been brought to the fore by the practices of the
American surveillance state, Cobra Club is also about the more mun-
dane ways in which differing norms and forms of ‘netiquette’ come into
conflict online. Its interest in transparency and complicity is established
right from the start by way of a home screen which requires players
to accept an End User License Agreement, encouraging them to click
‘I consent’ in order to access what are described as ‘special end game fea-
tures’. Hovering between diegetic and extradiegetic (am I, as the player,
agreeing to terms set by the game or am I, as the protagonist, agreeing
to a fictional social networking app’s terms of service?) this screen sets
the stage for the Cobra Club’s key plot twist. This twist divides the game
into two halves: in the first half, players are gradually inducted into the
online club, meeting other users, becoming more comfortable with the
interface and unlocking new tools and features. As I will argue, draw-
ing on scholarly discussions of selfies, webcam performances and online
‘coming out’ narratives, this first act offers a satirical but heartfelt illus-
tration of the importance of online platforms as spaces for constructing
collective identities and negotiating questions of consent. With the twist
the games enters a second act that highlights issues of online privacy
while further demonstrating how videogames lend themselves to story-
telling strategies based on metalepsis.
Like Shattered Memories, Cobra Club’s interface presents digitally
mediated experience in terms of frames within frames, with the screen
of the player’s laptop becoming the screen of the protagonist’s phone
(Figure 3.1). Bookended by the digital buttons, sliders, checkboxes and
filters, the playfield is dominated by a mirror in which we can see the
player-character, who has apparently locked himself in the bathroom
with his smartphone in pursuit of privacy. He is periodically interrupted
by his mother, who knocks at the door now and again to ask what he’s
doing in there and tell him his dinner’s getting cold. In this way the game
emphasizes the capacity of smartphones to reconfigure space, allowing
individuals to establish ‘a form of privacy in public’ and to uncouple
intimacy from physical proximity (boyd 2014, 59). It also suggests that
Private Subjects 69
this capacity can be particularly important for members of minorities
and sexual subcultures, and for other groups who face discrimination.
In Cobra Club, as for the queer rural teens studied by anthropologist
Mary L. Gray, ‘queerness is both extended outward and brought back
home’ by way of digital technologies (2009, 103). These technologies
catalyse the emergence of ‘boundary publics’ that muddle distinctions
between online and offline life, public and private space, the near and
the distant (ibid.). Thus while there is no way for players to reply to the
protagonist’s mother on the other side of the bathroom door, we are able
to engage in intimate exchanges with fellow Cobra Clubbers via chat
windows. On a basic level, these conversations come down to choos-
ing whether to respond positively or negatively to NPCs’ compliments,
offers, requests and images. What makes these exchanges entertaining
is the surreal e uphemisms and absurd allusions they bristle with: NPCs
called WillyQueen817 or BrokenWorm649 will ask if we’d like to see
their ‘pikachu’ or their ‘cushioned frankfurter pics’ before pleading for
‘material with suggestive cucumber’ or ‘work with romantic pecker’;
we can in turn opt to describe their pics as ‘mythical’, ‘salty’, ‘vintage’,
‘Kafkaesque’, ‘melodic’, ‘caring’, ‘unabridged’ or ‘farm-to-table’ – or
to break off the conversation by imploring them to ‘find god’. Limit-
ing our role in these dialogues to choosing from pre-written responses
is no doubt a pragmatic design decision first and foremost, but it also
reflects the nature of online communication, much of which is phatic
and template-based. As Alex Georgakopoulou notes in her discussion
of teenage Instagram users, the specific linguistic content of comments
matters less than the fact that they can be recognized as gestures of
‘ritual appreciation’, and messages are often intentionally formulaic
(2016, 304). In a similar vein, Michele Zappavigna shows how web us-
ers deploy discursive ‘templates’, catchphrases and memetic readymades
to foster ‘ambient affiliation’ (2012, 105, 96–99), riffing on established
blueprints. With its bizarre double entendres, Cobra Club also evokes
the poetics of spam, a style developed in response to algorithmic fil-
tering mechanisms and characterized by often ludicrously ‘heightened
and exaggerated’ euphemisms and bywords (Paasonen 2011, 123–125;
Brunton 2013). By constraining what we are able to say, in short, Yang
is able to suggest how the rules and norms of different web platforms
and communities shape what individuals can say and how they will be
read online.
While the game’s photography mechanics are more flexible than its
dialogue system, here too there are constraints on expression set by the
game’s interface. All players of Cobra Club are presented with the same
body, confined to the same bathroom and stuck in the same pose. The
game lies in tilting, zooming and panning the camera, and in using fil-
ters and sliders, to present this body in ways that will be pleasing to our
fellow club members. Again, these limits on interaction foreground the
70 Private Subjects
Figure 3.1 S creenshot from Cobra Club.
extent to which notionally personal, spontaneous and creative forms of

online identity work are shaped by more or less elastic rules, from inter-
face options, grammatical precepts, trends, cultural norms and generic
conventions to algorithmic instructions, intellectual property laws and
‘appropriate content’ policies. As Mendelson and Papacharissi observe,
different social networking sites offer different ‘performative palettes’,
providing users with tools for ‘emphasizing certain characteristics …
[and] diminishing other characteristics perceived as flawed, depending
on context’ (2011, 251–252); Cobra Club merely takes this process a
step further. And, where we might expect online cultures centred on
eroticism, fetishism and the expression of marginal sexual identities to
be transgressive, Cobra Club echoes what Ken Hillis (2009) concludes
in his work on gay webcam communities: that such cultures are in fact
particularly rife with rules and rituals – and, as such, useful case studies
in online protocol. It quickly becomes clear that if our avatar is violating
social taboos by sharing naked images of himself on Cobra Club, he is
also participating in a highly ordered system of exchange.
Indeed, where selfies are frequently associated with narcissism and
self-absorption, Cobra Club is more in line with scholars who argue that
selfie-taking, vlogging, streaming and ‘camming’ are in fact highly so-
cial, other-oriented activities, grounded in aesthetic norms and cultural
conventions collectively developed by communities of practice in collab-
oration with audiences who may or may not be content producers them-
selves (Senft 2008; Abidin 2016; Georgakopoulou 2016). For Hillis, gay
Private Subjects 71
webcam performances are about more than baring all; they are ‘highly
aestheticized productions’ by way of which the individual can become
a ‘telefetish’ or ‘living emblem[]’, incarnating fantasies held in common
on behalf of the community (2009, 210, 216). In the face of contingency,
erasure and marginalization, this quasi-ceremonial (re)production of
the self as a ‘sign-body’ can become a ‘fetishistic strategy for coping
ritualistically’ – fetishistic because although a kind of ‘cynical reason’ or
‘ironic power’ is always at work reminding us that these performances
are just that, we can enjoy the illusion nonetheless (ibid. 231). Hillis also
proposes that camming is about creating a space where one can ‘feel
safe’, a ‘framed and bounded’ space that feels intimate because ‘physi
cally, webcam viewers experience webcam settings in semiprivate or pri-
vate modes of reception and thereby infer to the settings themselves a
quality of safety’ (ibid. 224). Hillis’ claims resonate not just with Cobra
Club’s portrayal of a character playfully exploring his sexuality from the
safety of a locked bathroom, but also with accounts of how teenagers
and young people seek agency and a sense of identity through practices
of online self-representation. Mendelson and Papacharissi, for example,
argue that selfies provide an important means of practising and witness-
ing the work of performing gender, even as the ‘exaggerated … poses
and … playful attitude[s]’ selfie-takers strike enable them to pass this
work off as mere play (2011, 236).
Cobra Club, too, presents a playful façade while making some serious
points about identity. For all its humour, the game also suggests the im-
portance of the smartphone as a means of mediating between public and
private spaces and facilitating experiments in self-presentation. It shows
too that these capacities can be particularly valuable for individuals and
communities who face prejudice, violence and erasure – a point also made
by Gray, who discusses the difficulties facing queer teens who aspire ‘to
fit identifiable codes … to be readable to those in the know’ while avoid-
ing unwanted attention from bigots or predators (2009, 117). Queerness
has historically served as a battleground upon which conflicting notions
of the subject – religious, medical, legal, nationalistic, psychoanalytic,
behaviourist or postmodern – are pitched against one another (Dollimore
1991). Gray (2009) argues that the dominant discourse of queer identity
today, from ‘popular media like Dawson’s Creek’ to ‘national LGBT
social movement rhetoric produced by the Human Rights Campaign’,
posits ‘gay, lesbian, bisexual or transgender identities [as] essential, in-
ner states of being just under the surface waiting to be discovered’ (92).
These discourses remain rooted in individualistic, cod-psychoanalytic
narratives of ‘individuals scaling the ladders out of their foggy, sup-
pressed subconscious and opening their closet doors’ (ibid.), narratives
akin to the plot of Shattered Memories. Gray, however, argues for the
need to address ‘the social rather than the psychological underpinnings
of identity’, addressing ‘the collective labour of crafting, articulating and
72 Private Subjects
performing LGBT identities’ (ibid.) – a call to which Yang’s game ably
responds. Cobra Club flirts with traditional, cod-psychoanalytic ideas
of queer subject formation by way of the maternal voice which hails the
protagonist from outside the closet-like space of the locked bathroom,
wryly gesturing at the cliché that queer men are the products of domi-
neering mothers and absent fathers. Ultimately, though, the game is less
concerned with Lacan’s big Other than Orwell’s Big Brother, speaking
to shifting notions of privacy in network culture. Shattered Memories
understands identity in terms of bounded private spaces (the individual
psyche, the family home), which harbour secrets that have to be brought
to light; in Cobra Club, by contrast, identity is networked and collec-
tively constructed, a matter of what information the individual chooses
to share with whom, and of the tools they have at their disposal. Like
Redshirt, the game shows how social media establish more-or-less ex-
plicit, more-or-less flexible rules and offer more-or-less extensive tool-
kits for ‘doing’ self-presentation.
A Twist in the Cobra’s Tale

As I have said, Cobra Club’s first act is about initiating players into this
new social space, and sees them gradually unlocking more tools and toys
while receiving constant reminders that it is all a game – a playful one,
in which there are no winners and losers. (Here Cobra Club’s status as a
‘notgame’, an interactive fiction that uses videogame conventions while
eschewing binary fail states and goals, is important). Certain NPCs will
share tips and secrets in return for photos, telling us ‘you can unlock
stuff in this game’ and advising us to ‘click da snake in profile screen a
buncha times’ or click ‘the potty paper … 18 times’. While some of the
features we discover in this way might be found in a real photo editing
app, others break the fourth wall by letting players toy with the ava-
tar’s body and even the gameworld’s physical ‘laws’, adding piercings,
altering proportions and causing our virtual penis to waggle, stretch,
crumple, or sparkle. This traffic in secrets gestures at the significance
of economies of insider knowledge within both gaming culture (with its
long tradition of cheat codes and hidden ‘easter eggs’) and web culture
more generally (Consalvo 2007, 38; Andrejevic 2013). As with offline
communities, sharing or withholding secrets is an important means of
extending or enforcing online cultures’ boundaries. By the end of C obra
Club’s first act, players are supposed to feel thoroughly at home in a
space where (as Yang puts it) ‘all cocks are worthy of consideration’
(Yang 2016), free to revel in the pleasures of vicarious exhibitionism and
innuendo. We might refuse a particular Cobra Clubber’s overtures, to
be sure, but it’s nothing personal – they’re sure to find someone else who
is appreciative of what they have to share if they just keep chatting. In
its bawdy idealism, this vision echoes that of utopian socialist Charles
Private Subjects 73
Fourier, who, as Roland Barthes observes, saw processes of ‘petty cal-
culation’ and demographic profiling as a means of bringing harmony,
happiness and sensual fulfilment to everyone (Barthes 1976, 103). For
Fourier, keeping all of the people happy all of the time was merely a mat-
ter of developing suitably nuanced modes of classification and systems
of ordering – a dream which finds a degraded echo in the discourse of
big data evangelists, who hold that by sharing our data we are helping to
create a more open, efficient and equitable world, one where everyone’s
tastes can be catered to.
Cobra Club’s second act abruptly undercuts this fantasy, however,
revealing that the player’s images have been covertly harvested and up-
loaded to a National Security Agency website – or rather to a public
Tumblr blog masquerading as an NSA website. These images are, of
course, of the avatar’s body rather than the player’s. All the same, seeing
that they have been posted online comes as something of a shock. From
a game studies perspective we can read this shock as a consequence of
Yang’s breaching the ‘magic circle’. As I have already noted, various
videogame critics have shown that circle’s boundaries to be decidedly
fuzzy (Consalvo 2007, 6–8; Stenros 2012), suggesting that perhaps it
is best seen as a permeable membrane rather than a concrete wall. The
concept remains useful, however, as a means of discussing how players
understand what is at stake in play, and of thinking about the contracts
games establish with their players, whether those contracts are tacit and
metaphorical (like the expectation that the game will be fair, providing
players with the tools needed to progress) or literal and legal (like End
User License Agreements). By connecting a fictional social network to a
real one, Cobra Club dramatically ruptures the magic circle – or, rather,
shows that it was never as solid as we might have thought. Reminding the
player that they are subject to the gaze of agencies that consider them-
selves above the law, this twist taps into the anxieties web users suppress
every time they accept EULAs they have not really read – a potent ges-
ture given that many smartphone games are essentially Trojan horses for
software that collects ‘big social data’ (Pybus et al. 2015).
This twist is all the more effective for the fact that, while it may violate
our expectations, it is in accordance with the literal contract we agree
to upon beginning to play – a contract that we might well have assumed
was a part of the game. Yang offers a classic example of what narrato
logists call metalepsis, a technique which involves shifting between ap-
parently distinct diegetic and extradiegetic levels or layers, dissolving the
boundaries that are supposed to separate fictional worlds from those of
the storyteller and their audience. Marie-Laure Ryan (2006) holds that
videogames ‘offer a particularly favourable environment for metalepsis’
due to their hybrid status: ‘as programs that produce fictional worlds,
they can play with the levels of world and code; as worlds that invite
the player to play the role of a character, they can exploit the contrast
74 Private Subjects
between the player’s real and fictional identities; and as fictional worlds,
they can resort to many of the metaleptic tricks of standard literary fic-
tion’ (224). In Cobra Club’s case the impact of the metaleptic twist is
heightened by the fact that players are likely to be playing on the same
machine they use to work and socialize. Speaking to the status of new
media devices, from games consoles and phones to tablets and laptops,
as convergent technologies, the game asks us what it means to play, chat
and relax with the same machines we use for banking, working and
shopping. By wrenching our attention from the window in which the
gameworld is displayed to a browser tab in which the Tumblr site host-
ing our photos appears, it essentially stages an experience of what web
theorist danah boyd (2014) calls ‘context collapse’, when media created
with a particular audience and purpose in mind go astray, acquiring
unexpected audiences, meanings or functions (31). For boyd, there are
four properties of ‘mediated publics’ that conspire to create opportuni-
ties for context collapse: the ‘persistence’ of material posted online, the
‘searchability’ of online content, the ‘replicability’ of digital files and the
way that amenities like linking and forwarding generate ‘scalability’,
resulting in the ‘possibility of tremendous visibility’ (2011, 46). On an
Internet also characterized by ‘invisible audiences’ and porous public/
private boundaries, these properties mean that media can follow strange
trajectories (ibid. 50). Whether it is home videos becoming memes, pri-
vate photos becoming revenge porn, the appropriation of profile pics by
the creators of bot armies or Facebook records of hedonistic nights out
ending up on the screens of our bosses, media meant to be personal or
private, intended only for a select public governed by particular rules
and norms, have a nasty habit of reaching new audiences online.
Cobra Club uses procedural caricature to show how affordances,
rules and norms shape self-presentation in online social spaces, and
how understandings of what is appropriate or permissible in particular
spaces develop. It also shows how conflicts and controversies can arise
as data travel from one context to another. Ironically, Cobra Club itself
became the centre of an online controversy when the video streaming
platform Twitch added it to a blacklist alongside various other games
containing nudity or sexual content. Twitch has become a key plat-
form for gamer culture: emerging from the gaming section of ‘lifecast-
ing’ platform Justin.tv, it quickly attained stratospheric popularity as
a means of broadcasting play. Bought by Amazon for $970 million in
2014, the site now attracts a million streamers and 100 million viewers
monthly, standing alongside the likes of Netflix, Apple and Google as
one of the top four users of Internet bandwidth (Gillette and Soper 2015).
Hamilton, Garretson and Kerne (2014) account for Twitch’s popularity
with the proposition that its streams constitute ‘virtual third places,
in which informal communities emerge, socialize and participate’ – a
description that could equally apply to Yang’s fictional club (1). Twitch
Private Subjects 75
decided, however, that they did not want any communities forming
around Cobra Club, placing it alongside Porno Studio Tycoon, BMX
XXX and numerous Japanese eroge (‘erotic games’) on its list of pro-
hibited titles. Perhaps inevitably, this ban increased the game’s profile,
introducing it to new audiences who, while they variously found Cobra
Club funny, baffling or offensive, were almost unanimous in their refusal
to accept it as either a ‘real’ videogame or a valid political and artistic
statement. Particularly telling was the way that the game was portrayed
by YouTubers. Gaming videos often involve vloggers performing hyper-
bolically emotive reactions (of rage, silliness, cynicism) with which view-
ers are invited to identify (Hamilton et al. 2014, 5, 7); in Cobra Club’s
case, videos (and indeed their preview images) tend to show young men
theatrically expressing shock, disgust and disquiet. Their eyes squeezed
shut, their hands clamped to mouths, they squeal, giggle and groan their
way through the game, usually quitting before the twist occurs (S Pete
2015; YOGSCAST Lewis & Simon 2016).
These vloggers’ knowing shows of being shocked and scandalized by
Cobra Club’s playful homoeroticism bring to mind Eve Sedgwick and
Michael Moon’s (1990) account of the dynamics of celebrity sex scan-
dals and tabloid ‘outings’ – performances which depend upon
a reserve force of information always maintained in readiness to

be presumed upon – through jokey allusion, through the semiotic
paraphernalia of ‘sophistication’ – and yet poised also in equal read-
iness to be disappeared at any moment … leaving a suppositionally
virginal surface, unsullied by any admitted knowledge …. (20)
But if the knowing homophobia on display in these videos is depressing

enough, perhaps worse is the way that, by presenting Cobra Club as
proof of gay shamelessness (be it the shamelessness of NPCs presuming
we want to see their dicks or of Yang’s supposing that anyone would
want to play his game), the videos obscure the game’s real target: the
NSA’s shameless violation of public privacy. As with online ‘slut sham-
ing’ campaigns, which Wendy Chun (2016) sees as a means of displacing
fears fostered by ‘leaky’ communications technologies onto the bodies
of women whose putatively shameful acts become figures for ‘the ways
in which we’ve been commodified and sold, precisely at moments when
we think we are in private’ (145, 158), these videos eschew meaningful
discussion of online privacy in favour of masculinist scapegoating.
In a blogpost protesting Twitch’s ban, Yang (2015b) offers a com-
parative reading of the major video streaming sites’ policies on nudity
and sexual content. He objects that these policies are too broad and
inflexible, resulting in games like Cobra Club, with its ‘focus … on ideas
of consent, boundaries, bodies and respect’, being filed alongside titles
which privilege titillation or portray sexual violence, while the many
76 Private Subjects
triple A games in which scantily-clad female characters are paraded for
the player’s delectation receive a free pass. Mounting a plea for ‘case-by-
case … consideration’ Yang is, in effect, foregrounding the fact that rules
always come from somewhere and always have to be enforced by some-
body, even if (as in the case of automated takedowns issued by Sound-
cloud and YouTube) that somebody is a software agent (ibid.). One of the
real obscenities of online content filtering was not, however, addressed
in his post, remaining obscene in the etymological sense of off-stage:
the fact that, in practice, the fallibility of algorithmic filters means the
burden of keeping social networks and streaming sites ‘clean’ falls on
‘a global subcontracted workforce … earning around four dollars per
hour’ to uphold guidelines that are at once maddeningly specific and
riddled with ambiguities, questionable assumptions and internal contra-
dictions (Chen 2012; Steyerl 2014). While neither Yang’s game nor his
statement addresses this dimension of dick pic politics, Cobra Club does
begin to suggest how (not)games might be suited to portraying social
networks as spaces where competing norms, protocols, rules and codes
can mesh, clash and crossbreed without a clear winner emerging – and,
as such, to tackling the complexities of privacy, sharing and censorship
in an era of automated takedown notices and parental controls, iCloud
hacks and digital ‘back doors’.
Classrooms, Closets and Black Boxes

Between them, the portraits of smartphone-mediated life offered by
Shattered Memories and Cobra Club bring to the fore some of the
problems that dog discussions of digital privacy and surveillance.
Against the ideal of the rational individual who should be free to share
as they choose, the gothic Shattered Memories insists that individuals
do not necessarily know themselves or what they are sharing, arguing
that the tiniest details can function as symptoms or clues, pointing the
way to dark truths that we might prefer to keep private and compul-
sions we are powerless to resist. Cobra Club, meanwhile, shows how
selves are constructed in relation to the rules and norms of different
communities, while foregrounding the ‘leakiness’ of network infra-
structures and the ambiguities of (n)etiquette. Both games suggest that
if users of new media act in ways that threaten their own privacy, they
do so having been encouraged, and even seduced, by arguments in
favour of sharing. Notions of seduction are, as we have seen, key to
Cobra Club, which stands alongside a number of recent independent
games that explore the dynamics of digital sociability and surveil-
lance through narratives of exhibitionism, voyeurism, romance and
fl irtation – games like Kara Stone’s Sext Adventure, Nina Freeman’s
Cibele and Christine Love’s visual novel Don’t Take It Personally,
Babe, It Just Ain’t Your Story.
Private Subjects 77
I want, in closing, to turn briefly to Don’t Take It Personally, which
offers an especially thoughtful account of the trade-offs inherent in us-
ing new media. Love shows how networked digital devices can facili-
tate friendship, fandom, romance and projective identification, but also
acknowledges that they can promote voyeurism, prurience and gossip,
fuelling misunderstandings, privacy violations and abuses of trust. She
does so through the story of John Rook, a high school English teacher in
near-future Ontario who is given access to both his student’s social me-
dia profiles and their private inboxes. As a visual novel, much of Don’t
Take It Personally consists of reading, with the occasional decision to
make. Early in the game, for example, players must decide whether Rook
should abuse his position to get closer to a student he’s attracted to.
Ultimately, however, our ability to effect the story is, like Rook’s ability
to control his students, limited; as the game’s title hints, Love is keen to
interrogate the promises of agency with which single-player games tan-
talize prospective players – and, in doing so, to call into question both
notions of privacy and the assumption that surveillance helps authority
figures to make better decisions.
Most of the game takes place in the classroom, as Rook tries to teach
his students the principles of textual analysis. In his downtime, mean-
while, Rook checks an internet forum where fans discuss a fictional
anime series. In both environments the emphasis is on how we construct
interpretations and concoct hypotheses on the basis of the available data,
and on how context, confirmation bias, desire, paranoia and apophenia
inevitably skew this process. In the end, Rook turns out to be both a bad
teacher and a bad reader, but he also turns out to have less power than he
might have thought. At the climax of the game we discover not only that
Rook’s students knew their private exchanges were being monitored, but
that they have been staging a performance intended to deceive him. We
also learn that they cannot understand the idea that reading someone
else’s personal messages could be experienced as a violation. In the fu-
ture Love imagines, privacy literally means nothing to the young.
Like Shattered Memories and Cobra Club, then, Don’t Take It Per-
sonally hinges on a twist, a decisive moment of revelation. The real
twist, though, is that no one but Rook is shocked by this revelation – not
even the player, who is given so many hints that they are likely to have
put two and two together long before their avatar does. What Rook had
considered private secrets were already common knowledge; informa-
tion that he believed to be compromising – information, in particular,
about his students’ sexual activities and orientations – is met with a
shrug. With this (anti)climax Love imagines a world akin to that which
Chun (2016) calls for in her discussion of ‘slut-shaming’. As she ob-
serves, a common response to such forms of online ‘outing’ is to try
and shame the shamers – a strategy that, for her, merely perpetuates a
pernicious cycle of revelation and retribution. To get to the root of the
78 Private Subjects
problem, Chun proposes, we need to ask ourselves ‘why these indiscre-
tions matter in the first place’ (ibid. 145). As she argues, ‘the epistemo
logy of outing relies on the illusion of Privacy, which it must transgress’
(ibid. 151), just as the forms of ‘knowingness’ Sedgwick and Moon
decry draw power from specious ideas of ‘innocence’. Given this, we
should be asking not for greater ‘safety and protection’ but for ‘space[s]
in which one can be vulnerable and not be attacked’ (ibid. 158). In such
a space, sharing sensitive biographical details or intimate images would
no longer leave us open to shame, scandal or abuse. To imagine what
this state of affairs would look like, we need only turn back to Barthes’
reading of Charles Fourier’s utopian philosophy. For Barthes, Fourier’s
fantasy society is utopian not merely because individuals are free to pur-
sue pleasure in whatever fashion they choose, but because ‘there is no
metonymy attached to [one’s pleasures]: pleasure is what it is, nothing
more’ (1976, 81). As Nicolas de Villiers (2012) observes, Barthes himself
has sometimes been castigated for his failure to affirm a gay identity,
a failure that speaks to our tendency to see transparency and visibility as
ethically charged and politically necessary. De Villiers, however, ques-
tions this tendency, offering another reading of Barthes’ resistance to
categorisation (63–66). He cites Barthes’ opposition to the idea of hav-
ing to ‘proclaim yourself something’ in order to be ‘socially saved’, and
to a ‘society [that] will not tolerate that I should be … nothing, or, rather,
more precisely that the something I am should be openly expressed as
provisional, revocable, insignificant, inessential, in a word irrelevant’
(Barthes 1989, 291–292, emphasis in original). For Barthes as for Don’t
Take it Personally, utopia is a place where secrets lose their revelatory
force, their power to define us.
Conclusion
Like that of Chun, Galloway and the artist Zach Blas (2013), de Villiers’
work demonstrates that queer theory and new media theory have much
to teach one another, especially when it comes to rethinking privacy.
In the face of demands to be vocal and visible, and of techniques and
technologies geared towards delving beneath the surface in search of
spectacular secrets, these figures suggest we might respond to technolo-
gy’s reconfiguration of identity not by demanding privacy or retreating
back to the closet, but by developing ‘tactics of opacity’ and modes of
‘black boxing’ that acknowledge the nature and exploit the affordances
of digital devices and networks. For Galloway and Thacker (2009),
the challenge when it comes to digital identity is not one ‘of resisting
visualization (e.g., refusing to be a consumer profile, a data point)’ nor
‘of constantly escaping representation (e.g. using avatars, aliases, screen
identities)’ but of cultivating ‘a certain indiscernability’ by mobilizing
the power of ‘the bland, the negligible, the featureless’ (263, 261). As
Private Subjects 79
for Chun (who stresses the need to attend to the formulaic and the ge-
neric, showing how ‘templates and repetition’ can help subjects ‘to in-
habit hostile networks’ (2016, 16)) and de Villiers (for whom Barthes’
desire for ‘exemption from meaning’ prefigures tactics of queer opacity
(2012, 67)), Galloway and Thacker’s approach involves finding ways of
being seen as illegible, opaque or irrelevant. In order to do this, of course,
we must first understand how both interfaces and cultural frameworks
shape the terms on which we are intelligible, and it is here that games
can perhaps play a role. Players of Wii Sports soon developed a working
understanding of how the Wii ‘saw’ them, learning that they did not
need to mimic a golf swing or a tennis serve to achieve the desired effect;
players of Shattered Memories, meanwhile, worked out how to present
particular personality types to the game, reverse-engineering its modes
of reading them. These examples suggest how videogames, by giving us
space to play with models of digital interfaces and systems, can help us
to feel out the principles that underpin them. We have already seen how
games like Shattered Memories, Cobra Club, Don’t Take It Personally
and Redshirt go about this task. Integrating scaled-down procedural
caricatures of technologies like smartphones and social networks into
plots which dramatize the vicissitudes of digital identity, they show how
games can help us get to grips with the digital logics that shape our lives
and identities.
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4 Beastly Subjects
Bodies and Interfaces
You are an octopus, disguised as an adult human male. It is imperative

that your wife and children don’t see through your charade. It is also
imperative that you complete a ‘mysterious work’ underway in your
basement as soon as possible. Tonight, however, you are supposed to
be enjoying an anniversary dinner with your wife. In order to skip the
dinner without arousing suspicion, you decide to create a dummy to
stand in for you at the table, allowing you to sneak downstairs and con-
tinue working. To acquire the parts needed to assemble this decoy, you
must undertake a series of everyday domestic activities – helping out in
the kitchen, playing with your son, putting your daughter to bed. Your
unwieldy tentacles render even these banal tasks tricky and risky, how-
ever, leaving you vulnerable to slips that will expose you as an impostor.
There is one further complicating factor: a sushi chef, who knows your
secret, is determined to catch and eat you.
This is the premise of Octodad, a game created by students at
Chicago’s De Paul University in 2010. Initially distributed for free, its
winningly absurd premise and unusual mechanics attracted enough at-
tention that members of the development team were able to form their
own studio, Young Horses Inc., to develop the sequel Octodad: Dadliest
Catch, which was released on PC, PlayStation 4 and PlayStation Vita
in 2014. Asked where the original idea for Octodad came from, Young
Horses audio designer Seth Parker replied ‘Somebody said something
that reminded me of Descartes so I was like, what if you were kind
of a passenger in your own body? And then someone was like, “what
if you were driving your own body?” “What if you’re a guy inside a
robot and you were driving them?” “What if you’re an octopus in your
head?” “Well, what if you’re just an octopus?” And that was how it
happened’ (Geisler 2013). As this suggests, by having players manipulate
an unruly animal body so that it can pass for human, Octodad and
Dadliest Catch are playfully engaging the question of what it means to
be human – and, in particular, what it means to be a man – today. In
this chapter I want to consider the Octodad games alongside the action
survival game Tokyo Jungle and Tom McHenry’s sci-fi text adventure
Horse Master: The Game of Horse Mastery. Putting players in charge
Beastly Subjects 85
of avatars and NPCs who are either animals or animal/human hybrids,
these games foreground the videogame’s status as a medium that speaks
to and about bodies, often engaging players on a visceral as much as an
intellectual level. They also give a sense of how digital technologies are
changing the way we think about embodied subjecthood by promising
users greater control over distasteful, shameful, inconvenient or obstruc-
tive aspects of our ‘beastly’ bodies.
Scholars like Lahti (2003) and Kirkpatrick (2011) have argued that
one of the videogame’s key characteristics is its capacity to involve
players at a carnal, kinaesthetic level. If games engage us with images,
sounds, stories, rules and challenges, they also do so through what Steve
Swink (2008) calls ‘game feel’ or ‘virtual sensation’, the experience of
manipulating virtual objects with particular properties and capacities
in real-time. As Kirkpatrick argues, critics tend to overstate the im-
portance of games’ audiovisual representations while largely ignoring
‘what videogame players do with their hands’ (2011, 88). Taking this
criticism on board, this chapter argues that in order to understand what
games have to say about identity and subjectivity, we have to address
how they involve players in hands-on relationships with virtual bod-
ies manipulated and managed via keyboards, buttons, triggers, sticks,
wands and touchpads. But where Kirkpatrick remains equivocal at best
regarding the suitability of digital games as vehicles for stories, messages
and meanings (ibid. 222–224), I will argue that by encouraging us to
cultivate intimate kinaesthetic relationships with virtual bodies, games
can and do convey ideas, advancing understandings of subjectivity and
identity that shed light on the assumptions undergirding digital culture.
First, though, I want to introduce one of the key theoretical concepts
that will ground this chapter – Dominic Pettman’s (2011) notion of the
‘cybernetic triangle’ (5) – and to offer a brief overview of how video
games portray animals.
Altered Beasts
Needless to say, the history of humans using animals as avatars and
metaphors long predates gaming. Animal studies scholars like Lippit
(2000), Shukin (2009) and Pettman (2011) stress the increasingly im-
portant role of technology as a third term in this symbolic economy. For
Pettman, indeed, animals, humans and machines are now inexorably
bound together in what he calls ‘the “cybernetic triangle”’, a ‘flexible …
discursive geometry’ whose ‘three poles or points’ have been ‘figured,
and reconfigured, conceptually over time’ to suit shifting cultural needs
(2011, 5). Thus, if Enlightenment philosophers drew on Aristotle to ad-
vance a new understanding of man as a rational animal, in an age of
artificial intelligence we may be keener to affirm our ‘animal’ qualities
of intuition and affectivity, aligning ourselves with creaturely life rather
86 Beastly Subjects
than coldly rational software. At the same time, we continue to follow
in the footsteps of Da Vinci and Descartes by framing animal bodies
as machinic, as Boston Dynamics’ quadrupedal ‘Big Dog’ robots show.
With the advent of cybernetics and digital biotechnology, we are seeing
a growing tendency to collapse the cybernetic triangle’s three corners
onto the same plane: Pettman cites cyberneticist Norbert Wiener’s con-
tention that ‘humans, animals and machines can all be understood in
the same manner and according to the same principles: the regulation
of energy and information’, while philosopher Rosi Braidotti proposes
that our belief in human exceptionalism is becoming increasingly unten-
able in the face of ‘neoliberal market forces’ focused on harnessing the
‘informational power of living matter itself’ (Pettman 2011, 5; Braidotti
2013, 61). Such developments have put further stress on a model of hu-
man subjectivity that was already ‘internally contradictory’ and reliant
on ‘what [it] excludes as “other”’, a model defined in opposition not
just to animals and machines, but also to homo sapiens who fail to con-
form to humanism’s notion of a subject ‘implicitly assumed to be mas-
culine, white, urbanized, speaking a standard language, heterosexually
inscribed in a reproductive unit and a full citizen of a recognized polity’
(Braidotti 2013, 67, 65).
While such concerns might seem remote from the world of video
gaming, Parker’s account of Octodad’s Cartesian origins shows that it
would be a mistake to assume they are of no interest to game designers.
While they do so to very different ends, Tokyo Jungle, Octodad and Horse
Master all instantiate versions of Pettman’s ‘cybernetic triangle’, linking
players to on-screen animal bodies via digital interfaces used to com-
mand or act upon those bodies. If all videogames establish a ‘cyborgian’
connection between player and technology (Lahti 2003, 158), in these
games that connection becomes a means of exploring the relationship
between the human, the creaturely and the computational in a world of
intelligent machines, quantified self apps, cloning and 3D printed pros-
thetics. Admittedly, all three games stop short of anything like the radi-
cal ‘post-anthropocentric posthumanism’ Braidotti advocates (2013, 92).
Ultimately, these are games by, for and about humans, in which digital
creatures ‘play the role of a distorted reflection for humanity’s never-
ending mirror stage’ (Pettman 2011, 47). This does not mean, however,
that analysing Tokyo Jungle alongside Octodad and Horse Master can-
not help us to unpack the many ways in which the cybernetic triangle is
mobilized as a discursive resource in contemporary technoculture. In the
next section, I lay the groundwork for my account of how these particular
games address human/animal/technological relationships by reviewing
some of the ways in which animals are commonly represented in videog-
ames, before exploring the role of more-or-less explicit creaturely meta-
phors in other kinds of digital interface design. From there I turn to Tokyo
Jungle. An action game, it exemplifies the ability of real-time interfaces
Beastly Subjects 87
to engage players at the ‘animal’ level of ingrained reflexes and visceral
responses, entangling their bodies with those of their digital surrogates
and eliciting what are often described as ‘flow states’, a term derived
from the work of psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi. I then show
how the Octodad games’ intentionally awkward control schemes resist
the impetus towards flow. Subverting expectations of how player/avatar
interfaces ought to work, Octodad and its sequel mount an investigation
of embodied subjectivity and masculine identity that veers between the
zanily comic and the downright dysphoric. This is followed by a consid-
eration of the more abstracted relationship between human player and
animal character in Horse Master, a relationship which reflects emerging
conceptions of bodies as biocapital (Vora 2015). The chapter’s conclusion
reviews the modes of managing and manipulating creaturely bodies that
these games present, arguing for gaming’s ability to give players a feel
for bodies quite unlike their own and imagining how it might be used to
help us rethink identity categories such as ethnicity, ability, age, gender
and sexuality.
Animals and Interfaces

Whether as avatars, pets or sidekicks, digital animals feature in a wide
array of videogames, from Ecco the Dolphin and Barbie Horse Adven-
tures: Mystery Ride to Metal Gear Solid V, Nintendogs and Pokémon
GO. As Anne Allison (2006) notes, games are capable of creating re-
markably involved ‘techno-intimate’ relationships between users and
digital creatures, encouraging players to see their charges as ‘property,
possession and tool, but also … free agent, loyal pet, personal friend’
(228). If animal videogame characters can often feel more alive and ex-
pressive than human ones, this testifies to the power of thinking gamic
character less in terms of words and images than kinetic signatures
and corporeal potentials: we ‘get to know’ our Nintendogs, the Panzer
Dragoon series’ dragons and The Last Guardian’s griffin-like Trico
through their animations and the rhythm of their movements, learn-
ing the interface cues used to command or collaborate with them over
hours of playful interaction. Asking players to depend on their animal
companions for puzzle solving and traversal, to invest time in nurturing
them and keeping them out of harm’s way, such games suggest how gam-
ing’s emphasis on risks and rewards can become a means of fostering
attachments based on mutual reliance and responsibility, guilt and pride.
Games in which players control animal avatars, meanwhile, suggest the
extent to which gaming’s appeal lies in loaning players bodies that allow
them to experience space and time in new ways, gliding, cantering, leap-
ing and diving through gamespace.
In recent years, many indie studios have used animal avatars to elicit
belly laughs: Octodad resembles Minotaur China Shop, CLOP and Goat
88 Beastly Subjects
Simulator in that it tasks players with controlling an absurdly unwieldy
bestial body and implements a physics-based animation system geared
towards spectacular pratfalls and chaotic collisions. These games speak
to online culture’s enduring fascination with animals doing cute, funny
or weird things. They are also part of a broader trend for games based
on procedural slapstick, a trend bound up with the growth of online
distribution and the emergence of free-to-play browser games, YouTube
‘Let’s Play’ videos and gaming livestreams. Indeed, some gamers have
accused the developers of games like Goat Simulator of calculatedly
capitalizing on the popularity of let’s plays by creating ‘YouTube bait’ –
games that are watchable precisely because they are ‘half-finished …
with some wacky physics-based mechanic and tonnes of bugs’, provid-
ing vloggers with grist for the theatrical displays of bemusement, glee
or rage that are, as we saw last chapter, their stock in trade (Yin-Poole
2015). As I will explain in my discussion of the Octodad games, how-
ever, attempts to distinguish ‘YouTube bait’ from ‘real’ games express
more than a suspicion that cynical developers might be out to make
a quick buck. As with the complaints about ‘notgames’ and ‘walking
simulators’ discussed in Chapter 3, attacking ‘YouTube bait’ is a means
of articulating normative notions of what games ought to be. These no-
tions, as we shall see, are often bound up with decidedly regressive ideas
about gamer identity.
While necessarily brief, this overview should have given a sense of
how games represent animals. It should also have clarified the idea of
the cybernetic triangle, a metaphoric nexus that works to frame digital
devices as pets, beasts of burden as vehicles, and people as fleshy com-
puters or hairless apes. Of course, such metaphors are not peculiar to
gaming, and in fact play an important role in digital culture more gener-
ally. Within a relatively short space of time, computers have transformed
from highly specialized tools used by a select coterie of expert profes-
sionals to portable, personal devices integrated into all areas of leisure
and social life. We should not underestimate the importance of animal
metaphors in helping to effect this shift by encouraging consumers to see
digital devices as beloved and faithful companions, at once a user’s best
friend and her trusty helpmeet. Reproducing a 1999 Dan Piraro cartoon
in which the chairman of the ‘American Association of Lapdogs’ deems
the laptop PC ‘the enemy’, Donna Haraway notes that it ‘simultaneously
joins and separates’ domestic animals and personal computers, reflect-
ing a sense that they are in certain respects equivalent (2008, 9); for
many millennials, meanwhile, the Tamagotchi’s constant demands to be
fed, medicated, cleaned and played with provided a useful apprentice-
ship in carrying around a digital device perpetually bidding for their at-
tention. In many ways, indeed, modern smartphones are more creaturely
than Tamagotchis ever were; dispensing with buttons and keys in f avour
of haptic interfaces, voice prompts and facial recognition software,
Beastly Subjects 89
entreating and attempting to beguile users with buzzings, blinkings, ani
mations and melodies, their design reflects a concerted effort on the part
of companies like Apple to foster intuitive, affective, touchy-feely rela-
tionships between consumers and their devices.
By framing human–computer interaction as akin to human–animal
interaction, interface designers flatter users while also providing an alibi
for technologies’ failings. Ideally, pets and gadgets alike are obedient,
loyal and lovable, though in reality both can prove inscrutable, wilful
and susceptible to tragic malfunction. This metaphor also serves to ob-
fuscate an unpalatable truth: that the user may not really be the one in
control. Discussing the dynamics of pedagogy, Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick
(2003) asks ‘what does it mean when our cats bring small wounded an-
imals into the house?’ (153). Where many cat-lovers ‘interpret these de-
posits as offerings or gifts’, Sedgwick follows anthropologist Elizabeth
Marshall Thomas in proposing that, far from paying tribute to their
owners as ‘admired, quasi-parental figures’, these animals are in fact
trying to teach them to hunt (ibid.). In other words, this is not a show
of devotion or an acknowledgement of mastery, but an attempt at edu
cation, with the cat as tutor and the owner their hapless student. For
Sedgwick, this scene poses the question of whether ‘we can learn only
when we are aware we are being taught’ (ibid.). This question resonates
with Apperley and Heber’s (2015) account of how game designers em-
ploy images of animals to ‘train’ users, encouraging them to learn and
love new digital interface technologies. Analysing Kinectimals, a child
ren’s game bundled with Microsoft’s Kinect hardware, Apperley and
Heber show how the game inculcates an understanding of the Kinect’s
voice-and gesture-based interface even as it frames users as the ones
who are doing the teaching by making them responsible for a menagerie
of virtual felines – a dynamic not dissimilar to that of the Tamagotchi
owner graduating to their first Nokia. And, as we shall see in the next
section, the question of whether the user or the technology is in control
becomes particularly urgent with proliferation of digital systems which
aim to pre-empt and circumvent conscious thought in order to capture
or act on aspects of what we might call our ‘animal being’ – autonomic
responses, innate biases and affect scripts. It’s with this development in
mind that I turn now to Tokyo Jungle.
Incorporating the Interface

Developed by the Japanese studio Crispy’s, Tokyo Jungle is an exuber-
ant, fast-paced 3D action game with a surprisingly involved premise: the
year is 2027, and Tokyo has been overrun by pets, zoo animals and pre-
historic beasts in the wake of a ‘space–time disturbance’ that has wiped
humanity from the face of the earth. It emerges that this disturbance
is the result of a professor in 2027 having been tricked into building
90 Beastly Subjects
a ‘coordinate transformer’ by humans from the year 2215, who have
brought the planet to the brink of ecological collapse and now want
to swap places with their twenty-first-century counterparts. At the cli-
max of the game’s story mode, players assume the role of a robotic dog
and have to choose between bringing the exiled c.2027 humans back to
the present or shutting off the coordinate transformer forever, reclaim-
ing the earth for the animals. Striking for its unflattering portrayal of
humanity, this plot is ultimately little more than the alibi for granting
players control over a range of animal avatars, from cheetahs, hippos
and gazelles to housecats and dinosaurs, as they battle for survival. In
what follows I want to use Tokyo Jungle as an example of how action
games’ interfaces engage embodied players at a preconscious level, in-
terrogating the notion of digital play as ‘immersive’ and proposing that
we might instead read the appeal of games like Tokyo Jungle in terms of
‘auto-animalization’.
In his insightful unpacking of the slippery idea of ‘immersion’,
Gordon Calleja (2011) divides player involvement in digital games into
six categories: kinaesthetic, spatial, shared, narrative, affective and
ludic (43–44). Different games and genres prioritize different forms of
involvement, and a single game will tend to engage players in multiple
ways at any one time, with players devoting more or less cognitive band-
width to particular aspects of a game (and, indeed, their extra-gamic en-
vironment) depending on what is happening at that moment and where
they are in the course of their developing relationship with that game.
As an arcade-style single-player game, which affords players ‘real-time’
control over an avatar negotiating a 3D playfield, Tokyo Jungle prior-
itizes kinaesthetic, spatial and affective involvement. As such, it serves
as a useful case study in how games can cultivate visceral connections
between players and their avatars. In concrete terms, ‘real-time control’
means that the software must ‘respond to input within 240 m illiseconds
(ms)’ and ‘be ready to accept input and provide response at a consistent,
ongoing rate of 100 ms or less’ (Swink 2008, 35–36). As these figures
suggest, games like Tokyo Jungle tend to be more concerned with test-
ing our reflexes than our capacity for lateral thought. In Kirkpatrick’s
(2009) words, ‘to play the game we have to act without thinking’, so
that the avatar becomes an extension of the player’s body (130). Indeed,
players often refer to fighting games, shooters and genres similarly de-
pendent on reflexes and hand-eye coordination as ‘twitch’ games (hence
Twitch.tv’s name). Calleja (2011) uses the term ‘incorporation’ to de-
scribe the process of learning a game’s control scheme and building up
the embodied knowledge necessary to win (ibid. 170). Having ‘incorpo-
rated’ Tokyo Jungle’s control scheme and acquired a feel for the various
animal bodies it puts at our disposal, we are able to act intuitively, cap-
italizing on opportunities and evading predators without really having
to think about it. The incorporation process is expedited by the game’s
Beastly Subjects 91
compliance with interface orthodoxies; anyone who plays PlayStation
games regularly will already be habituated to the idea of pushing the left
thumbstick to direct our avatar, of pressing ‘X’ to jump and ‘square’ to
attack, of holding down a shoulder button to sneak and accessing our
inventory via the directional pad.
The apparently immediate experience of controlling an avatar’s body
in ‘real-time’, then, actually entails an intricate braiding of different
timeframes. At the temporal micro-scale, it involves designers account-
ing for the speed of conscious thoughts and pre-conscious reflex actions,
the pace at which electrical impulses and bursts of radiation travel, the
rates at which graphics processors make geometric calculations (mea-
sured in ‘teraflops’, or trillions of floating point operations per second)
and hard drives with drive heads ‘mov[ing] at speeds of upward of one
hundred miles per hour’ access data (Kirschenbaum 2008, 95). Zooming
out slightly, it is assumed that players will invest time in ‘internalizing’
the controls, habituating themselves to the game’s rules and conven-
tions and ‘incorporating’ their avatar. On the macro-scale, meanwhile,
real-time control schemes are a consequence of sociotechnical develop-
ments that have taken place over decades, even centuries. Any genealogy
of videogaming must acknowledge the role of the military–industrial–
entertainment complex in the development of the technologies that
make digital gaming possible (De Peuter and Dyer-Witheford 2009, 101;
Crogan 2011); it must also acknowledge the importance of Taylorist ‘mo-
tion studies and management science’, and the modes of ‘performance
training for improving reaction times, speed and ergonomic efficiency’
that emerged from these fields (Krapp 2011, 82, 101). As media archaeo
logists would no doubt have us recall, moreover, one could zoom out
further to address the evolution of the primate sensorium, the formation
of the carboniferous deposits burned to feed the power grids to which
consoles are connected, and the geological processes through which the
minerals used in the construction of microchips were formed. When
real-time interfaces work, they elide these complex histories, causing us
to forget about the assemblage connecting the player to their avatar. This
sense of immediacy can, however, be hard to maintain: while developers
will seek to sustain a steady screen refresh rate (normally targeting 30 or
60 frames per second as a baseline), many real-time games are subject to
slowdown or lag due to bottlenecks in the rendering pipeline. Connect-
ing technologies from different phases in media history can also cause
hiccups: console games designed to be played on cathode ray tube (CRT)
screens, for example, can be harder to control on modern flatscreens,
whose frame-buffering and post-processing systems can cause inputs
and outputs to become desynchronized.
As a real-time action game, Tokyo Jungle aims to establish a seamless
connection between player and avatar (or at least a seamless-seeming
one). In other ways, though, it is a game in which time is out of joint.
92 Beastly Subjects
This, as we have already seen, is true of its scenario, which uses the
conceit of a ‘space–time transporter’ swallowing humanity as an excuse
to choreograph wacky scraps between pomeranians, velociraptors and
electronic pets. More interesting, however, are the conflicting temporal
dynamics of the game’s two play modes, story and survival. Divided into
short episodes, each of which sees the player tasked with completing a
particular goal as a different animal, story mode subjectivizes our ava
tars via cutscenes that imbue them with individual traits, eccentricities
and goals while fleshing out the story of humanity’s disappearance. In
survival mode, meanwhile, players search for food, claim territory, woo
breeding partners and tackle random challenges while earning ‘survival
points’ (used to unlock new avatars) and hunting for diary entries, ar-
ticles and reports (which open up new story missions). Even after story
mode’s plot has concluded and all of the available animals have been
unlocked, it is survival mode that offers the game’s enduring draw, chal-
lenging players to surpass their best scores. In short, where story mode is
about achieving closure, survival mode is about deferring it. Where story
mode focuses on individual animals, with survival mode the timeframe
shifts from the ontogenetic level – that of the development and lifespan
of a single creature – to the phylogenetic – the development of a species
over multiple generations. We essentially play as a selfish gene rather
than a single organism, and the only way to survive past the 20-year
mark (each real minute equates to an in-game year) is to mate, transfer-
ring control to the next generation so that the bloodline can continue.
Where Tokyo Jungle’s story mode ‘humanizes’ our animal avatars
by giving them individuating goals, relationships, character traits and
developmental arcs, survival mode encourages us to see them as more
akin to machines: stewarding the current bearer of our genetic infor-
mation boils down to managing inputs and outputs to maintain homeo-
static equilibrium, measured in terms of the health, hunger and stamina
gauges visible at the top of the screen. Like the quantified self apps that
estimate how many steps users have taken, how many kilocalories they
have metabolized or how many hours of REM sleep they are getting, this
system suggests the degree to which cybernetic ideas inform contempo-
rary notions of embodied subjectivity. This influence is also evident in
Tokyo Jungle’s portrayal of sex, which is essentially framed as a matter
of data transfer, with strong eugenic overtones. In the event that we have
consumed enough kilocalories to rank up and attract a healthy mate,
our offspring will be stronger and more numerous; if we can only attract
a ‘desperate’ mate, we will be left in command of a weak and flea-ridden
litter, making survival more of a challenge. Success breeds success, but
pick a sub-par mate and it is easy to spiral into a nosedive. With every
in-game year that passes, survival mode becomes more difficult, as in-
creasingly dangerous predators take to the streets. As with the earliest
arcade games, there is no way to ‘complete’ the game: try as we might,
Beastly Subjects 93
eventually the lifecycle will be broken by a freak storm, a sudden food
shortage, a random outbreak of toxic fog or an unlucky encounter with
an apex predator. Indeed, while English and American critics consis-
tently praised the game for being charmingly offbeat,1 in survival mode
Tokyo Jungle becomes strangely bleak, a procedural portrayal of crea-
tures with no individuality and no goal beyond obeying overmastering
biological drives that compel them to keep struggling against a violent,
cruelly indifferent universe.
Animalizing the Player

Insofar as it charges players with managing dynasties of creaturely input/
output machines, Tokyo Jungle is unusual. In other respects, though,
the game is highly conventional, sharing with action and arcade games
in general an emphasis on perpetuating cycles and maintaining states of
equilibrium. Such games frequently challenge players to draw out strings
and circuits for as long as possible – combos, chains, juggles, multipliers,
loops. Digital games can appear gruellingly, bafflingly repetitious to un-
initiated spectators (Dovey and Kennedy 2006, 110; Kirkpatrick 2011,
186). Watching players devoting hours to doing (or attempting to do) the
same thing over and over again, such spectators often default to a rhetoric
of compulsion and addiction, seeing a player reduced to the status of a
rat in a maze or a component of a cybernetic circuit. For gamers, how-
ever, repetition can be highly rewarding, a matter of building up literacies
and skills over hours of practice. In this section, I want to explore these
tensions, looking at how scholars and designers have theorized the plea-
sures of playful repetition before going on to consider where videogames
sit in relation to critical accounts of digital technologies exploiting our psy-
chological and physiological weaknesses in order to ‘animalize’ the user.
Katie Salen and Eric Zimmerman argue that digital games’ repeti-
tiousness invests them with the allure of the ‘same-but-different’, an al-
lure grounded in the fact that ‘[e]very play of the game will be unique,
even though the rules of the game, its formal structure, remain fixed’
(Salen and Zimmerman 2003, 346). Consistent enough that we can
master their principles but dynamic enough that there are always new
surprises to encounter, it is this combination that enables games to claim
hundreds of hours of players’ time – especially when there are unpredict-
able human opponents to play against, or (as in games like Spelunky)
procedural generation routines producing endless new spins on the same
basic template. In attempting to explain gaming’s appeal, critics and de-
velopers often have recourse to psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi’s
concept of ‘flow’ (see, for example, Chen 2007; Swink 2008, 23; Baron
2012). Csikszentmihalyi describes flow as a state of ‘optimal experience’
in which the tasks at hand are experienced as satisfying and absorbing
rather than onerous or overwhelming. For him, what links elite athletes,
94 Beastly Subjects
great artists and paradigm-shifting scientists is their ability to access
this ‘flow state’ (Csikszentmihalyi 2002 [1990]). It is easy to see why
the theory has proven popular within gaming culture: game design is,
after all, about tuning difficulty curves, offering satisfying feedback and
captivating players to the extent that they ‘lose track of “time” in the
usual sense of the word’ (Csikszentmihalyi and Selega Csikszentmihalyi
1992, 104). And, as N atasha Dow Schüll (2012) notes, by using creative,
sporting and intellectual success stories as his case studies, Csikszentmi-
halyi casts in a rather glamorous light phenomena which might other-
wise seem troubling or regrettable (167). While Csikszentmihalyi does
acknowledge that individuals sometimes ‘seek flow in activities that are
neutral or destructive to the self and/or the culture’ (Csikszentmihalyi
and Nakamura 2002, 101), his emphasis on fulfilment, self-actualization
and a mindful orientation towards the present means that flow discourse
is more often used to downplay the extent to which digital play can be
boring or worryingly compelling – and indeed the extent to which, in
a threateningly random world full of nasty surprises, games might be
gratifying precisely b ecause they are repetitious and predictable (an idea
on which Chapter 7 will elaborate). Thus, while the attraction of games
like Tokyo Jungle can be discussed in terms of agency, motivation, skill
acquisition and the attainment of mastery, we should also acknowledge
that play entails the delegation of control, as players submit to systems
tuned to keep them playing.
Other scholars provide alternatives to flow discourse: in Brian
Moriarty’s (2002) influential opinion, games are fundamentally about
the process of ‘entrainment’, of ‘coax[ing] the behavior of participants
into mutually satisfying rhythms and patterns’. This term has the vir-
tue of gesturing at the less palatable side of digital play: as Salen and
Zimmerman (2003) remind us, ‘entrainment means both to carry along
and to trap’, and if we are not careful we ‘may find ourselves not just
playing a game but being played by the game as well’ (361, 342, empha-
sis in original). Tom Apperley (2010) describes such experiences in terms
of the transition from a pleasurable experience of ‘eurhythmia’ to one of
‘arrhythmia’, where the rhythms of the game and those of the gaming
body fall out of synch as ‘one rhythm starts to dominate, or interfere
with, the other’ (39). There are significant parallels here with Schüll’s
(2012) study of machine gambling, which offers another useful means
of moving beyond flow discourse. Schüll argues that while flow theory
can be a useful analytical tool (not least because it has been embraced
by designers of casinos and gambling technologies at least as eagerly as
it has by videogame developers), it proves unsatisfactory when it comes
to addressing just where ‘interaction turns into immersion, autonomy
into automaticity, control into compulsion’ (168). This, of course, is a
key question when it comes to technological interfaces designed to cap-
ture, hold and valorize attention through the algorithmic management
Beastly Subjects 95
of ratios, rhythms and probabilities. Thus, in her discussion of the con-
dition of trance-like absorption pursued by devotees of electronic gamb
ling, Schüll refers instead to the ‘machine zone’, wherein ‘clock time’
gives way to ‘zone time’, as ‘time, space and social identity are suspended
in the mechanical rhythm of a repeating process’ (ibid. 203–206, 13).
For Schüll’s gamblers, as for many gamers, play is a means of attaining a
different relation to time, of ‘suspend[ing] themselves in a state of equili
brated affect’ (ibid. 308).
There are, of course, many differences between the kinds of electronic
gambling devices Schüll is describing and a game like Tokyo Jungle.
There are also numerous parallels however – not least in that game
designers, like designers of gambling devices and digital interfaces in
general, share a strong interest in developing means of ensuring that
‘consumers of media are conscripted into [their] flows at a level we might
term … “preconscious”’ (Gibbs 2010, 192). Game design doxa posit a
conception of the digital subject profoundly shaped by behaviourism,
evolutionary biology and cybernetics: for Daniel Cook (2007), for ex-
ample, videogames can be seen as a ‘grand hack’ of our neural circuitry,
dosing players with dopamine by exploiting mechanisms that have
evolved to stimulate skill acquisition. Many other designers affirm the
efficacy of behaviourist reinforcement techniques, framing game deve
lopment in terms of honing ratios and intervals to create compelling ca-
dences, crescendos and changes of tempo (Hopson 2001, 2012; Bateman
2009, 74). Academics and game designers are also moving beyond tradi-
tional methods of ‘playtesting’ and focus grouping to embrace biometric
technologies, monitoring degrees of skin conductance, gaze patterns,
pulse rates and neural and muscular activity in the hope of better un-
derstanding players’ behaviours, responses and motivations (Ambinder
2011; McAllister, Mirza-Babaei and Nacke 2012; Nacke, Bateman and
Mandryk 2014). If, for many critics, videogames defy interpretation and
reject meaning, signification and symbolism to speak directly to the us-
er’s body, biometric player research attempts to listen directly to that
body. Consciousness and language become irrelevant, if not an impedi-
ment, to the inquiry: as player research professional Graham McAllister
(2012) contends, biometric research offers more accurate results than
traditional interviews because in interviews players ‘often lie’, whether
because ‘they want to please the person asking them [about the game]’ or
because ‘they’ve fabricated something in their mind, perhaps, or they’ve
remembered it differently’.
Such research attempts to shed light on the complexity and variety of
gameplay experience in order to more effectively cater to a wider range
of players. There is ample cause to be suspicious when it comes to how
the games industry may attempt to apply this research, however. As we
saw in Chapter 3, the industry’s interest in behaviourism and biometrics
is bound up with its embrace of user surveillance techniques that aim
96 Beastly Subjects
to levy and recuperate attention and affect, turning the player’s body
into a source of data and profit. As Selena Nemorin (2016) notes, such
strategies have worrying implications in terms of user agency. For her,
the purpose of emerging ‘bio-and neuro-technologies, augmented reality
technologies, and so forth’ is clear: they are means of ‘animaliz[ing]’
consumers (11). Discussing the emerging field of neuromarketing,
Nemorin finds that it posits an ideal consumer akin in many respects
to Heidegger’s ‘poor in world animal’, a creature confined within an
‘encircling ring’ by ‘evolutionary factors that set limits on how [it] can
access the world and the possible actions it can take’ (ibid.). Promot-
ing ‘captivation … and disinhibition’, these developing technologies of
‘augmented animality’ aim to forestall consumers’ critical and reflexive
capacities so that they respond only in terms of ‘instinctive/reflex reac-
tions to external stimuli’ (ibid. 10, 16, emphasis in original).
As Nemorin is careful to note, such visions of rapt consumers whose
faculties of ‘critical reflection and interpretation’ are held in abeyance by
sophisticated technologies are, at least at present, the stuff of marketing
rhetoric rather than lived reality (ibid. 17). Echoing Hopson (2012) –
who holds that pundits worried about gamers being reduced to the sta-
tus of rats in mazes or drooling Pavlovian dogs are too ready to believe
in the efficacy of behaviourist techniques – Nemorin holds that autom-
atism and agency are not alternatives but the extreme ends of a ‘contin-
uum’. The idea that in the past we were all fully rational and reflexive
‘agentic consumers’ is, in other words, as much a nostalgic fallacy as
visions of ‘animalized’ users ‘acting merely on instincts and reflex’ are
unduly dystopian in their depiction of the future (2016, 11). We should
be careful, then, about giving too much credence to depictions of gamers
as hapless thralls, even as we acknowledge that the games industry is,
like many other sectors of digital culture, actively honing modes of ad-
dressing digital subjects at an instinctive rather than an intellectual level.
Here, again, we see how digital technologies have helped to revive un-
derstandings of the subject grounded in behaviourism and cybernetics,
understandings which rely for their authority on the notional objectivity
of quantitative data and reflect the popular cachet of evolutionary bio
logy and neuroscience as guides to understanding the self. Faced with
the often reductive and essentializing accounts of both gameplay and
subjecthood that emerge, it becomes important to move beyond plati-
tudinous paeans to ‘flow’ and ask why games which offer experiences
of ‘eurhythmia’ or ‘animalization’ might appeal to particular players in
particular contexts. Here, Helen Thornham’s (2011) ethnographic work
with gamers is instructive. Reminding us that play is never simply a mat-
ter of sovereign human agents in complete control of quiescent technolo-
gies, nor of devious technologies manipulating docile dupes, Thornham
describes gaming as a process of ‘negotiation’ between player(s) and game
(ibid. 107, 111). Warning against game studies’ tendency to ignore the
Beastly Subjects 97
environments, situations and sociocultural contexts within which play
occurs, she also reminds us that by referring to ‘the body’ in the abstract
we risk forgetting that ‘corporeality and identity … have to continue to
be embedded into socio-cultural gender and power politics’ (ibid. 115).
Thus, while it might be tempting to treat flow as universal, explaining
gaming’s appeal with reference to aspects of the human cognitive and
perceptual apparatus putatively held in common by all, for Thornham
such explanations fail to address the sociocultural factors that inform
who plays what, where, with whom and for how long, eliding ques-
tions of economics, technological literacy, gender, ethnicity, sexuality,
neurodiversity and ability. Rather than framing flow as something that
takes place at a level ‘beneath’ that of identity and conscious thought,
then, we might ask why certain subjects are more willing and more able
to temporarily delegate agency to the game in the hope of attaining the
kinds of states Schüll describes. Chapter 7 will address this question in
detail, looking at the gendered terms on which different games structure
the player’s time and elicit their prolonged engagement through the lens
of Lauren Berlant’s account of neoliberal subjects seeking out objects
of ‘cruel optimism’ which allow them to attain a condition of ‘coasting
sentience’ (2011, 42–43). For now, though, I want to turn to Octodad,
a game which calculatedly stymies the player’s attempts to ‘incorporate’
the avatar and master his body’s capacities. By forestalling flow, it con-
structs a different kind of embodied connection between player and ava
tar, one that speaks to gaming culture’s complicated relationship with
masculinity.
Floppy Logic
In Tokyo Jungle, the experience of controlling animal bodies is meant to
become second nature. The game subscribes to the idea that a game’s in-
terface should be as ‘transparent’ and as responsive as possible, quickly
internalized and forgotten so as to facilitate the pursuit of ‘flow’ and
the creaturely comforts of repetition. Read by the light of Nemorin’s
account of ‘animalized’ consumers, Tokyo Jungle suggests that allow-
ing oneself to be animalized can in fact be a lot of fun. With a couple of
hours to spare, I switch on the PlayStation, selecting survival mode and
assuming control of a photorealistic (if slightly angular) hyena, beagle
or springbok. Cantering through the derelict cityscape as night begins
to fall, my practised thumbs move all-but-automatically, guiding my
avatar across railway lines and over footbridges. Passages of frenzied
activity alternate with quieter stretches of play. I experience a pleasing
sense of exemption from the logistical and emotional complexities of ev-
eryday life, a sense amplified by the impassive demeanour of the rather
stiff 3D model I am piloting. Reacting to the threats and opportunities
in front of me, I find there is little purpose in thinking too far ahead.
98 Beastly Subjects
All that matters is continuing the creaturely bloodline that is my link
to the machine zone, maintaining the cybernetic circuit that connects
my body to my avatar. Thanks to a sophisticated piece of computing
hardware, I can indulge fantasies of returning to a state of animal im-
mediacy, of leaving human concerns behind. The Octodad games, by
contrast, have interfaces that are intended to feel unnatural to habit-
ual gamers. They delight in setting players seemingly trivial challenges
(making a cup of coffee, buying groceries) that are rendered fiendishly
difficult by the control scheme. Where Tokyo Jungle lets the players lose
themselves in other, more agile bodies, Octodad aims to make them feel
awkward, out of place and under scrutiny (if Octodad attracts too much
attention from NPCs, a visibility meter will fill and the game will end).
These, of course, are exactly the kinds of experience many gamers go to
videogames and their agile, hard-bodied heroes to forget about.
As I argued in the chapter’s introduction, the Octodad games use
the absurd conceit of an octopus masquerading as a smalltown dad to
convey the message that it’s tough being a man today. While this mes-
sage might be trite, even reactionary, the way that the games convey
it deserves a ttention – not least because, just as Octodad the avatar is
forever slipping out of the player’s control, so the Octodad games have
a tendency to slide off-message, pointing the way to altogether queerer
perspectives on masculine identity. In Tokyo Jungle, animals are used to
figure a particular understanding of ‘natural’ sexuality and gender, with
the game presenting sex as a means of procreation and a driver of evolu-
tionary mutation (ignoring, in so doing, the fact that non-procreative and
homosexual sex exist within the animal world). By contrast, Octodad’s
slippery, literally spineless body, awkwardly crammed into the costume
of a suburban paterfamilias, figures human sex and gender as fraught
with queer complexities.
On a technological level, Octodad’s slipperiness is the product of a
physics-based animation system. Such systems will be familiar to many
gamers from the way the player-character in games like Halo and its
sequels will suddenly enter ‘ragdoll’ mode when they ‘die’, flopping to
the ground or pinwheeling limply through the air. Videogames often try
to take the sting out of failure by making the avatar’s death cathartic or
comic (Atkins 2007, 247), and ragdoll effects have become a favoured
method of making ‘the failure state … fun’ (Swink 2008, 305). As this
suggests, most gamic heroes will only go ‘floppy’ at the emasculating
moment of their death, becoming laughing stocks once they have left
the player’s control; in the Octodad games, by contrast, such effects are
not the exception but the rule. As the games’ animator notes, Octodad
is essentially a ‘ragdoll … made of ropes’ who is tugged this way or
that by the player ‘like a marionette’ (Scott-Tunkin 2012). Whether we
are playing via a mouse and keyboard, a PS4 pad or on the PlayStation
Vita handheld, this rejection of control orthodoxies imbues the Octodad
Beastly Subjects 99
games with a highly distinctive ‘game feel’, lending play a wobbly, slop-
ing, springily erratic rhythm (Swink 2008). For a veteran gamer, the
effect is decidedly disconcerting, as objects that are familiar to us (key-
boards, controllers, even our own fingers and thumbs, tuned as they are
to traditional control schemes) become newly strange. While we may
become slightly more at home in Octodad’s skin over time, his body is
never fully incorporated. Ironically, this feeling of being out of control is
a consequence of the game affording players more flexibility than most
games. Where videogame avatars will normally head in whatever direc-
tion the player pushes the thumbstick, in the PS4 version of Dadliest
Catch, we must lift and place Octodad’s tentacular ‘feet’ one step at a
time using the joypad’s triggers and sticks; where, in most games, pick-
ing up an object is a matter of pressing a button when within the ap-
propriate range, here we must use both sticks to guide one of Octodad’s
tentacles through three dimensional space before ‘grabbing’ the desired
item with a shoulder button. In the majority of games, simple button
prompts consistently elicit the same ‘canned’ animations from our ava-
tars; here, the degree of control afforded players, in combination with
the physics system, provides plenty of leeway for unexpected, often
comic, outcomes. This degree of randomness arguably accounts for at
least some of the snobbery directed at supposed ‘YouTube bait’; where,
as Kirkpatrick observes, gamers usually pride themselves on their ability
to see past a game’s surface, discern the workings of the ludic system be-
neath and devise techniques and strategies that will enable them to excel
(2011, 228), Octodad frustrates this urge. Octodad doesn’t just struggle
to convince as a husband and father; he also makes it hard for the player
to be convincing as a competent gamer. For some players – those espe-
cially invested in the idea of videogames as opportunities to demonstrate
masculinist mastery – this puts the games beyond the pale.
Real Men Have Backbone

Octodad’s creators list a number of inspirations for their physics-based
gameplay systems, singling out Flashbang’s Minotaur China Shop, a
browser game co-designed by the same Steve Swink whose work on ‘game
feel’ I have cited throughout the chapter, as particularly influential (Lada
2012; Scott-Tunkin 2012). In an interview, Swink describes Minotaur
China Shop’s genesis in a ‘physics test’ undertaken by his team’s ‘tech
artist, Adam Mechtley … to see if we could get a physically-active ragdoll
up and walking around’ (Walker 2008). Finding the results to be ‘very
clumsy’, the development team ‘leaned into accidentally breaking things
as part of the gameplay’ (ibid.). The result was a title in which players
are cast as a minotaur who has gone into business selling crockery. Cus-
tomers arrive in the bottom of the screen to request particular items,
which the player then has to retrieve from the shop’s shelves and return
100 Beastly Subjects
to the counter within the time limit, all the while trying to ensure that
the minotaur’s lumbering, skidding body smashes as little of his own
stock as possible. Like Octodad, Minotaur China Shop is subverting a
videogame trope whereby player-characters turn into beasts to deal out
spectacular violence or perform incredible feats of agility. This trope, of
course, draws on much older texts and traditions, from Robert Louis
Stevenson’s tale of Doctor Jeckyll to myths of werewolves and histories
of the Viking berserkers, who reputedly wore bear-hide in the hope they
would be imbued with ursine ferocity (Pettman 2011, 46). But where,
in these examples, becoming animal is associated with licence, freedom
and power, the comic twist in Minotaur China Shop and O ctodad is
that our avatars are hamstrung rather than enabled by their extraordi-
nary bodies, which render the simplest human tasks – m owing the lawn,
grilling a hamburger, negotiating a supermarket checkout aisle – an ab-
surd struggle.
Both games make use of the cybernetic triangle to play with notions
of masculinity. Where, however, Minotaur China Shop hinges on the in-
congruity of a burly, proverbially short-tempered beast taking an interest
in fine china, Octodad is about instilling an invertebrate with ‘manly’
rigour and claiming a place for an octopus – creatures generally thought
of as cold, alien and repulsive – in the heart of a warm and loving family.
As their nods to H.P. Lovecraft’s Cthulu mythos show, by making their
protagonist an octopus Young Horses were knowingly subverting a tra-
dition of portraying cephalopods as quintessentially ‘Weird’ creatures,
avatars of ‘taxonomic transgression … [and] problematised ontology’
(Miéville 2008, 105, 109). As China Miéville has argued, tentacled hor-
rors like Cthulu – ‘a monster of vaguely anthropoid outline, but with
an octopus-like head whose mouth was a mass of feelers’ (Lovecraft
2013, 32) – became, for Weird authors, a favourite means of figuring
anxieties regarding the place of mankind in a ‘natural’ world revealed by
Darwin and Einstein to be unsettlingly random, unfathomably complex
and monstrously indifferent. Both Octodad games gesture towards this
Weird tradition: in the original Octodad the living room TV is tuned
to a monster movie in which a giant octopoid monster lays waste to a
city; in Dadliest Catch, the stained glass windows in the church where
Octodad gets married are adorned with a sinister Cthulu-like design.
Indeed, the first game – in which players are charged with creating a
decoy to distract Octodad’s human wife so that he can bring to fruition
his ‘mysterious work’ – plays on the idea that our avatar might be a ne-
farious alien interloper, only to reveal that his plot entails surprising his
spouse with a home-made anniversary gift.
Octodad is certainly, then, a figure of ‘taxonomic transgression’. His
transgression is not a Lovecraftian crime against reason and nature, how-
ever, but rather a failure to uphold gender norms. If anything, it is the
eerily ordinary world Octodad occupies rather than his extraordinarily
Beastly Subjects 101
slippery body that comes across as sinister. A 1950s-tinged suburban
idyll in which everything from his wife’s immaculate A-line skirt to the
contours of the Frigidaire radiate middle-American nuclear normalcy,
this setting suggests McCarthyite paranoia and repression as much as it
does the joys of picket-fenced domesticity. As such, it provides a perfect
backdrop for a game about masculinity, masquerade and secrecy, a game
that uses zany humour to affirm normative values (for Young Horses,
Octodad is about the importance of perseverance, courage and familial
togetherness (Young Horses 2013)) even as it betrays a preoccupation
with failure, fraud, ridicule and abandonment: as the developers explain,
the suspicion meter that fills when you do things that make you
stand out as non-human is a symbol of Octodad’s fear. A symbol of
the people around him taking note of his flaws and marking them as
strange. His ultimate fear is having his family slip away when they
discover what he really is.
(Ibid.)
Boys Will Be Boys

At one point in the original game, Octodad’s young son Tommy2 in-
vites him to run a ‘gauntlet of awesome challenges’. He initially warns
Octodad that to refuse would make him ‘a chicken’, before reflecting
that ‘even chickens have a spine’ and concluding that perhaps it would
make him ‘an octopus’. This is Octodad in a nutshell, a game in which
the hero repeatedly risks revealing that he is not a real human in order to
prove that he is nonetheless a real man – which is to say not spineless or
limp-wristed. Here, too, the game could be said to be in dialogue with
Weird fiction: as Miéville notes, if Weird and ‘pre-Weird’ authors use
octopoid creatures to express a racist horror of supposed degeneration
and miscegenation, their outbursts of ‘ecstatic Kristevan disgust at the
octopus-as-abject’ also have a gendered dimension (2008, 107). Pitting
male subjects against tentacled chimeras, these texts participate in a mi-
sogynistic (not to mention homophobic and transphobic) tradition of
associating masculinity with phallic rigidity while framing femininity as
a perfidiously viscous, yielding, coiling threat to masculine integrity (see
Kristeva 1982; Irigaray 1985, 112; Grosz 1994, 205). Octodad compli-
cates this convention by having a tentacled hero struggling to ‘pass’ as
a member of another species. Young Horses’ (2013) comments suggest
that the character is meant to represent the struggles of ‘normal’ men
attempting to live up to ideas of what a husband and father ought to
be: Octodad ‘keeps trying to keep his family happy by doing the best he
can’. Moments like Tommy’s challenge, though, make the games’ queer
connotations clear – suddenly Octodad’s scenario starts to resonate with
Foucault’s (1980) account of the process whereby homosexuals came to
be seen as ‘a species’, as distinct from heterosexuals as cephalopods are
from humans (43).
There are now many games that tell stories about lesbian, gay, bisex-
ual, trans, intersex and queer characters, from indie games like Cobra
Club and Don’t Take It Personally, Babe, It Just Ain’t Your Story (both
of which were discussed in Chapter 3) to triple A games like Valkyria
Chronicles or Dragon Age: Inquisition. At the time of writing, Temple
University’s LGBTQ Game Archive lists 486 titles from the 1980s to the
present which contain ‘LGBTQ and queerly read game content’ on its
site (LGBTQ Game Archive, 2017). Given this, it might seem redundant
to insist on viewing Octodad and its sequel as ‘queer’ games – indeed,
insofar as Young Horses (2013) see them as celebrating the heroic tenac-
ity of men who manage to transcend their own self-doubt, anxiety and
awkwardness, 3 they are arguably rather heteronormative. As I’ve pro-
posed, the message of these games can be summed up as ‘it’s tough being
a man’ – a message at best banal and tone-deaf, and at worst betraying
the kind of ‘heterosexual male self-pity’ that fuels ‘men’s rights’ activism
and its belief that feminism, ‘political correctness’, post-Fordism and the
rise of information technologies are emasculating threats to an authentic
male identity seen as either at risk or already lost (Sedgwick 2008, 145).
In this respect, Octodad is in line with other, more po-faced games that
cast players as heroic paternal figures struggling to maintain order for
the sake of the next generation (Gallagher 2014a) – a narrative cliché
that often carries worrying undertones given gamer culture’s sorry tra-
dition of bigotry, insensitivity and ‘toxic’ prejudice (Consalvo 2012). At
the same time, by articulating this message through an interface that
encourages players to literally feel the angst of a character estranged
from his own body, the Octodad games configure a cybernetic triangle
suggestive of gaming’s unique ability to communicate through ‘virtual
sensation’ (Swink 2008). As scholars like Greer (2013) and Lauteria
(2011) suggest, those triple A games that do feature LGBTIQ charac-
ters often provide only perfunctory or wishfully utopian portrayals of
queer experience. Their queerness, moreover, tends to be confined to the
level of plot, dialogue and imagery rather than informing gameplay. The
Octodad series, by contrast, adopts and adapts mechanics and interface
conventions from triple A games, showing how developers can use ‘game
feel’ not just to create comedy but also to pose questions about iden-
tity and embodiment. In many ways the games amount to a procedural
elaboration of Butler’s celebrated notion of gender performativity, the
process of ‘doing’ gendered identities (in this case, the identity of a dot-
ing father) via the iterative citation of a repertoire of gestures, poses and
attitudes, a process that proves far easier for some subjects than it does
for others (1993, 108–109). While they do so in a comic mode, Octodad
and Dadliest Catch bring home how fraught and failure-prone attempts
to perform identities can be. Introducing an element of physics-based
slapstick into the ‘stealth action’ genre (a debt Dadliest Catch acknow
ledges via a parody of seminal stealth game Metal Gear Solid 2’s fa-
mous prologue), the Octodad games show how suited this genre, with
its emphasis on hiding, sneaking and avoiding suspicion, is to offering
accounts of what it’s like to navigate hostile environments where violent
reprisal might be only a performative slip away.
Even Cyberpunks Get the Blues

In both Octodad and Tokyo Jungle, the animal bodies that are under
(and sometimes out of) our control are presented in comic terms, en-
couraging us to laugh off anxieties about the degree to which our own
‘animal’ bodies are subject to beastly drives, temptations and losses of
agency. Tokyo Jungle has us incorporating animal bodies to the point
where traversing virtual space as a gazelle or a cheetah comes to feel
‘natural’, while Octodad uses an intentionally unintuitive interface to
tell a story about a character struggling to fit in. Horse Master, by con-
trast, is a text adventure. Built using the interactive fiction tool Twine, it
limits our interaction with the bestial body at its story’s centre to select-
ing options from lists. The game is set in a lightly sketched but decidedly
dystopian future, in which contemporary fears over rapacious capitalists
exploiting biotechnologies to extract profit from life itself have been re-
alized. The story plays out across twenty in-game days, as our character
nurtures and trains a bioengineered horse in the hope of winning the
prestigious Horse Master championship.
In gameplay terms, this means clicking through menus to select ac-
tions which augment our horse’s statistics. Choosing to groom our horse
with a particular shampoo, to inject it with nutrients, or to attach elec-
trodes to certain parts of its body will increase the relevant numerical
values, and we can perform three such actions per day. Players are even-
tually given the option of delegating these processes to a piece of soft-
ware, further abstracting their relationship with this animal body. As
the game puts it,
the thing about Horse Mastering is that, once you get the hang of
the basic physical tasks involved, it’s basically just a giant game
of spreadsheet management. The skill becomes chaining the right
actions in order to maximize your efficiency and produce the best
horse. Horse mastery means exploiting every action and every horse
statistic. So you got all the maximum combos off a Horse Mastery
Internet forum and coded a series of macros to just let your com-
puter apply your actions for you.
Primed by popular media (which often present the bond between animals
and their trainers in exaggeratedly romantic terms (McHugh 2011)), one
might expect that this automated, impersonal system would be a poor
substitute for hands-on attention. In fact, it produces excellent results.
As with Papers, Please and Richard Hofmeier’s Cart Life (a ‘retail
simulator’ in which players are cast as a street vendor struggling to make
ends meet), Horse Master is about resource allocation and the rhythm
of daily life in circumstances where the means to survive – let alone
thrive – are frighteningly scarce. The news is full of elliptical references
to recession and rebellion, and things appear to be far from rosy for
our protagonist. Having taken out numerous loans in order to reach
the championship, their only hope is to triumph, securing tenure as a
horse master. In service of this goal they are mainlining dexobrimadine,
a dangerous and expensive nootropic favoured by professional horse
masters. Again, this speculative future is recognizable as a portrait of
a present in which new drugs, apps and exercise regimes promise to
enhance productivity and eliminate fatigue, manifesting an increasingly
prevalent conviction that it is naive and delusional to ‘believe that there
are any essential features that distinguish living beings from machines’
and effecting a subordination of ‘biological rhythms … to the tempo-
rality of a globally networked ‘24/7’ capitalism’ (Crary 2013, 29, 14).
Horse M aster merely extrapolates from this point to a future where
information, currency, commerce, chemistry and biology are utterly
inextricable.
While, as a text adventure, Horse Master does not provide the same
sense of occupying a coherent virtual space that the Octodad games and
Tokyo Jungle do, it remains an intensely visceral game, using the second
person to locate players within the wracked body and fractured psyche
of a protagonist subject to accesses of paranoia, hubris, sentimentality
and shame. By the end of the game, our character is torn between ‘the
excitement of joy and the excitement of fear’. They are also physically
falling apart:
You keep losing the thread of your thoughts and then pulling hairs
from your nose or scalp as you try to work your way around to
remembering and then there is blood sometimes. If you can score
some dexobrimadine at the Horse Master Competition, your heart
might not explode.
We never see an image of our horse, but the details that gradually a ccrete
create a vivid but confusing impression of a creature that certainly
doesn’t match our image of anything equine: this species emerges from
‘the egg sac of its queen’s papal dome’ and boasts cilia, spiracles, gillflaps
and ‘elaborate flared carapaces’. While it does have hooves and a mane,
the latter is actually a ‘bundle of long prehensile tentilla emerging from
behind the carapace’, which ‘was a surprise by-product from the Fourth
Evolutionary Improvement on the Foundational Horse Formulae (FHF)’.
Apparently, the adult horse ‘oxidizes luciferins, causing the distinct
horse steaming bioluminescence that is quite unsettling to humans on
a primal level’. Situated somewhere between species, sounding as much
like cephalopods, insects or crustacea as they do mammals, branded and
sold like cars, cultivated in nutrient baths and described hexidecimally
(we are told that the ‘Europa Trotter’ breed ‘range[s] in colour from
#f9f9f9 to as dark as #646270’), these ‘horses’ embody a future where it
no longer makes sense to distinguish between natural and the artificial,
the biological and the technological, life and property.
Making the ‘horse’ at the centre of the story impossible to visualize
is one of the many ways in which Horse Master undercuts the impulse
to anthropomorphize animals and sentimentalize human relationships
with them. There is none of the ‘utopian imagining’ that Susan McHugh
(2011) finds bodied forth in narratives of young women achieving tri-
umph and transcendence on the backs of horses here (65); nor do we
see joyous and mutually transformative experiences of cross-species ‘re-
ciprocal trust’ like those Haraway (2008) (who is herself wary of the
human tendency to idealize human/animal bonds) experiences compet-
ing in agility tournaments with her dog Cayenne (224). Indeed, Horse
Master’s instruction manual warns readers to ‘never ride’ and ‘never
anthropomorphize a horse’ declaring that ‘they are powerful, murder-
ous creatures capable of faster than human movement’. Bent on explod-
ing the romantic myths of interspecies camaraderie that videogames
so often mobilize, Horse Master reminds us that horses, like dogs, are
‘biotechnologies’ (Haraway 2008, 56). As Haraway notes, humans have
shaped the evolution of these species over untold generations, often
pressing them into service to effect the slaughter and dispossession of
cultures considered to be less than fully human – her agility sessions take
place ‘on the same expropriated Native land where Cayenne’s ancestors
herded sheep … imported from the already colonial pastoral economy
of Australia to feed the California gold rush forty-niners’ (ibid. 15–16).
Horse Master’s bluntest attacks on the sentimental clichés of animal and
trainer narratives come once we reach the contest itself. In the penulti-
mate round, competitors must demonstrate their control over their horse
by severing one of their fingers and forbidding the (apparently carnivo-
rous) horse from eating it until they give it leave to; in the final round,
the horse must stand obediently to attention as the player-character ‘sev-
ers its main nervous bundle’ with a knife and extracts its ‘nerve disc’, on
which is imprinted a radar chart of its scores in the five categories it is
being judged in. While this act kills the horse, it is apparently considered
entirely compatible with the pledge we have taken ‘to treat [our horse]
with the full dignity of its species and according to all the customs of
[our] people’. It may be that the judges are suitably impressed, in which
case we win the game and are treated to a slightly hollow-sounding
happy ending; it may be that we lose, in which case our character goes
back to a life of penury. Either way, the game returns us to its title
screen, adorned with an adorable pixel art image of a cowboy and his
steed dashing across a desert landscape.
Conclusion
In Horse Master, the refusal to indulge sentimental visions of animal/
human companionship goes hand in hand with an interface that keeps
the player at arm’s length; rather than beguiling ‘animalized’ gamers
with the kinaesthetic pleasures of controlling an agile creaturely body, it
has them click through pages of words and statistics on the way to one of
several more or less dispiriting conclusions. We might conclude that, by
appealing more to the conscious brain than the reflexes, abstract inter-
faces lend themselves more readily to critique; such a conclusion would,
however, be too simplistic. Horse Master’s mode of configuring the
‘cybernetic triangle’ linking player, avatar and technology is an excel-
lent fit for the story it wants to tell. But while it is the most trenchant of
the three games in its portrayal of human greed, cruelty and hypocrisy,
Tokyo Jungle and Octodad are far more effective as examples of how
games can convey ideas about embodiment and identity not just through
words, sounds and images, but also through their interfaces, control
schemes and modes of simulating physical forces. This capacity becomes
especially interesting if we take into account the way that critical the-
ory has begun to address questions of identity and subjectivity in terms
of inertia, friction, mass, flexibility, flow and discontinuity over recent
decades. Celia Lury (1998), for example, takes exception to Csikszent-
mihalyi’s ideas on the grounds that flow discourse is a potent articula-
tion of the neoliberal dream of the flexible, self-starting, resourceful,
entrepreneurial subject. For her, it suggests the way in which subjects
are pressured to adopt forms of ‘experimental individualism’, cultivat-
ing the ‘ability to be disembodied and re-embodied at will’, to become
‘disembedded from specific social relations, to be deracinated, without
gender, class, sexuality or age … to display a combination of such natu
ral and social characteristics as required’ (1998, 23, 7–15, 24). Simi-
lar ideas animate Susan Ossman’s (2002) unpacking of what she calls
the discourse of ‘en-lightenment’, a discourse that celebrates an agile,
lean, light, fluid corporeal ideal constructed in opposition to non-white,
non-Western, non-modern bodies that are framed as at once dark and
heavy, weighed down by ponderous and outmoded traditions, rituals
and values (20–29). Jasbir Puar (2007), meanwhile, highlights the way
that scholars working at the intersection of affect theory, queer theory
and critical race studies have been advancing accounts of discrimination
notable for their emphasis on questions of texture and velocity: Sarah
Ahmed and Arun Saldanha, for example, use notions of fluidity and
‘stickiness’ to address the way that negative affects seem to attach more
easily to certain subjects, the ‘viscosities’ that cause bodies to form ag-
gregates and the way in which race can make ‘certain bodies stick to
certain spaces’ (189–190, emphasis in original).
Understandably, critical accounts of videogaming, identity and embod-
iment have largely concentrated on questions of visibility and represen-
tation, looking at who is portrayed and how, while critiquing the games
industry’s fondness for pernicious stereotypes (e.g. Downs and Smith
2009; Gray 2014, 3–4). While such work is often subtle and insightful,
it tends to focus on how videogame characters look and behave rather
than how they ‘feel’ to the player controlling them.4 In so doing, it misses
the opportunity to address how videogames uphold or challenge models
of embodied identity through the terms on which they simulate different
bodies’ physical properties. One might argue, for example, that we should
be more alert to the way that action games in general articulate a dream of
‘manualizing’ the body, so that it is ‘condensed into the hand’ (Kirkpatrick
2011, 104), with its connotations of motility, mastery, utility and flexi-
bility. Whatever our avatar may look like, such games tacitly advance an
ideal of the body as an obedient vehicle of the will rather than a ponder-
ous, fallible, intractable or inflexible mass. Indeed, we could argue that the
appeal of such games lies in bringing into being the sort of body evoked by
Michel Serres’ (1997) comparison of the hand – as ‘a faculty, a capacity
for doing, for becoming claw or paw, weapon or compendium’ – with the
physique of the dancer or gymnast, a corporeality of ‘pure faculty, cleared
up by exercise, by the ascetism of un-differentiation’ (34). Playing action
games can be exhilarating, but we should acknowledge their compatibility
with somatophobia, the valorization of ‘postplural’ models of identity and
the production of states of quiescence and ‘flow’ that leave us vulnerable
to the machinations of corporations dreaming of an ‘animalized’ customer
base. From YouTube cosmetics tutorials to quantified self and lifelogging
technologies to software that promises to ‘nudge’ users out of their bad
habits, contemporary technoculture is full of calls for digital subjects to
technologically master and manage unappealing, recalcitrant, risk-prone
or otherwise beastly bodies – and games are no exception.
Games like Octodad, however, suggest how designers might use
real-time interfaces to explore the factors affecting the ability of parti
cular subjects in particular contexts to live up to these dreams of flexibil-
ity, flow and control – from nationality, neurotype and socio-economic
status to ethnicity, medical history and access to technological or cul-
tural resources. By requiring us to develop an intuitive understanding
of the capacities and properties of simulated bodies, videogames can
also prime us to consider how non-humans apprehend and interact with
other entities. Forbidden Siren 2, a game I will be discussing in the
next chapter, offers a great example in its portrayal of the relationship
between a partially sighted character and his guide dog. These scenes
present a model for how designers might go about fashioning the kinds
of ‘figuration[s]’ Haraway (2008) calls for in her account of media as
‘material–semiotic nodes or knots in which diverse bodies and mean-
ings coshape one another’, knots which use digital technology to engage
our ‘fingery eyes’ and attune us to ‘the myriad of entangled, coshaping
species of the earth’ (4–5). There is potential here to change how players
feel – and, consequently, think – about embodiment, identity, time and
the coordination of creaturely and technological bodies. With marketers
and military intelligence operatives developing modes of ‘sidelin[ing] …
conscious deliberation’ even as governments keen to shrink healthcare
costs are asking smartphone-equipped citizens to take more responsi-
bility for their bodily well-being (Hansen 2015, 55–60), this kind of
thinking is only becoming more important.
The games I’ve analysed in this chapter use animal bodies to connect
players to different subspecies of the digital subject: in Tokyo Jungle,
it is the ‘animalized’ gamer perpetually chasing experiences of flow; in
Octodad, the awkward modern man floundering in the face of contra-
dictory understandings of masculinity; in Horse Master, the neoliberal
labourer killing themselves in the attempt to survive. One can easily
imagine how similar forms of kinaesthetic connotation could be put to
more radical uses, putting players in touch with other bodies and subjec-
tivities, whether they belong to our fellow humans or to other life forms.
Even comparatively ‘mindless’ games like Tokyo Jungle have the poten-
tial to make players aware precisely of the extent to which their actions
are unconscious – a matter of habits and aptitudes ingrained over very
long periods of time and of myriad intuitive decisions made too quickly
for conscious oversight. Mark Hansen (2004) has long argued that their
status as processes rather than representations enables digital media to
make time and the body ‘present’ in new ways, by ‘tingeing or flavouring
the embodied perceptual present’ (605). This being the case, videogame
avatars, whether or not they outwardly resemble us, may be understood
as re-presenting our bodies back to us via what Hansen calls ‘supple-
mentary … mediation’ or ‘mediation of mediation itself’ (2015, 53). As
I noted in Chapter 2, Hansen consider videogames an instructive exam-
ple of how ‘technoculture puts increasing demands on us to act in the
absence of any prior awareness and without sufficient time for conscious
deliberation’ (ibid. 57). Through ‘repetition that leads to embodiment’,
players train themselves to respond in the ‘microtemporal moment’, syn-
chronizing their actions with the ‘machinic microtemporal operationality
of … game engine[s]’ which operate at speeds ‘beneath the threshold of
ordinary human perception’ (ibid.). While critics like Kirkpatrick argue
that this renders games unsuited to conveying ideas in the way that books
or movies do, it also makes them capable of conveying the texture and
rhythm of embodied experience in new ways – ways that might just lead
us towards a more developed understanding of the relationship between
biology, technology and identity in contemporary culture.
Notes
1 Perpetuating a long tradition of European and American journalists treating
Japanese games as strange, quirky and exotic (Gallagher 2014b).
2 For reasons that are never explained, Octodad’s son and daughter appear to
be perfectly normal human children. The game’s failure to supply an expla-
nation becomes the occasion for a joke at the very end of Dadliest Catch.
3 The developers argue that Octodad is a hero because ‘He overcomes his fear,
and continues on even while his suspicion meter fills and people begin to
whisper’.
4 Though as Diane Carr’s (2014) disability studies-informed perspective on
how ‘ability and augmentation’ are represented in the Dead Space and Deus
Ex series shows, there are exceptions.
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5 Synthetic Subjects
Horror and Artificial
Intelligence
‘Talk to Siri as you would to a person’. So ran the promotional material

for Apple’s Speech Interpretation and Recognition Interface, first bun-
dled with the iPhone 4S in late 2011. Marketed as an ‘intelligent per-
sonal assistant’, Siri’s name has become shorthand for an age in which
encounters with more-or-less autonomous, more-or-less intelligent ma-
chines are no longer a futuristic fantasy but an increasingly common fact
of everyday life. Along with competitors like Microsoft’s Cortana and
Amazon’s Alexa, Google’s DeepMind neural networks and the myriad
chatbots and spambots who now populate the web, Siri has initiated a
new phase in our enduring fascination with artificial intelligence and its
implications for our sense of what it means to be ‘a person’. Gamers, of
course, have been interacting with artificially intelligent digital agents
(many of them admittedly primitive) for decades now. Where the film
and TV industries have responded to our renewed interest in AI with
a wave of narratives that portray vexed, sometimes violent relation-
ships between AIs and humans (Her, Chappie, Ex Machina, Humans
and Westworld among them), all single-player digital games could be
considered dramas about humans learning to collaborate and compete
with AI. Given this, videogames are uniquely placed to offer commen-
tary on human/AI relationships and their effects on our notions of self-
hood and subjectivity. Admittedly, experts at the cutting edge of, say,
natural language processing or neural network design would probably
balk at extending the term ‘AI’ to the comparatively rudimentary sets
of if/then propositions that determine how videogame nonplayer char-
acters (NPCs) behave. This, however, is the term gamers and gaming
journalists tend to use. And if videogame NPCs are hardly examples of
cutting edge machine intelligence, they are quite sophisticated enough
to play their part in game-fictions which dramatize concerns over the
ever-closer entanglement of humans and computers.
In looking at how games ask us to think about AI the most obvi-
ous starting point would be the many science-fiction themed titles in
which androids, cyborgs and intelligent computers feature – lest we for-
get, Microsoft’s Cortana is named after a ‘synthetic intelligence’ from
their Xbox brand’s flagship Halo series. Such an approach might well
Synthetic Subjects 115
be productive: it is interesting to note, for example, that some of gaming
culture’s most popular comic characters, from Portal’s misanthropic,
meme-spawning GLaDOS to Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic’s
HK-47, are intelligent machines, perhaps because writing dialogue for
digital characters brought to life by codes and scripts offers such rich op-
portunities for riffing on the narrative videogame’s status as an often un-
easy compromise between storytelling and simulation. The Bioshock 2
expansion Minerva’s Den, meanwhile, proves that games are capable
of nuanced and thoughtful engagements with the history of AI and the
questions it raises. An allohistorical narrative incorporating references
to information theory, cybernetics and the Turing test, Minerva’s Den
eschews lazy human/machine dichotomies to offer a gratifyingly comp
lex account of how technology, gender, race, education and class factor
into notions of ‘the human’.
While there are, then, sci-fi-themed games that feature arresting por-
trayals of human/AI relationships, this chapter takes a different tack,
looking instead at the ‘survival horror’ genre. It argues that survival
horror games capitalize on the creepiness of AI, affording players a
pleasurable means of indulging our anxious fascination with intelli-
gent machines. Siri, Alexa, Cortana and their ilk attempt to ‘human-
ize’ AI, continuing a long tradition of anthropomorphizing software
entities (Agre 1997). The games I addressed in Chapter 4, meanwhile,
drew parallels between animals and computers. In cases such as these,
metaphor and personification are deployed to present digital devices as
loyal friends, faithful servants, lovable pets or considerate co-workers.
In survival horror games, by contrast, AI assumes shapes borrowed from
gothic literature, horror movies and Weird fiction, as NPCs take up roles
in scare stories about our susceptibility to technological manipulation.
The first part of the chapter considers Silent Hill 2, a gothic fable about
a bereaved husband encountering his dead wife’s doppelganger. The next
section focuses on the Siren/Forbidden Siren series, a cycle of games
released between 2003 and 2008, in which the inhabitants of isolated
Japanese villages mutate into hideous undead ‘shibito’ (‘corpse people’).
The last section addresses Alien: Isolation, an entry in the long-running
transmedia franchise inaugurated by Ridley Scott’s Alien which, like
Scott’s film, roams ‘the liminal zone between science fiction and Gothic
horror’, and which was advertised as using pioneering AI techniques to
bring H.R. Giger’s ‘xenomorph’ creature to life (Luckhurst 2014, 10).
As I noted in the discussion of Silent Hill: Shattered Memories in
Chapter 3, scholars have often interpreted survival horror games from
a psychoanalytic standpoint (e.g. Santos and White 2005; Kirkland
2015), drawing in particular on Freud’s 1919 paper on the uncanny. As
I also argued, however, simply to see survival horror games as advanc-
ing a psychoanalytic understanding of the subject (as a ‘deep’ individual
whose psyche is haunted by unconscious drives and desires, repressed
memories and formative childhood traumas which struggle to reach the
surface) is to miss an important dimension of the genre. As I showed
in Chapter 3, survival horror games witness a tension between modern
conceptions of the subject – conceptions expressed in linear stories about
‘deep’ individuals acting more or less (ir)rationally – and those that un-
dergird contemporary technoculture – in which, as we have seen, the
ability to collect and aggregate vast quantities of data has helped to pro-
mote an understanding of individuals as black boxed nodes looped into
larger networks, and of brains and bodies as biocybernetic machines
susceptible to technological manipulation, conditioning and even pro-
gramming. Thus, while it would be pointless and perverse to deny the
close ties survival horror games have to their gothic and psychoanalytic
pre-texts, and while it would be misleading to portray cybernetics and
psychoanalysis as incompatible alternatives (as critics have shown, it is
more accurate to think in terms of a generative – if often antagonistic –
conversation between the two (Liu 2011, 13; Franklin 2015, 140–147))
it is also crucial to recognize how the development of the survival horror
genre has been shaped by these shifts. While Isolation is the only game
considered here that takes place in a storyworld populated by AIs and
androids, and while at the time Silent Hill 2 was released Siri was little
more than a twinkle in Steve Jobs’ eye, these games are very much en-
gaged with the implications of digitization.
In using gothic tropes to address fears raised by emerging techno
logies, these games are hardly without precedent; in fact, many critics
argue that the gothic tradition has always been concerned not merely
with the nature of subjectivity and the psyche, memory, emotion and
perception, but with adumbrating and exploring the potentials of new
technologies and media formats (Kittler 1997; Sconce 2000; Nead
2007). In what follows I draw on the work of Fred Botting and Lydia H.
Liu, both of whom offer pointers as to how gothic motifs and psycho-
analytic theories might function in a technoculture increasingly scep-
tical of notions of the ‘deep’ subject and the subconscious mind. For
Botting (2013), the story of the gothic tradition in the late twentieth and
early twenty-first centuries is itself a horror story about subjects being
divested of their psychic depths and transmogrified into automata. If the
ghosts who haunt gothic literature are scary because they ‘manifest[] a
return of repressed wishes, beliefs and fears from the unconscious and
surmounted regions of psychic life’, those who haunt gothic cinema are
scary because they ‘figure[] … a technological dimension from which
human powers and autonomy seem increasingly alienated’ (129–130).
With the advent of digital media and post-Fordist labour, this process
intensifies: where cinema effected an ‘externalisation’ of what were once
understood as products of the subject’s own mind, now ‘externalisation
becomes evacuation: the reader or viewer is hollowed out, emptied of
content and substance, the pressure from outside drawing interiority to
the surface’ (ibid. 128). As ‘qualities associated with depth and interi-
ority are given mechanical counterparts and drawn to the surface for
inspection and activation, switched on or off’, the truly scary question
becomes not what might be lurking in the umbrous recesses of our own
psyches, but whether the unconscious has itself become obsolete, super-
seded by devices which reduce humans to mere appendages of a vast
cybernetic assemblage. Botting sees the gamer as a privileged figure for
anxieties regarding a ‘perceived loss of humanity’ in digital culture (ibid.
135): where, as we saw last chapter, rapt gamers are often compared to
animals or machines, for Botting they resemble nothing so much as ‘pup-
pets, zombies, mutants, vampires, automata’ (ibid. 137), gothic doppel-
gangers of both the late-capitalist consumer ‘divested of reason, agency
or self-control’ and the post-Fordist worker living out ‘a contemporary
working life dominated by screens’ (ibid. 135). Creepily intent on slaying
digital demons and laying virtual ghosts, Botting’s gamer does not real-
ize that they themselves have become an uncanny travesty of a human
subject. As we shall see, more reflexive examples of the survival horror
genre quickly begin to play on this idea, scaring players by confronting
them not just with digital facsimiles of gothic ghouls and monsters, but
with the stereotype of the gamer being ‘played’ by the very technologies
they think they are in control of.
Liu (2011), meanwhile, renovates the concept of the uncanny for the
digital present by returning to the texts from which Freud was working.
She reminds us that Freud’s paper, which associates the uncanny with ‘the
return of the repressed’, has its own repressed content: Ernst Jentsch’s
1906 article ‘On the Psychology of the Uncanny’, which is also based
on a reading of Hoffman’s ‘Sandman’ (Liu 2011, 209). Jentsch’s analy-
sis focuses on Olympia, the mechanical doll with whom Nathanael, the
tale’s protagonist, becomes besotted. For Jentsch, what is uncanny about
Hoffman’s text is the ambiguity it cultivates as to whether O lympia is
a real woman or just an automaton; he argues that the sense of the un-
canny arises from ‘doubt as to whether an apparently living being really
is animate and, conversely, doubt as to whether a lifeless object may not
in fact be animate’ (1997 [1906], 11). While Freud acknowledges his
debt to Jentsch, he also takes great pains to refute this thesis, framing
Olympia as a red herring and reading the text as an allegory for castra-
tion anxiety – the psychic phenomenon which, for him, lies at the root
of the uncanny (Liu 2011, 208). Liu, however, believes that Jentsch’s
concern with distinguishing the living from the merely lifelike remains
relevant to our culture of ‘cybernetic toys’, digital tools and autonomous
computational agents (ibid.). In her own reading of ‘The Sandman’ Liu
‘relocate[s] the uncanny from castration anxiety back to the automaton’
(ibid. 220). Rather than simply concluding that Freud was wrong and
Jentsch right all along, however, she proposes a third possibility: while it
is obvious that Olympia is an automaton, what if Nathanael’s ‘fantasies
about himself being an automaton’ are also true (ibid.)? In this reading,
it is not the idea that we might mistake a machine for a living being
that is uncanny but the idea the we might fail to recognize ourselves as
machines who have been tricked into thinking we are deep sovereign
subjects (ibid. 224).
Between them Liu and Botting provide a means of accounting for the
uncanny charge of survival horror games, one that acknowledges what
the genre inherits from gothic literature and psychoanalytic theory but
also foregrounds its status as a response to the effects of digital techno
logies. Where critical readings of survival horror titles have tended to
focus on questions of trauma and repression, perversity and primal de-
sire, I argue that these games are more noteworthy for the way that they
use the expressive resources of the videogame form to foreground the
eeriness of anthropomorphic AIs and the strange temporal and affec-
tive disjunctions characteristic of machine-mediated communication. By
confronting players with spectres, zombies, abhuman hybrids and alien
creatures, and by forcing their protagonists to struggle with outmoded
technologies in order to outwit or evade these creatures, the survival
horror games this chapter discusses (melo)dramatize the experience of
living in a world where ‘the realm of not-quite-life is growing apace …
[as] materials are beginning to have characteristics which used to be re-
served for life and biological material is being incorporated into all kinds
of things, from plastics to robots’ (Thrift 2008, 163). Generating feel-
ings of fear – but also of absurdity, self-consciousness and shame which
stem from our susceptibility to that fear – these games rework gothic
motifs to speak to the uncertain status of digital subjects in a culture
of intelligent machines. They are uncanny not because they confront
us with eerily lifelike NPCs (as we shall see in the next section, their
A I-controlled characters are in fact prone to bathetic and unsettling
slips which quickly scotch the idea of their being truly ‘intelligent’), but
because they reveal how susceptible players are to technological manip-
ulation, how easily even comparatively crude simulations can elicit the
appropriate manual inputs and affective outputs from us.
Breakdown and Bathos

So far I have argued that survival horror games continue what crit-
ics like Botting see as a gothic tradition of using supernatural motifs
(haunting, possession, vampirism etc.) to explore the implications of so-
ciocultural shifts and new technologies, drawing on his account of the
gothic as a form that has reinvented itself over the centuries to address
the challenges to the notion of the rational enlightenment subject posed
by Romanticism, Darwinism, psychoanalysis, consumer capitalism and
the advent of the information age. If gothic texts have traditionally ex-
pressed fears of being controlled or contaminated by monstrous others,
in these games those fears are directed towards computers and AI. In
this section, I want to say something more about the eeriness of human/
AI interaction before turning to Silent Hill 2, my first example of how
survival horror games bring this eeriness to the fore.
As I have already proposed, AIs are disturbing not because they are
convincingly lifelike, but because they do not have to be to draw us in,
however fleetingly. As Frances Dyson (2014) notes in an account of soft-
ware agents which use speech recognition and voice synthesis techno
logy to converse with human customers, users tend to ‘“automatically”
respond[] to [the software] as if it were human’ until they receive decisive
proof to the contrary, obeying the same ‘conversational protocols’ they
would normally use even though they know such niceties are superfluous
(77). While users are not fooled into thinking that they are really con-
versing with another human, they nevertheless behave as if they were,
out of sheer force of habit – only to find themselves irrationally irked by
the systems’ bathetic slips and breaches of conversational etiquette. As
this suggests, the problem with AIs is not that they make us forget we’re
interacting with a machine, but that they make us remember how prone
we are to letting habit and protocol take over from conscious, rational
thought. We might start out knowing that it’s only an AI, only a game,
but we keep slipping into playing along – before being abruptly and em-
barrassingly returned to our senses. This tendency has long been recog-
nized by AI researchers, who refer to it as ‘the ELIZA effect’. Coined by
Douglas Hofstadter (1997), the term alludes to Joseph Weizenbaum’s
ELIZA, a mid-1960s experiment in computerized natural language
processing. In a version of Turing’s famous ‘imitation game’, Weizen-
baum’s programme used simple techniques to produce the illusion that
users were conversing with another human. But if ELIZA occasionally
made comments that seemed astonishingly insightful, it was more often
subject to deflating episodes of ‘breakdown’ that revealed the primitive
nature of the techniques underwriting the illusion (see Wardrip-Fruin
2009, 26–27, 36).
As communications theorist J.D. Peters has observed, the irony of new
technologies is that, even as they promise to make our lives easier, they
create the potential for new forms of misunderstanding, malfunction
and embarrassment, fuelling ‘the pervasive sense that communication is
always breaking down’ that he sees as characteristic of life in the over-
developed, networked world. This sense has only been heightened by
the development of technologies like AI, which promise (or threaten)
to extend ‘horizons of incommunicability … beyond the human world’,
raising ‘the vexing question of communication with animals, extrater-
restrials and smart machines’ (1999, 1, 2). For Peters, our anxieties re-
garding communication breakdown are a consequence of our belief in
the superiority – and even ‘holy status’ – of the ‘dialogue’ model of com-
munication, which is founded on ‘reciprocity and interaction’ (ibid. 33).
Dialogue’s cardinal attribute is its liveness, where live means both the
opposite of dead and the opposite of pre-recorded. For Peters, this pref-
erence for live, spontaneous, person-to-person contact over impersonal,
asynchronous and ‘mass’ communication goes all the way back to Plato’s
Phaedrus, ‘find[ing] a wellspring in the Socratic privilege of soul-to-soul
connection’ (ibid. 35). He even goes so far as to suggest that, in valour-
izing dialogue over writing, Socrates is opposing himself to ‘the artificial
intelligence of the written text, which simulates a caring teacher’ but
ultimately offers no more than a ‘parody [of] the full erotic presence and
mutuality that Socrates calls for …’ (ibid. 49). The closer AIs come to
providing a convincing facsimile of this kind of ‘true’ dialogue, the more
jarring and disturbing their failures become.
Like Weizenbaum’s ELIZA or the AIs Dyson analyses, videogame
NPCs sometimes make felicitously apt or poignant gestures that leave us
with the impression they must be truly intelligent. But they are also subject
to bathetic breakdowns that render the limitations of the game code ‘be-
hind’ them glaringly apparent, from comically incongruous speech samples
to graphical glitches. Bathos need not be a regrettable accident, though;
as playwright Howard Brenton (1980) observes, dramatists can also use
what he calls ‘bathos techniques’ to artfully undercut the audience’s expec-
tations (27). Brenton offers an insight into the nature of these techniques
in the introduction to his 1970 play Christie in Love. Here, he explains
that while the play’s police officers are essentially stock characters, they
occasionally experience what he calls ‘sudden lights’: insights that inspire
‘unpredictable speeches beyond the confines of pastiche’ and which he lik-
ens to ‘a cardboard black and white cut-out suddenly reach[ing] out a fully
fledged hand’ (ibid.). This strategy of endowing stock characters with sud-
den flashes of intuition is, Brenton tells us, not only ‘a bathos technique’
but a ‘very cruel’ one (ibid.). Cruel to the characters, whose moments of
brilliance prove bitterly fleeting, it is perhaps crueller still to the audience,
who are coaxed into mistaking those characters for ‘real’ thinking, feeling
humans only to be brought back to earth with a Brechtian bump. This
also serves as a description of how survival horror games work: making a
virtue of videogame AI’s limitations, they draw players into close relation-
ships with NPCs only to expose them to moments of breakdown which
generate feelings of horror, shock and bathetic absurdity, reminding the
player of their tendency to slip into states of abstraction more characteris-
tic of an automaton than a deep, rational human subject. Few games have
used this technique more effectively than Silent Hill 2.
Blissful Ignorance
A self-contained tale only tangentially related to the first Silent Hill,
Silent Hill 2 casts players as widower James Sunderland. Summoned to
a sleepy lakeside town by a letter purportedly written by his late wife
Mary, he finds the streets swathed in fog and the buildings abandoned
but for packs of hideous humanoid monsters. Having narrowly escaped
from a run-in with a strange masked figure carrying a cleaver, James
encounters a woman named Maria, who bears an uncanny resemblance
to his dead wife. But where Mary was prim and sentimental, Maria,
with her sardonic put-downs and her snakeskin miniskirt, is more as-
sertive, more impulsive, more sensuous and in general more alive. From
the player’s perspective, Maria also performs another function, serving
as an alluring embodiment of the PlayStation 2’s technological prowess.
Sony had dubbed the PS2’s graphics chip ‘the emotion engine’, claim-
ing at the console’s launch that it would enable unprecedentedly lifelike
characters to express and elicit feelings in a manner hitherto impossi-
ble; as a high-profile game released early in the system’s lifespan, Silent
Hill 2 attempted to make good on these claims by foregrounding the re-
lationship between James and Maria. Players spend large passages of the
game escorting the AI-controlled Maria through the town, protecting
her from the bizarre creatures they encounter. Eventually, however. there
is a sequence during which the player cannot prevent Maria being killed
by the masked man with the cleaver. This scene initiates a cycle of sepa
ration and reunion, death and resurrection, which recurs until eventu-
ally it becomes apparent that Maria’s repeated ‘deaths’ and rebirths are
a symptom of Sunderland’s guilty conscience: in a flashback triggered by
the discovery of a degraded VHS tape, we learn that Mary was sick and
that James himself killed her, motivated less by mercy than his revulsion
at her physical decline. His subconscious has been insistently re-staging
Mary’s death as Maria’s murder at the masked executioner’s hands.
As a game structured around repeated re-playings of an eerily familiar
woman’s traumatic death, it is easy to see why critics interested in un-
derstanding Silent Hill 2 have turned to Freud’s account of the uncanny,
concerned as it is with repetition, automatism, doppelgangers and the
return of the repressed (Niedenthal 2009; Kirkland 2009a, 2015). If we
turn instead to Lydia Liu’s engagement with Freud’s text, however, we
can see that while Silent Hill 2 is certainly a game about masculine psy-
chosexual hang-ups, perhaps more interesting and original is the way
that it uses gothic conventions to pose questions about interaction and
immersion, simulation and solipsism. Drawing players in only to bathet-
ically push them away again, the game elicits a sense of unease rooted
not in the fear of violence but our readiness to play along with (and even
to be played by) media and machines.
As in Her and Ex Machina,1 Silent Hill 2 frames the promise and
threat of AI in gendered terms, drawing on misogynistic clichés to ex-
press its anxieties. In each of these texts, our wonder and our suspicion
are directed at sexualized female characters who end up confirming our
worst fears by taking the hapless male protagonists for a ride. If this re-
flects the fact that the film industry and the games industry alike remain
shamefully androcentric, it also points to a phenomenon observed by
Nina Power (2014), who highlights the pervasive use of female – or
‘female-sounding’ – voices as instruments of ‘soft coercion’ in the net-
worked neoliberal city (23). As she argues, there is no reason that the
voices of self-service checkout machines, transport networks or digital
‘personal assistants’ need to be gendered at all – or, rather, if there is a
reason for feminizing these systems, it is so that they can perform an
‘ideological function’, obfuscating both the fact that real authority re-
mains, for the most part, in male hands and the degree to which citizens,
consumers and users are disempowered by systems that purport to serve
them (ibid. 23–24). While these computerized voices might sound be-
nignly solicitous, the truth is that ‘you do not command the machine, the
machine “commands” you by informing, instructing, softly controlling’
(ibid. 25). While it could hardly be called feminist, Silent Hill 2’s story
of a man willingly fooled by a sexy simulation does at least gesture at
the way AI designers used gendered representations to play on users’
vanity and complacency, exploiting the predisposition to take the imper-
sonal personally, to mistake pre-recorded messages or rote politenesses
for real, spontaneous, meaningful interaction. Bad enough when it was a
matter of mini-skirted air hostesses expected to perform the ‘emotional
labour’ of making passengers feel special (Hochschild 1983), this ten-
dency takes on an eerie new resonance when it is a matter of machines
designed to keep users quiescent.
With this narrative conceit – in which a female figure with whom the
male protagonist should be able to enjoy the ‘full erotic presence and
mutuality’ that Plato calls for turns out to be a mere simulacrum (Peters
1999, 49) – Silent Hill 2 ingeniously turns the bathetic slips to which all
AIs are prone into a virtue. ‘Companion’ NPCs are often temperamen-
tal: one minute, they will be obediently following the player-character;
the next they will suddenly halt at a threshold, undergo a violent mood
swing, get lodged in a piece of scenery or lapse into a cryptic behavioural
loop. And, more often than not, they will die again and again, right before
our eyes. In most games this is a problem; not for nothing have so-called
‘escort missions’, in which players must protect AI companions, come to
be seen as a cardinal game design faux pas. Silent Hill 2, however, cre-
ates a context in which Maria’s emergent behavioural quirks contribute
to, rather than detract from, the game’s story and atmosphere. If it is
disturbing to watch the game’s deformed, mannequin-like enemies jit-
tering and loping across the screen, it is even more striking to see Maria
suddenly ‘break character’. Here, as in the other games the chapter con-
siders, the horror of our character being attacked by violent monsters is
only part of the story. Less immediate, if ultimately more pervasive, is
the sense of finding ourselves taken in by AI.
Silent Hill 2 offers multiple endings depending on how the player has
behaved, taking into account things like whether we have protected or
neglected Maria and whether we have kept James’ energy levels topped
up. It is hard to call any of these endings happy, however. In one,
Sunderland returns to a reality bleached by his delusion’s undoing; in
another, he takes his own life; the remaining two see him retreating fur-
ther into fantasy, whether by preparing an occult ritual intended to bring
Mary back to life or by leaving town with Maria – who begins to cough,
evoking Mary’s illness and suggesting Sunderland cannot even allow
himself to enjoy the consolatory fiction he has concocted. These port
raits of a protagonist torn between clinging to or rejecting the fantasy
of a fulfilling relationship with Mary/Maria are also none-too-flattering
images of the player/videogame relationship, with the delusional James
as a doppelganger of the gamer passionately invested in a piece of soft-
ware. Like James’ conversations with the phantom his subconscious has
created, gameplay is not a true dialogue but a matter of feedback loops
which aim to foster the illusion of meaningful interaction: players make
their inputs in the here and now, but the outputs that games issue in re-
sponse are set in stone before play even begins; the system might react in
‘real-time’, (which, as we saw in Chapter 4, is itself a slippery concept),
but it does so by selecting from a predetermined database of instructions,
operations and assets. Just as with Weizenbaum’s ELIZA/Doctor script,
which ‘cause[d] the software to parody the conversational patterns of
a nondirective therapist’, giving correspondents back their own inputs
reworked via ‘a multistep transformation’ so as to resemble thoughtful
responses (Wardrip-Fruin 2009, 28, 30), games translate players’ manual
inputs into audiovisual outputs, allowing those players to converse – or
play – with themselves. This is not, in other words, true, live interaction,
and it is for this reason that some critics have challenged the tendency
to define games as ‘interactive media’, preferring to describe them as
‘configurative’ or ‘ergodic’ texts (Aarseth 1997, 1; Moulthrop 2004,
60; Dovey and Kennedy 2006, 23, 105). This lack of true interaction
lays behind the lingering sense that there is something eerie, pathetic or
onanistic about gaming and the tendency to portray games as escapist
fantasies which attempt to compensate players for a presumed lack of
purpose and success in ‘real life’. As we know, however, the fact that
they are not truly interactive does not necessarily make videogames less
engaging. Graeme Kirkpatrick uses the neatly oxymoronic term ‘willed
illusions’ to describe this paradox, arguing that ‘players know that they
are responsible for maintaining the illusion that is the gameworld and
the sense of play that supports it’ and that this ‘ultimately threatens the
game itself, giving it a kind of ontological insecurity’ (2011, 74–75). To
see games as hypnotizing their players is, then, as mistaken as believing
that players are in full, conscious control of the gameplay experience. In
fact, as we saw in Chapter 4, passages of rapt engagement or fugue-like
absorption alternate with accesses of boredom, frustration or bathetic
self-awareness. While this is true of all videogames, the ludic and
diegetic conventions of the survival horror genre are particularly good at
bringing this dynamic to the fore, playing on the nagging fear that new
technologies might reveal us to be little more than machines ourselves.
In the Blink of an Eye

Silent Hill 2 offers us one picture of our relationship with AI: Maria in-
carnates the AI as an appealing façade that has been designed to flatter
and tempt us, but that, when we look more closely, merely reflects our
own folly, vanity and susceptibility back at us. In the Siren series (a cycle
of games helmed by Keiichiro Toyama, the director of the original Silent
Hill), we get a different picture of AI and the threat it represents to hu-
manistic conceptions of a deep subject. Where Silent Hill 2 foregrounds
the James/Maria relationship, in the Siren games players are required
to hop between various avatars connected to networks of NPCs (hos-
tile and friendly, dead and alive, animal, human and demonic) by both
technological and telepathic channels of communication. Drawing on
a gothic tradition of haunted media technologies that facilitate contact
with the beyond (Connor 1999; Sconce 2000), Siren retools this trope
to address the implications of human-to-AI and (scarier still) AI-to-AI
communication. Its most innovative and intriguing move in this regard
is the implementation of a play mechanic called ‘sightjacking’. Portrayed
in the narrative as a form of telepathic possession, sightjacking enables
players to literally see through the eyes of other characters, including the
hostile shibito who roam the games’ environments. Diegetically speak-
ing, the shibito are corpses resurrected by a supernatural force to play
out travesties of the routines that governed their lives: undead house-
wives tend the same kitchens, undead farmers plough the same furrows
and undead policemen walk the same beats. In reality, of course, these
NPCs are automata compelled by computer code to perform the same
cycle of animations and replay the same snatches of dialogue again and
again – until they detect the player-character, at which point they move
in to attack. While the first shibito the player encounters in any Siren
game will be humanoid, enemies become more grotesque – and more
powerful – as the game progresses. The player-characters, meanwhile,
are not soldiers, cyborg ninjas or space marines but ordinary men and
women: over the course of the three Siren games, players step into the
shoes of schoolchildren, novelists, dock workers, nurses, reporters and
retired cops. Consequently, the player’s best bet is to run and hide from
enemies rather than engaging them – and this is where sightjacking comes
in. While players are at a disadvantage if they try to attack the shibito
directly, they can use sightjacking to observe their routines and work
out ways of ambushing or avoiding them. It should be noted, however,
that the selection of cryptic, partial views available by cycling through
the ‘feeds’ from NPCs’ eyes (which is done by rotating the joypad’s
thumbstick in a manner akin to twisting the dial on an analogue r adio)
provides nothing like a totalized, bird’s-eye view of the playfield. More-
over, by sightjacking we sacrifice the ability to see our character’s imme-
diate surroundings, rendering them more vulnerable to attack (a penalty
Siren: Blood Curse obviated by splitting the screen, letting us see both
our character and the viewpoint they have ‘jacked’). Sightjacking is use-
ful, then, but players still have to depend on guesswork, blind faith and
dumb luck to escape.
The player’s control over the camera is also limited by the fact that if
their avatar is spotted by one of the shibito, the view will cut for a split
second to an image of that avatar from the enemy’s perspective. This kind
of switch in viewpoint is highly unusual from the standpoint of gaming’s
visual grammar: videogames almost never employ the ‘shot/reverse shot’
structure so fundamental to filmic syntax, and if, in cinema, characters
are banned from looking directly into the camera lest they ruin the audi-
ence’s voyeuristic pleasure, Siren’s cutaways are similarly disruptive, vi-
olently revoking the player’s pretensions to scopic privilege. From having
been able to flit between other characters’ consciousnesses at will, we are
suddenly implicated and made to feel like an interloper. This unceremo-
nious ‘jacking’ of the camera can be truly unsettling, testifying to the
power of mere images to elicit visceral responses. Visual culture scholar
W.J.T. Mitchell offers us a means of accounting for this disturbing power
in his discussion of Velasquez’s Las Meninas – a canvas that, like the
Siren games, plays with the visual conventions of its medium to exert
an unsettling fascination. As Mitchell notes, we are all aware ‘that the
figures in [paintings] do not really “look back” at us; they only appear
to do so’ (2005, 50). While this is ‘a primordial condition of pictures as
such’, Mitchell argues that Velasquez’s highly reflexive canvas ‘stages it
in an enhanced, extreme form, posing its tableau vivant for sovereign
beholders whose authority is subtly called into question even as it is com-
plimented’ (ibid.). Las Meninas, he concludes, ‘is a picture that wants
nothing from us while pretending to be totally oriented toward us’ (ibid.).
This analysis is the basis for Mitchell’s proposition that we should un-
derstand images and other media not as alive or dead, animate or inani-
mate, but as ‘undead’ (ibid. 54–55). He argues that it is we, the viewers,
who (re)animate these ‘undead’ artefacts by pretending that they need us,
demanding our attention and complicity (an argument Liu sees as a de-
velopment of sorts of Jentsch’s thesis on the uncanny (2011, 214)). If the
Siren series is about the undead in the sense that it pits the player against
revenant ‘corpse-people’ trapped in a temporal loop, it is also about the
undead in Mitchell’s sense: by discovering the player-character, Siren’s
shibito also expose the player, revealing that they have become shame-
fully, irrationally absorbed in playing along with the game.
In Siren as in Silent Hill 2, then, horror is mingled with bathos, the
deflating experience of being brought to one’s senses by games that seem
to circumvent our rational faculties and coax us into an automaton-like
quiescence. We know we cannot ‘really’ be seen by our artificially intel-
ligent enemies, but it comes as a shock when they spot us all the same.
Graeme Kirkpatrick (2011) addresses this alloy of horror and absurdity
in his discussion of the ‘QTE’ (‘Quick Timer Event’) sections in another
horror game, Capcom’s Resident Evil 4. In these sequences, the player
must rapidly respond to button prompts, flashed up on the screen, to
survive. For Kirkpatrick, ‘the appearance of the button [icons] and the
sudden quickening of events seems to conspire to produce a sense of ri-
diculousness’, so that, in the midst of playing ‘an adult game’ renowned
for its capacity to conjure tension, dread and shock, players ‘are sud-
denly offered the spectacle of our own activity as something childish. We
see ourselves pressing a brightly coloured plastic button on an infantile
toy’ (ibid. 107). Much as in Siren, the player is shocked into seeing them-
selves ‘objectively’ and shamed into a realization that they have become
too excited, too invested, too willing to submit to the game’s premise.
K irkpatrick emphasizes the material and visceral dimensions of this
shock, the way that it returns him to a bathetic consciousness of ‘the con-
troller itself and with it the world of objects including our own bodies’
(ibid. 110), undermining the ‘repression’ of the material that games seek
to effect. In failing to complete these QTEs, he becomes newly aware
that ‘good play is about feeling … [and], at least partly, a function of
not looking at or thinking about our hands’ (ibid. 97, emphasis in origi
nal). As I observed in Chapter 4, once we have internalized our avatar
we cease to be conscious of the actions required to operate them, and,
to a degree, of material reality more generally. Returning to reality can,
consequently, be a deflating and even shameful experience – especially if
we have been playing when we should have been doing something else.
While designers like Peter Molyneux and Will Wright have lain stress
on the videogame’s unique ability to produce a sense of guilt, causing
us to regret fictional actions, David Surman points out that games also
make us ‘feel guilty when virtual work overrides real’ – when, that is,
we find ourselves devoting time to grinding through a game, even one
we are not really enjoying, rather than answering e-mails or feeding our
cat (Surman 2005). At such moments, we are confronted with the horror
of having become the kind of stereotypical gamer Botting describes –
a sad individual who likes to think they are in control but is really a
zombie-like slave to their technologies.
Shame and Cybernetics

By now the case for viewing survival horror through a cybernetic rather
than a psychoanalytic lens should be clearer. While survival horror
games undoubtedly participate in a gothic tradition intimately bound up
with psychoanalytic discourse, they also reflect anxieties peculiar to the
culture of AI and ‘the new unconscious’ – an unconscious understood
not according to a Freudian or Lacanian framework but in terms of
neurophysiology, systems theory and the ‘technogenetic’ co-evolution of
humans and intelligent machines (Hayles 2012). Survival horror games
capitalize on the cybernetic bond that videogames establish between
player and hardware, pleasurably unsettling us by foregrounding the
ability of even comparatively crude technologies to elicit not just fear
and shock, but also a sense of bathetic absurdity and self-consciousness
that has to do with our susceptibility to being ‘played’ by machines. Such
games use well-worn gothic tricks to push our physiological buttons, elic-
iting jump scares, sweaty palms and accelerated heartbeats – suggesting,
in so doing, that the player themselves may be no more than a fleshy
input/output machine. While they may be full of Freudian signifiers at
the level of their scenarios, they also entangle both their players and
their player-characters in communications networks, circuits and feed-
back loops which bridge and uncannily blur the divide between humans
and non-humans, reminding us that ‘debates about communication’ are
inevitably debates about ‘the status of the human being, our place in a
universe populated by simians and cyborgs, fetuses and the brain-dead,
angels and UFOs, “primitives” and smart machines, the dead and the
distant’ (Peters 1999, 228–229). If these games highlight our tendency
to anthropomorphize computers, they also suggest that we may be an-
thropomorphizing ourselves by clinging to hubristic, humanistic notions
of subjectivity which deny that we may have more in common with com-
puters than we would care to admit: as Franklin notes, most 1940s cy-
berneticists considered Freud’s theories – which Freud famously argued
should be counted alongside Copernican cosmology and Darwinian evo-
lutionary theory as one of the three ‘severe blows’ inflicted by ‘science’
on ‘human narcissism’ – to be no more than ‘mystifications intended
to preserve the humanist ideal of the subject against the insights of the
most recent fields of scientific knowledge’ (Freud 2001 [1917], 139–141;
Franklin 2015, 143).
In this section, I want to develop this argument by looking more closely
at the role of technology in the Siren series. Like many survival horror
titles (Kirkland 2009b), the Siren games are rife with often conspicu-
ously low-tech media and communications technologies, from rotary
telephones and FM radios to handwritten letters and faded photos. I also
want to use the work of cyberneticist and psychologist S ilvan Tomkins
to unpack survival horror’s ability to produce the kinds of shame re-
sponse that Kirkpatrick and Surman describe. For Adam Frank and
Eve Sedgwick (1995), Tomkins’ work provides a valuable alternative to
psychoanalytic theories of the subject, offering a nuanced account of
human affect rooted in cybernetics’ vocabulary of signals, circuits and
homeostasis. Particularly interesting, for them, is the fact that Tomkins
understands shame and self-consciousness not in terms of the individual
psyche shaped by ‘Oedipality and repression’ but as a consequence of
miscommunication and misapprehension, of breakdowns in consensus
or failures of reciprocity (ibid. 98). Thus, a shame response could be
triggered ‘because one is suddenly looked at by one who is strange …
or one started to smile but found one was smiling at a stranger’ (ibid.).
Likewise, shame can be triggered by the Jentschian experience of being
unable to determine whether something is animate or inanimate, sentient
or non-sentient, a subject or a thing – hence our tendency to blush when
we start speaking only to realize the voice at the other end of the phone-
line is a pre-recorded message. That the affective charge of horror games
might have to do with these kinds of shameful confusion is also suggested
by Kirkpatrick, who relates his sudden, bathetic apprehension of his own
absurdity to Bergson’s (1984 [1900]) theory of the comic, which holds
that the purpose of laughter is to reinforce the division between the lively,
malleable stuff of human consciousness and the deathly inflexibility of
material things – to shore up, in other words, the very distinction bet
ween things and persons that, for Jentsch as for Liu, the uncanny blurs.
Siren’s affective intensity comes, then, not from its being totally ‘im-
mersive’ or its ability to tap into sublimated urges and repressed traumas,
but from the way that the game suddenly and dramatically estranges
players with pointed reminders that if they are scared, it is because they
are scaring themselves by imaginatively investing in the game’s scenario
and taking the AI characters playing at being zombies seriously. Scarier
still (or, if you prefer, more ridiculous) is the fact that we succumb again
and again to this pretence, that each revelation merely restarts the same
bathetic cycle, whereby stretches of immersed absorption are punctuated
by flashes of shameful self-awareness. Following Tomkins, we can see
these bathetic jolts as correctives to excessive or misplaced investments
of attention; for him, feelings like shame and disgust ‘operate[] only
after interest or enjoyment has been activated, and inhibit[] one or the
other or both’ (Frank and Sedgwick 1995, 97).
This tendency to overinvest in technological simulacra is brought
to the fore in a mission that occurs late in the original Siren, as the
player-characters attempt to penetrate the shibito ‘nest’ that has over-
run the town. The mission opens with the player’s route blocked by a
gun-toting shibito standing guard at the end of a parade of shops. By
sightjacking another enemy, players can obtain the phone number for
one of these shops, call it using a nearby phone and, when the guard
leaves his post to investigate the ringing, slip past. Having done so they
reach a residential area where they stumble across an abandoned house
containing a shrine of sorts to a pop star of the 1950s. A record of hers,
left on the turntable, can be used to decoy another shibito. Drawn to
the source of the recorded voice, he becomes vulnerable to an ambush –
unless we wait too long, at which point the record will begin to skip,
breaking the illusion and jolting the NPC out of its trance. On one level,
these puzzles are about giving the player an opportunity to assert their
superiority over the AI, to demonstrate the ‘wideawake adaptability’ and
presence of mind that notionally differentiates humans from machines
(Bergson 1984 [1900], 67). At the same time, however, these scenes of
rapt zombies momentarily duped and hypnotized by crude technological
tricks offer the player an image of their own loss of objectivity at those
moments when they are taken in by the game. Undead creatures held
spellbound by media that are, in Mitchell’s terms, equally undead, these
shibito figure the potential for new forms of misunderstanding, decep-
tion and exploitation that new technologies bring.
Which is not to claim that the Siren games are entirely pessimistic
about connectivity; in fact, technological and telepathic connections are
often presented as a means of achieving things it would be impossible to
do alone, most strikingly in Forbidden Siren 2, which features s everal
missions in which the player controls a partially sighted character, Shu
Mikami, by sightjacking his guide dog Tsukasa. Like the games analysed
in Chapter 4, these missions draw parallels between human/computer
interaction and human/animal interaction. As Peters (1999) notes,
the question of communication with animals has long been bound up
with that of communication with machines and computer interaction
(243–244). But where humanity has traditionally preferred to see itself
as ‘standing on an ontological ladder betwixt the beasts and the angels’,
he hopes that contemporary technology’s blurring of the categories of
animal, human and machine will temper our hubris and push us to-
wards an understanding of ‘humanity as a nexus within a biological
network and circuit of information flows’ (ibid. 244). The Shu/Tsukasa
missions show how games might help us to effect such a shift, while
also suggesting that it might prove liberating – if humbling – rather than
scary. Controlling Mikami from Tsukasa’s perspective means seeing ev-
erything in monochrome and re-learning how to navigate gamic space:
so accustomed is any habitual gamer to a camera that tracks their avatar
that playing via the viewpoint of another character is intensely disorient-
ing. As players have no direct control over Tsukasa’s movements (the AI
dog retains, so to speak, a mind of its own) it can be hard to keep Shu
in the frame. When navigating from Tsukasa’s viewpoint, pushing what
is normally ‘forward’ on the control pad might actually move Shu back-
wards or sideways for example. In these sequences, as with the QTEs
that prove so prejudicial to Kirkpatrick’s sense of immersion in Resident
Evil 4, the control scheme ceases to seem ‘natural’ and the materiality
of the interface is reaffirmed. Where action games tend to flatter players
with stories of sovereign individual taking control, Forbidden Siren 2
presents a world in which the player’s agency is shared with (and con-
tested by) non-human actors and collaborators, from animals to AIs,
forcing players to acknowledge and adapt themselves to other ways of
apprehending reality.
Impasse and Evolution
Forbidden Siren 2’s Shu/Tsukasa missions take the tendencies, strategies
and preoccupations that define survival horror to an extreme. The will-
ingness to place ludic and mechanical constraints on the player, the im-
petus on avoiding and/or collaborating with uncanny NPCs in order to
survive and the use of gothic conventions to foster suspense, shock and
disquiet are all in evidence here, with the plight of the player-character
serving as an eldritch allegory for the situation of a human race en-
tangled in increasingly complex relationships of dependency with AIs.
The same is true of the final game this chapter will address, Creative
Assembly’s Alien: Isolation. But while this might make it seem like the
survival horror genre has not been subject to any radical developments
in the years separating 2008’s Siren: Blood Curse from Isolation’s 2014
release, this is not the case. In fact, the genre has undergone something
of an identity crisis – a crisis that, insofar as it sheds light on the genre’s
anomalous position within the triple A industry, gamer identities and the
direction pursued by Isolation, is worth reviewing here.
Silent Hill 2 and the PS2 Siren games date from what many fans
now see as survival horror’s golden age, a period usually understood to
stretch from the 1996 release of Capcom’s Biohazard/Resident Evil for
the PlayStation (the game that coined the term ‘survival horror’) to that
of Resident Evil 4 for the GameCube in 2005. That game abandoned the
series’ familiar control scheme and its claustrophobic static camera an-
gles in favour of a more fluid and action-oriented approach to gameplay.
This move proved divisive among fans, compromising the feelings of
disempowerment that had made the genre so perversely compelling for
some players. As Tanya Krzywinska (2002) long ago observed, where
many videogames strive to imbue players with a sense of empowerment,
choice and control (however illusory), survival horror games have always
been noteworthy for the readiness and relish with which they disem-
power players, in keeping with the horror genre’s interest in forces that
‘threaten … human agency’ (13). Weapons tend to be scarce, enemies
plentiful and powerful, player-characters vulnerable, environments lab-
yrinthine and disorienting. Granting players (a degree of) control only
to dramatically revoke it, survival horror gameplay is structured around
the rhythmic interchange of tension and release, agency and impotence.
But if Resident Evil 4 alienated some survival horror fans, it was also
tremendously popular and influential, attracting players for whom the
uncompromising difficulty of prior horror games had been a source of
aggravation. For a while, there was a widespread sense that survival hor-
ror faced an insoluble catch 22: truly frightening titles were too demand-
ing (both mechanically and psychologically) to reach a mass audience,
especially now that the genre’s novelty factor had waned; action–horror
hybrids, while more user-friendly, risked sacrificing the genre’s capacity
to unsettle. As we have seen in previous chapters, however, the advent
of new distribution models, development environments and middleware
platforms has made it viable for developers to target smaller audiences
prepared to tolerate – if not eager to embrace – gameplay concepts from
which triple A publishers now shy away. As a result, recent years have
seen the release of numerous smaller-scale games – from Amnesia: The
Dark Descent and its sequel to Slender: The Eight Pages, Outlast and
Soma – that eschew Resident Evil 4’s action-heavy approach in favour
of a return to the principles of ‘classic’ survival horror. Alien: Isolation is
perhaps the highest profile example of this new wave of survival horror
titles, and is particularly noteworthy for the extent to which its deve
lopers foregrounded the role of AI programming in generating tense and
involving gameplay.
The Alien franchise is, as Angela Ndalianis (2004) argues, a paradig-
matic example of the logic of ‘seriality’ that governs the contemporary
entertainment industry, a logic underpinned by the drive to ruthlessly
exploit intellectual property across a globalized marketplace. Now a
sprawling transmedia universe, Alien had already spawned tens of in-
teractive spin-offs, from arcade beat ’em ups to portable sidescrollers,
prior to Isolation’s arrival. But where most games set in the Alien uni-
verse have taken cues from James Cameron’s gung-ho Vietnam allegory
Aliens, confronting players with waves of alien creatures who serve as
little more than canon fodder, Isolation opts (at least for the bulk of the
game) to pit players against just one alien. As the game’s lead designer
Gary Napper put it in a pre-release interview, ‘we kind of wanted to go
from the first film’, emphasizing ‘horror’ over combat (Hogarty 2014).
Reading between the lines, Napper’s comments seem calculated not just
to promote Isolation but to differentiate it from the 2013 first-person
shooter Aliens: Colonial Marines. For Jayemanne and Keogh (2016),
that game, which cast players as heavily armed space marines tasked
with eradicating scores of aliens, exemplifies the approach that most
videogame developers have taken in remediating the Alien franchise.
They argue that games like Colonial Marines betray the effects of this
approach in three ways: thematically, they place an ‘emphasis on ma-
rine capability’ while ditching the ‘feminist and anti-corporate tropes’
that are a core part of the films; at a game design level, they centre on
equipping the player with the ‘fetishised equipment and weaponry of
the marines’ in a way that ‘align[s] with the techno-masculinist “ideal
player” [to] ensure a tight match between game and ideal player type’;
and finally, they invert ‘the structure of the gaze’ that defines the films,
so that the alien creature becomes a target to be scanned for rather than
a ‘stalking hunter of horror’ we can hardly bear to look at.
Jayemanne and Keogh argue that these changes are made in the ser-
vice of the ideology of masculine ‘ego-centric technicity’ that dominates
triple A gaming culture, an ideology which holds that games should
afford the implicitly male player an opportunity to affirm their techno
logical competency by asserting their dominance over the gamespace
and the entities inhabiting it (ibid.). As we have seen in both this chap-
ter and Chapter 3, survival horror games are notable for their willing-
ness to bend (though not break) these rules. While different titles might
represent more or less radical departures from convention, the genre as
a whole is characterized by its focus on ordinary people whose mem-
ories, neuroses and interpersonal relationships drive the games’ plots,
its tradition of female NPCs and protagonists, its focus on confronting
unarmed or underequipped players with enemies more powerful and/
or intelligent than typical videogame adversaries and its use of play me-
chanics, graphical effects and perspectives that make it difficult to gain
an overview of the field of play. In many ways, the debates as to the
genre’s future prospects sparked by Resident Evil 4 were debates about
the extent to which this idiosyncratic genre could be brought in line with
the norms of an increasingly risk-averse industry, rooted in the logic of
egocentric technicity.
Isolation pushes back against this logic, casting players as Amanda
Ripley (daughter of Sigourney Weaver’s Alien heroine) and pitting her
against a creature she has no means of killing (though players do even-
tually find weapons with which they can temporarily repel it). If these
decisions go against the industry’s conviction that triple A gamers prefer
egocentric power fantasies starring male heroes, they were perhaps eas-
ier to justify in the wake of the criticism meted out to Colonial Marines,
which was not held to be a good masculinist egocentric shooter even by
those for whom such a prospect would have appealed. The game was parti
cularly derided for its animation and AI, which rendered H.R. Giger’s
xenomorph a source of slapstick hilarity rather than cosmic terror, and
saw forums and social media platforms overrun with images, GIFs and
videos of AI aliens freezing and jittering, glitching through solid objects
or waddling stiltedly along, comically oblivious to the player-character.
Napper and Isolation’s lead artist Jude Bond perhaps had these bathetic
images in mind during their interview with Hogarty; certainly, they re-
turn again and again to their Alien game’s unique selling point, ‘an alien
AI that ultimately utilizes its senses and does what it wants when it’s
hunting … a dynamic alien rather than a scripted alien’, a ‘deadly killing
thing that’s brilliantly designed, can move around the space believably
and is big, is scary and is totally unpredictable’ (Hogarty 2014). Indeed,
so marked was Creative Assembly’s desire to foreground the game’s AI
that journalists writing previews were shown flow charts of the alien’s
behaviour. Isolation, then, constituted an attempt to both revive a genre
that had been considered more or less commercially moribund by the
late 2000s and to remediate a cinematic franchise that fans felt had
been ill-served by recent videogame adaptations. The solution Creative
Assembly proposed was to aim not just for visual fidelity to Scott’s film,
but also for what we might call procedural fidelity – modelling patterns
of behaviour and seeking to foster certain kinds of gameplay scenario
through the use of AI.
For the first few hours of Isolation, the xenomorph is noteworthy
by its absence. While fleeting glimpses, ominous noises and overheard
conversations serve to remind players that there is something lurking
in the shadows, their primary adversaries in this part of the game are
androids who behave not unlike the AI characters in earlier survival hor-
ror games, tirelessly patrolling the same beat until they see or hear the
player-character. My first encounter with the xenomorph came as I was
attempting to escape one of these androids. Sprinting down a corridor,
my avatar suddenly came to an abrupt halt as the camera jerked upwards
to show the creature dropping out of a ceiling duct, multiple rows of
teeth bared, into her face. So effective was this introduction to the alien
that I assumed it had to be scripted. Reloading the game, I carefully cir-
cumnavigated the duct – only to run into the creature as I rounded the
next corner. As this suggests, Isolation’s xenomorph is indeed more dy-
namic than many AI characters: where Siren requires players to learn the
routines of the shibito using sightjacking and to plan their escape route
accordingly, the xenomorph’s capriciousness means no route is necessar-
ily a safe route in Isolation. This, combined with the fact that the alien
is impossible to kill, means that much of Isolation’s first act is given over
to the sometimes acutely frustrating process of repeatedly dying and re-
loading as we build up a model of how the creature thinks and perceives.
Realizing it too can hear the beeping motion tracker device that warns
us of its presence, we learn to use the device sparingly; finding that the
xenomorph will sometimes spot us even if we are hidden in a locker or
under a desk, we become less complacent about taking cover. In short,
we must learn to think like an AI, assembling a picture, however, rudi
mentary, inaccurate or superstitious, of the systems the game uses to
govern the alien’s behaviour.
In her celebrated psychoanalytic reading of Alien, Barbara Creed (2000
[1993]) frames Scott’s film as a compulsive replaying of the Freudian pri-
mal scene and Giger’s xenomorph as an incarnation of the ‘monstrous
feminine’ which collapses the figure of the ‘oral-sadistic mother’ and
that of the ‘phallic-mother’ into a combination that ‘both repels and
attracts’ the viewer, leaving them as incapable of looking as they are of
looking away (132). For Jayemanne and Keogh (2016), Isolation suc-
ceeds where most Alien games fail in part because it restores to the crea-
ture its status as a source of horror and fascination rather than a moving
target. While I would agree, I would also argue that, ultimately, Isola-
tion’s xenomorph is horrifying less as a spectacle which speaks to the
traumatic process of Freudian subject formation than as a procedural
intelligence whose agency limits and threatens that of the player. Viewed
in terms of cybernetic circuits rather than oedipal triangles, Isolation
offers a depiction of what N. Katherine Hayles (2012) describes as
‘technogenesis’. As her book’s title announces, Hayles is interested in
how technologies shape ‘How We Think’ – and in particular how new
modes of thinking are ‘coevolv[ing]’ alongside digital technologies, with
‘both sides of the engagement (humans and technologies) … undergoing
coordinated transformations’ (ibid. 81). As she stresses, this process of
transformation is ‘not about progress’ and is not necessarily ‘moving
in a positive direction’ (ibid.). Nor, however, does Hayles believe tech-
nology’s effects are as straightforwardly baleful as the likes of Nicolas
Carr (for whom the Internet is causing ‘a general decline in intellectual
capacity’) would suggest (ibid. 2). Where, for Hayles, human/machine
technogenesis is simply a fact, Isolation outdoes even sceptics like Carr
by framing technogenesis as a horror story and human/AI relations in
terms of hypnosis, contagion and parasitism.
Of course, the Alien series has always been concerned with parasit-
ism: as everyone who has seen Alien’s notorious dinner table scene will
recall, xenomorphs lay their eggs in the bodies of captive hosts. In Iso-
lation, however, there is no alternative to parasitic co-option: if players
have managed to avoid becoming a host, it is because they have learned
to understand how the alien AI thinks and to see things from its point of
view, internalizing the creature’s modes of apprehending the gameworld
and reshaping their own behaviour accordingly. The choice, in other
words, is not between being contaminated or remaining ‘pure’, but bet
ween different forms of incorporation. By forcing us to accommodate
our behaviour to the alien’s, Isolation offers a violent crash course in
technogenesis. Requiring the gamer’s mind to run a simulation of a
game developer’s simulation of a sci-fi creature’s mind, it foregrounds
the eerie intimacy of human/machine relationships in which our brains
and bodies adapt to become more compatible with digital logic. Such
dynamics are not unique to games: they are also at work when iPhone
users alter the way that they pronounce particular words in response
to the parameters of Siri’s speech recognition systems, or compose text
messages informed by the vocabulary of the device’s autocomplete soft-
ware. Even such banal actions attest to human/AI symbiosis as a present
reality rather than a threatening prospect, showing that we are already
part-software.
The Siren series, too, figures human/AI relations in terms of contagion
and corruption, leaving it unclear whether people are being turned into
shibito by an ancient curse, an alien being or a quasi-viral infection car-
ried in the blood. But where Siren decentres and scares players by put-
ting its AI shibito on something like an equal footing (at least insofar as
they, too, can ‘jack’ the camera), Isolation goes further, all but reversing
the relationship that normally obtains between player-characters and
hostile NPCs. Where in most games we sit at the top of the food chain,
in Isolation players are entirely at the mercy of a being more powerful
and better adapted to its environment than their avatar will ever be – as
Jayemanne and Keogh (2016) argue, ‘this is as far from ego-centric de-
sign as could be’. If Siren’s shibito scare us by appearing to gaze back at
us, meanwhile, the xenomorph is scary because it offers no possibility of
dialogue, compassion, or even acknowledgement – as Luckhurst (2014)
writes, ‘the crucial part of the design for Alien was to resist giving the
creature eyes, abolishing any chance of mutual recognition, of a look
that could be returned’ (60). Where Siren and Silent Hill use AI to pres-
ent us with beings that are either not-quite human or no-longer human,
Isolation confronts us with something terrifyingly other.
None of which is to claim that advances in videogame AI techno
logy mean that Isolation is ‘more scary’ than the Siren games or S ilent
Hill 2. The comparative crudity of Maria’s AI is eerie because it under-
lines the stubbornness of James’ refusal to accept she isn’t real; likewise,
the predictability of Siren’s automata is eerie because it caricatures the
extent to which people are prisoners of habit, helping to flesh out the
game’s depiction of a village where the inhabitants’ day-to-day routines
are so ingrained that even the apocalypse can’t disrupt them. Nor is
Isolation’s AI technology so faultless that the game is free from quirks
and lapses. In this sense, one might argue that Isolation proves per-
haps too reminiscent of ‘classic’ survival horror. But, as I have said, this
cycle – whereby we are repeatedly reminded that the game we are play-
ing is only a simulation but repeatedly find ourselves becoming absorbed
in it nonetheless – is not just a regrettable inevitability but, in the hands
of canny designers, its own source of horror.
It is oddly appropriate, as such, that the Alien franchise should have
provided the vehicle for Creative Assembly’s attempt to at once revive
and reinvent ‘classic’ survival horror. Not for nothing does Ndalianis
(2004) see the Alien cycle as representative of the contemporary me-
diasphere’s regime of ‘neo-baroque seriality’, whereby fictions resist
closure in favour of repetition with variation, spawning ‘polycentric’
systems of stories and images (41). In each Alien narrative, the heroes
attempt not just to eradicate the creature, but to wipe every trace of
the species from human memory, lest we succumb again to the dream
of bending the aliens to our will. But even as each episode is obliged to
criticize corporate greed and hubris it slots into a system of texts that
witnesses Twentieth Century Fox’s determination for audiences never to
forget about Alien. They keep reviving the franchise to exploit it afresh,
and audiences keep obliging them – as Luckhurst’s (2014) description of
his ongoing relationship with the franchise attests. His account of going
to the cinema to see every Alien film, no matter how awful it promises
to be, offers a portrait of ‘ritual[ised]’ media consumption increasingly
tinged by anticlimax, shame and ‘disappointment’, by the sense that one
should really be old enough to know better by now (ibid. 87). In so doing
it speaks to the anxieties that survival horror so effectively plays upon.
Conclusion
In a June 2016 article posing the question ‘are satnavs changing our
brains?’ Guardian journalist Greg Milner recounts stories of motorists
led disastrously, sometimes fatally astray by their GPS devices. Follow-
ing the machine’s instructions, these drivers suddenly find that the road
has become a dirt track, that the bridge has collapsed, that they are in
the middle of a lake or teetering on the brink of cliff. In the hands of a
Stephen King, one can imagine these becoming tales of machinic malevo-
lence, of hitherto docile technologies turning on their complacent owners
and operators. As Milner seems to appreciate, though, the truly disqui-
eting aspect of these anecdotes is the drivers’ ‘uncritical acceptance of
turn-by-turn commands’ issued to them – an acceptance that reduces the
human in the driving seat to the status of a mere functionary, an automa-
ton under the control of an AI. As in Liu’s reading of ‘The Sandman’ and
Botting’s take on the digital gothic, the horror here is not of machines
coming to life or irrational thoughts taking on solid form, but of puta-
tively deep, thoughtful, autonomous human subjects proving to be no
more intelligent – and perhaps rather less intelligent – than machines. The
Freudian gothic elicits shock and shame by proposing that beneath the
subject’s civilized surface they remain carnal, bloodthirsty and atavistic;
survival horror speaks to the fear that perhaps the surface is all there is.
Expressed in scenarios that see humans duped, zombified or infected by
inhuman others, these fears also inform the way that these games con-
tinually coax players into taking digital simulations at face value only to
shock them back into an awareness of their own suggestibility. Whether
by giving players the power to sightjack and then turning it against them,
or by making them the prey of a remorseless killer creature which might
be lurking anywhere, these games conjure something of the unease we
feel upon realizing that the same technologies which enable and extend
us also render us traceable, available and s usceptible – whether to spam,
viruses, statistical analysis, government surveillance, hacking, doxxing
or identity theft. While the Googlemail chat bar offers users the reas-
suring option to ‘go invisible’ (to our contacts, if not to Google), these
games dramatize our visibility and vulnerability. Their storyworlds tend
to be low-tech, but the Jentschian dilemmas they dramatize (alive or
dead? person or machine?) show them to be products of a world where
it is becoming ever harder to distinguish life from ‘not-quite-life’, ‘live’
interaction from mere simulation. Heavily indebted to non-interactive
media, from gothic novels to zombie movies, these games also evoke, as
only interactive texts can, the bathos of machine-mediated life – a life of
spam e-mails and artificially intelligent aides, automated apology mes-
sages and algorithmically targeted advertising.
In the 15 years since Silent Hill 2, AI has come a long way: a re-
cent essay included in a collection titled The Nonhuman Turn sees
Mark B.N. Hansen propose that the familiar ‘prosthetic narrative of me-
dia technology’ (whereby technologies are understood primarily as ways
of extending or augmenting human capacities) is being rapidly eroded by
the dizzying volume of exchanges and interactions that now take place
between machinic agents operating in terms and on scales inaccessible
to human perception or understanding. For Hansen, these developments
are making it ever harder to believe that ‘real life will continue to require
our distinctly human modes of deliberation and agency’ (2015, 112,
135) – after all, what would super-intelligent computers want with be-
ings capable of becoming hopelessly absorbed in games of Pong? Where
advertisers and designers harp on gaming’s capacity to ‘immerse’ us,
survival horror games manifest a more ambivalent attitude, attesting to
the parlous nature of attention and the capacity of un/timely bathetic
‘flashes’ to compromise or heighten our investment in the scenarios digi-
tal media model, from combat to conversation. M itchell (2005) suggests
that attempts to inure ourselves to the illusionistic appeal of ‘undead’
media may be futile, arguing that if generations of critical theorists and
avant-garde artists have failed to do it then we are unlikely to find the
secret now. But while our fascination with ‘the subjectivized, animated
object in some form or other may be an incurable symptom’ (ibid. 30),
this does not mean it cannot be better understood. To this end, this
chapter has sought to show how the deep but precarious imaginative
involvement that games elicit can become, in the hands of developers
like Creative Assembly, Team Silent and Team Siren, not a handicap but
a resource. Where linear media are often at their most affecting when
meditating on the pathos of fate and the tragic dignity of the ‘deep’ in-
dividual, their games exploit the peculiarities of the videogame form
to bathetically highlight instances of miscommunication and malfunc-
tion, alienation and disillusionment, insisting that we are enmeshed with
sometimes scarily complex networks of non-humans. They show that
failures – whether players’ failures to win or AIs’ failures to ‘act hu-
man’ – are not necessarily failings, that they may in fact be the means
through which designers can articulate an account of how digitally me-
diated life feels. Where we tend to praise other media for inducing sym-
pathy, sorrow, contemplation or humility, survival horror games use AI
to elicit and explore the feelings of fear, frustration, dependency, doubt
and bathetic absurdity that intelligent machines gives rise to, encourag-
ing us to play with understandings of ‘intelligence’, ‘life’ and ‘communi-
cation’ even as they shift around us.
Note
1 These texts are of course drawing on a long tradition of more or less gothic
Pygmalion narratives about mechanical women, from Villiers de l’Isle-
Adam’s L’Eve Future/Tomorrow’s Eve to Harbou and Lang’s Metropolis.
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6 Mobile Subjects
Framing Selves and Spaces
By the mid-2000s, videogame spaces had come a long way from the
abstract mazes and featureless planes of early two-dimensional games.
Gameworlds had become so detailed and expansive, in fact, that players
sometimes struggled to find their way around them. Designers faced a
dilemma: how to create complex, visually rich, ‘immersive’ virtual spaces
without preventing players from discerning those spaces’ affordances and
underlying rules. A number of games arrived at the same solution to this
conundrum: equipping the player-character with an ‘augmented reality’
(AR) device. If real-world AR technologies turn ‘physical space’ into ‘aug-
mented space’ by ‘overlay[ing] it with dynamically changing information’
(Manovich 2007, 251, emphasis in original), the headsets and hand-
sets with which the heroes of Condemned Criminal Origins, Batman:
Arkham Asylum, Heavy Rain and their ilk are furnished use colour
coding, captioning and graphic overlays to strain out superficial details
and draw the player’s attention to enemies, items, alternative routes and
aspects of the gameworld that can be interacted with. While such systems
have become increasingly common in triple A games, not everyone likes
them: indeed, in a 2010 talk about Arkham Asylum, the game’s art di-
rector David Hego joked that he had ‘want[ed] to cry’ when he heard that
many players had gone through the entire game with the ‘detective vision’
filter engaged, ignoring the work he and his team had put into crafting a
detailed and atmospheric playspace (McWhertor 2010).
This chapter considers how videogames frame spaces and how, in
the process, they position players as digital subjects. It focuses on three
games that use innovative or unusual graphical techniques to draw at-
tention to this positioning process: Killer 7, Fez and Pokémon GO. Each
of these games plays on the paradox of the screen as a two-dimensional
surface that opens (or seems to open) onto three-dimensional depths.
Going beyond the forms of ‘narrative architecture’ that Henry Jenkins
(2004) has described, they show how videogames can use spatial meta
phors and optical illusions to articulate novel ‘points of view’. Before
moving on to discuss these games in detail, however, I want to expand on
Hego’s account of being reduced to tears by his own game’s AR system –
an account that bears not just on the question of how and why people
142 Mobile Subjects
play videogames, but also on that of what videogames can tell us about
digital visuality and spatiality. Graeme Kirkpatrick (2004) would argue
that what has upset Hego is the revelation of gamer culture’s fundamen-
tal cynicism. Where we often think of gaming as an opportunity to take
on other roles and explore fantasy worlds, for Kirkpatrick gameplay al-
ways comes down, sooner or later, to the process of working out what it
takes to win and doing it over and over again. Drawing on Sloterdijk’s
(1987) Critique of Cynical Reason, he notes that if Sloterdijk’s cynic
‘sees through the illusions of power but does nothing to dispel them’, the
same is true of the gamer who, even after they have become ‘aware of
the underlying algorithms that guide the game … succumbs to the mean-
ingless disenchantment of the interface and continues to play regardless
of how empty the experience has become’ (Kirkpatrick 2004, 117–118).
In-game AR systems speak to this cynical imperative, expediting the
process of ‘seeing through’ the game’s superficial charms to discern its
algorithmic essence. Read this way, such systems also begin to take on
an ‘allegorithmic’ significance (Galloway 2006, 91): for Galloway, ‘to
play game means to play the code of the game. To win means to know
the system. And thus to interpret a game means to interpret its algorithm
(to discover its parallel “allegorithm”)’ (ibid. 90–91). McKenzie Wark
expands on this idea, suggesting that games reveal an allegorithmic di-
mension when ‘the gamer discovers a relationship between appearances
and algorithm in the game’ that reflects a truth about the role of tech-
nology in ‘everyday life’ (2007, 128–133). To translate this into terms
relevant to Arkham Asylum and its ilk, the player’s recovery of informa-
tion from the gameworld by way of the tools with which their avatar is
equipped represents an allegorithm of the player’s mastery of the game –
and, more generally, of fantasies of mastering an unruly, recalcitrant
material world using technologies that render it legible and tractable.
These critics suggest that to identify as a ‘gamer’ is to affirm a com-
mitment to seeing through things, to going beyond the surface. Video
games repeatedly restage the drama of a player who finds him/herself
temporarily halted – whether thwarted by an obstacle or awed by a
spectacular view – before experiencing a revelation that allows them to
progress, to escape stasis, to reassert their dominance over their environ-
ment. The rise of systems like detective vision – which, ironically, add
supplementary layers to the interface in order to help players see through
it – suggest just how tricky it is to create coherent illusory spaces while en-
suring that players are able to discern their workings, however. In trying
to strike this balance they highlight the existence of two tensions that all
of the games I will be discussing in this chapter engage with in one way
or another. The first tension is between captivation and control: as Hego’s
tears suggest, while the process of learning to see through the interface
and find the solution can be very satisfying, it can also be tinged with a
sense of loss. Players assert control only at the cost of blinding themselves
Mobile Subjects 143
to the aesthetic pleasures that initially drew them to the game, of becoming
cynical and jaded. The second tension is between taking control and dele-
gating control. As I have observed, systems like detective vision help us to
‘see through things’ by interposing an additional interface layer ‘between’
the player and the gameworld. If they reveal certain things, they do so by
obscuring others. We gain more control only by becoming beholden to
the technology that grants us that control. It’s perhaps for this reason that
more committed gamers are often drawn to practices like glitch hunting
(combing games for interesting bugs and quirks), boundary breaking (at-
tempting to access parts of the environment the developers never intended
them to reach) and ‘speedrunning’ (discovering the quickest possible route
through a game, often making use of glitches and exploits), practices
which go beyond identifying the structures that underpin play to bend or
even break those structures. But if, in cases such as these, gamer culture’s
investment in ‘seeing through’ things inspires benign curiosity and admi-
rable ingenuity, we should note that it can also assume more troubling
forms. The accusations of corruption, bad faith and malign intent levelled
at developers, journalists and academics during ‘gamergate’, for example,
bespeak not just an intense aversion to being duped or talked down to,
but also a paranoiac flair for finding hostile alliances and covert attempts
at manipulation lurking around every corner – as we saw in Chapter 3,
certain gamergaters even became convinced of the existence of a state-
sponsored feminist conspiracy to destroy gaming culture from within.
While this chapter will not dwell on these events, they shed light on
the facets of gamer identity it does address. They also speak to the con-
cerns of other digital subjects: trends like taping over one’s webcam or
undergoing ‘digital detox’ express a more general sense among users of
networked digital devices that, by naively succumbing to the superficial
allure and aesthetic pleasure of digital interfaces, we risk picking up
pernicious habits and exposing ourselves to the machinations of shad-
owy entities out to con or control us. Scholars like Mark Andrejevic
(2013), meanwhile, read conspiracy theories as desperate attempts to
shore up collective identities and visions of how the world ought to be
in response to the daunting condition of ‘infoglut’ brought about by the
web (228–229). Games, then, are not unique in fostering an urge to see
through the interface to some underlying structure. They do, however,
provide a key site for working out these anxieties about naivety, control
and technological enchantment. As we have seen in previous chapters,
while videogames are now a mainstream proposition and are no longer
considered to be just for children, there is still an uneasiness, both within
and outside of ‘hardcore’ gamer culture, about being seen to coincide too
closely with the stereotype of the gaming ‘geek’ enthralled by the crude
and cartoonish fantasy scenarios unfolding onscreen (Thornham 2011,
69–70; Kirkpatrick 2012). For gamers, the wish to retain a childlike
capacity to be captivated and confounded by technology vies with the
144 Mobile Subjects
desire to demonstrate a mature command of it, informed by a working
knowledge of the systems beneath the surface. These tensions are vividly
dramatized in speedrunners’ commentaries on games, which often entail
tender mockery of both the game being played and the runner’s younger
self – a self not yet sophisticated enough to see through the interface or
skilled enough to exploit the opportunities it affords the in-the-know
player. And, as we shall see, these same tensions animate Killer 7, Fez
and Pokémon GO – games which ask players to think about how images
and interfaces situate digital subjects.
Points of View
Having begun to set out how I will be addressing questions of space
and subjectivity in this chapter, it’s perhaps worth saying a bit about
what I won’t be doing. From here, one might go on to elaborate the
ways in which videogames are bound up with what Jay (1993) calls ‘the
dominant Cartesian perspectivalist scopic regime’ of Western modernity
(363), and with what Mirzoeff theorizes as ‘visuality’, a system of tech-
niques, technologies and institutions that have functioned not just to
order, mediate and archive reality, but also to authorize and aestheticize
its domination by those in possession of the requisite knowledge and
equipment (Mirzoeff 2011, 35). Videogames, and especially first-person
shooters, often construct a martial, colonial, Cartesian subject position
for the player, expressing dreams of splitting the mind from the body
and making players the bearers of a deadly, digitally-augmented gaze
that reduces others to objects and ‘enframes’ environments as ‘standing
reserve[s] for technology’s instrumentalization’ (Friedberg 2006, 96).
They are, of course, intimately entangled with the military–industrial–
entertainment complex (De Peuter and Dyer-Witheford 2009; Crogan
2011; Chinen 2014). If I am not going to take this approach, it is in
part because so much excellent work has already been done in this di-
rection. It is also, however, because while I think that framing games in
these terms is entirely valid (especially when it comes to triple A games)
I also think that it is important to offer more granular accounts of gam-
ing, space and subjectivation. As Jay (1993) notes, there has always
been ‘a multiplicity of scopic regimes’ at work in modern culture (133).
Friedberg, meanwhile, contends that the rise of the computer has spurred
the emergence of a new ‘visual vernacular’ characterized by a ‘frac-
tured, multiple, simultaneous, time-shiftable sense of space and time’
while also arguing that it was only through ‘conflation’ and elision that
Cartesian perspectivalism came to seem like one coherent, pernicious
phenomenon in the first place (2006, 3, 48). As this suggests, critiques of
visuality’s totalizing aspirations can themselves have totalizing effects,
and sometimes risk making the operations they warn against seem like
faits accomplis – as if the construction of completely convincing virtual
Mobile Subjects 145
spaces and the digitization of real spaces were not just fantasies (albeit
ones being actively pursued) but done deals.
It’s with this in mind that this chapter addresses three games that sub-
vert, repurpose or reflexively foreground the techniques games employ to
create ostensibly solid and coherent virtual environments. On one level,
they are all videogames about videogames, highly self-referential and
steeped in the culture and history of gaming. If that history is often fig-
ured as a technologically driven progression from flat and abstract play-
fields to deep and realistic 3D gameworlds, these games can help us to
complicate that idea. They foreground gaming’s engagement with a wide
variety of technologies, techniques, representational conventions and cul-
tural histories. They also attest to how profoundly its visual and spa-
tial vocabulary has been shaped by exchanges between North A merica
and Japan (which, from the mid-1980s onwards, has played a crucial
role in global gaming culture, particularly in the domain of console and
handheld gaming), challenging the assumption that videogames can be
neatly slotted into the scopic history of ‘Western’ modernity. Beyond that,
though, they merit analysis for what they have to say about how interfaces
and infrastructures enable (or encourage) digital subjects to assume par-
ticular perspectives. Killer 7 and Fez portray fragmented, cryptic spaces
that defy mapping, requiring us to perpetually switch between conflicting
points of view to make progress. Pokémon GO, meanwhile, attempts a
layering of gamespace onto real space but, in its failure to achieve a seam-
less synthesis, ends up offering something far more interesting, drawing
the player’s notice to the layers of infrastructure – from subterranean
cables to airborne electromagnetic pulses – which make seemingly ‘magi-
cal’ technologies work. All three games ask us to play with the principles
of framing, with the terms on which real or virtual volumetric forms
intersect with the pixelated plane of the screen. This interplay of 2D
and 3D forms – which, in GO’s case, involves the live compositing of
3D models onto video feeds of real spaces – becomes a means of creating
challenges, puzzles and spectacular tableaux, but also of opening up new
subject positions and vantage points for players. The likes of Arkham
Asylum attempt to assure us that technology can help digital subjects to
assert sovereignty over space, positioning players as tooled-up masters
of all they survey. These titles, by contrast, give a sense of how digi-
tal technologies have brought into being what Wendy Chun (2016) calls
‘the seemingly sovereign individual, the subject driven to know, driven to
map, to zoom in and out, to manipulate and to act’ but often thwarted by
the very technologies that purport to serve this drive (8).
2D or Not 2D, That is the Question

All videogames, insofar as they are viewed on screens, are two-
dimensional. But there is an important difference between 2D games,
146 Mobile Subjects
which limit movement to the vertical and horizontal axes and tend to
use bitmapped ‘sprites’ to represent objects, and 3D games, wherein
players can move ‘into’ spaces sculpted out of virtual triangles, quads
or cubes along a z-axis. This distinction, however, is not as simple
as it might seem: as Mark J.P. Wolf (2010) observes, game designers
have experimented with many different methods of crafting and con-
necting navigable spaces. Many games violate Euclidean rules, switch
between ‘two-dimensional, two-and-a-half dimensional and three-
dimensional spatial structures’ and/or ‘have a dimensionality that falls
between two-dimensional spaces and ones that are computationally
three-dimensional’ (ibid. 41, 39, 19). In most cases, this is because the
designers are attempting to work around technological limitations, or
to introduce novel gameplay ideas; in the games this chapter analyses,
however, such experiments become a means of rendering both spaces
and modes of navigating those spaces meaningful. In the case of Killer 7,
a postmodern conspiracy thriller that plays out across a series of three-
dimensional environments traversed via invisible two-dimensional rails,
the game’s play with dimensionality becomes a means of discussing
freedom, choice and control. Initially released in 2005, the game es-
chews visual realism in favour of starkly geometric forms criss-crossed
by expressionistic shadows. Rife with historical references (Hiroshima,
the Weather Men) and pop cultural allusions (a troupe of Sentai-esque
heroes called ‘The Handsome Men’, a section employing 8-bit pixel
graphics, characters drawn from the gallery of 1970s poliziotteschi cin-
ema archetypes), its soundtrack spans Erik Satie gymnopedies, jazzy
house cuts and industrial ambience. While this referential range can
be disorienting, the game ensures that players remain oriented within
gamespace by rigourously limiting their control over both the camera
and their avatar. It is this balance between confusion and constraint
that makes the game compelling as an allegorithmic portrayal of digital
subjectivity. In attempting to understand the game, it helps to remem-
ber that Killer 7 was released during a period when, as Chun notes,
networks were being heralded as the ‘answer [to] the dilemma posed
by postmodernism – How to navigate an increasingly confused and
confusing globalized world?’ (2016, 39). As the twentieth century gave
way to the twenty-first, ‘individual subjects seemed mired in a haze …
There was a growing sense that it was now impossible for individuals
to apprehend, let alone comprehend, their relation to the world around
them’ thanks to ‘“placeless” architecture, frenetic commodification, un-
relenting globalization and media saturation’. With its assurance that
‘everything can be reduced to nodes and edges’, the network seemed to
offer a solution, a way of mapping spaces, relationships and phenomena
that promised to ‘dissolve postmodernism’ and return a sense of auto
nomy and perspective to the beleaguered twenty-first-century subject
(ibid. 40). Killer 7 puts this promise to the test.
Mobile Subjects 147
Figure 6.1 S creenshot from Killer 7.
As I’ve said, movement through Killer 7’s three-dimensional envi-

ronments is confined to (invisible) two-dimensional paths connected by
junctions. The system is not unlike that used by lightgun games and
‘rail shooters’, which confine player movement to a predetermined path,
with the important difference that while in those genres players are pro-
pelled forward automatically, in Killer 7 they are free to move back and
forth along the rails at their own pace. When we reach a junction, a
menu of locations pops up (see Figure 6.1). Pushing the stick in the di-
rection of a location will send our avatar onto that rail. Space becomes
a network graph, made up of nodes and edges. In this way, the game’s
navigation system becomes another means of manifesting the plot’s pre-
occupation with dyadic oppositions and covert mechanisms of control.
Political tensions between North America and Japan drive this narra-
tive, which plays out in a version of reality where two political parties
vie for control of Japan, one intent on maintaining ties with the US, the
other willing to risk nuclear war by breaking away. Controlling a cadre
of assassins ostensibly in the pay of the US government, players uncover
an increasingly baroque web of intrigues, double crosses, sleeper agents,
brainwashings and rigged elections. As a conspiracy thriller, the game
has much in common with Alan Pakula’s The Parallax View, a 1974 film
that Seb Franklin (2015) singles out as ‘point[ing] toward the interlinked
levels of subject formation and narrative form that characterize cultural
production in the age of control’ (152), an age in which, under the in-
fluence of cybernetic systems theory, subjects, institutions, nation states
and ecosystems are being ‘reconceptualized as information-processing
systems’ governed by the logic of digitality (xv). Following a prota
gonist ‘“cued” to move from step to step until he is in the exact time
and place, both geographically and psychologically, to be framed for
148 Mobile Subjects
[an] assassination’, the plot of Pakula’s film is structured not as ‘a uni-
directional arc but a series of decisions that can turn in any direction’,
creating what Franklin describes as a ‘switching-circuit-as-narrative …
driven by a logic of permutation, a deployment of individual characters
as interchangeable units within a formal structure’ (ibid. 154). Like The
Parallax View, Killer 7 uses the narrative conceit of assassins and double
agents to explore programming, paranoia and the exercise of power.
Pakula’s film uses subliminal imagery and visual symbols – flowing riv-
ers, model trains, escalators and other such images of enforced, mono
directional movement – to telegraph its concern with shadowy systems
of political manipulation, while its title’s optical metaphor signals its in-
terest in sightlines and points of view. Killer 7’s preoccupation with these
issues is communicated not just through plot and imagery, but also at
a mechanical and procedural level, via the invisible but immutable con-
straints that the game’s rail and junction system puts on the mobility and
viewpoint of the player. Factor in the way that the game forces players
to switch between the seven playable characters (who are represented as
multiple personalities coexisting in the psyche of another, non-playable
character) and these concerns become clearer still. Having players switch
between channels on a TV set to jump from character to character, the
game follows the postmodern tradition of channel hopping as shorthand
for the dilemma facing subjects attempting to negotiate a ‘schizophrenic’
late capitalist culture where consensus has given way to the proliferation
of incompatible points of view (Dix et al. 2011, 163).
Space in Killer 7 frequently becomes double or indeterminate: Kurt
Kalata (2005) cites as one of the game’s ‘standout moments’ the traversal
of the passage players take en route to each of the game’s ‘bosses’: ‘the
room is a simple, straight line with only two doors, a set of stairs, and a
few lights on the ceiling’ but it is also ‘a delightful optical illusion – are
you running through a narrow corridor, encased by brown walls? Or
are you running on top of a platform floating over a gigantic brown
abyss?’ (ibid.). On various other occasions, too, the game’s visual design
serves to render spaces dubiously legible – a poster masquerades as a
window, a hotel carpet is patterned so that the floor appears to be made
of cubes. These visual effects provide an analogue for the atmosphere of
paranoid uncertainty that pervades the game’s plot, wherein characters
are perpetually being confronted with undecidable alternatives – friend
or foe, delusion or reality, innocent or guilty. There is still, as there was
in other rail-based games, an aesthetic motivation for the plotting of
these 2D paths. But where in other rail games limiting the player’s mo-
bility is a way to maximize hardware resources, in Killer 7 – which has a
defiantly simplistic visual style, using low-polygon models, a stark, satu-
rated palette and large areas of blank space – the visual impact has more
to do with framing or ‘staging’, with the terms on which the gameworld
intersects with the screen’s plane. The rails, which allow the designers
Mobile Subjects 149
to choreograph the game’s ‘camerawork’, often produce compositions
that radically flatten virtual space. They also allow for the decentring of
the player-character where many third-person titles anchor the player’s
avatar to the centre of the screen, Killer 7’s characters are seen from a
variety of dramatic and unorthodox camera angles, sometimes explicitly
identified as those of wall-mounted surveillance cameras, sometimes di-
vorced from any identifiable (or physically possible) location. The rails
are, as such, a means of ‘focalization’, a concept that Michael Nitsche
(2008) has adapted from Gerard Genette and Mieke Bal to analyse the
various techniques game designers use to control what the player is
shown and how. But they also signify in and of themselves, as a method
of traversing virtual space rather than merely a means of framing what
that space contains.
Needless to say, these reminders that our control is limited can be
both unnerving and frustrating, perhaps especially for players used
to the kinds of ‘open world’ or ‘sandbox’ games that were becoming
very popular at the time of Killer 7’s release, and which now make
up a considerable slice of the triple A PC and console market. Many
of the most popular and influential open world games have emerged
from the US and Europe, a fact which leads Kalata (2005) to some-
what mischievously propose that Killer 7’s idiosyncratic navigation sys-
tem may have been intended ‘to piss off Americans’. Kalata reasons that
while ‘America has pumped out … open-ended games like Civilization,
SimCity and Pirates’, and specializes in ‘open-ended, nonlinear adven-
ture [games]’, the Japanese industry is known for roleplaying games that
‘only barely qualify as “role playing”, because so many of them follow a
predetermined story path’. Certainly, it is tempting to interpret Killer 7’s
minimalist visual style and its unusual navigation system as an implicit
critique of games that fill their painstakingly rendered virtual worlds
with attractive but inert decoration. The promise of such games is one
of freedom of action within expansive, realistically portrayed environ-
ments. Often, however, this amounts to vast expanses to trudge over,
endless blind alleys to explore and a surfeit of meaningless busywork to
undertake. In Killer 7, by contrast, players can only go somewhere if the
designers have made sure there is something to see or do there. In this
way, the game insists on the distinction between freedom and choice, the
same distinction that Shelly Errington draws attention to when, in her
anthropological analysis of Disney World, she compares ‘the structure
of choice provided to visitors’ at a theme park to that of ‘menu-driven
software’: with menu-based computer programs ‘I have a lot of options,
but it is among a number of pre-existing possibilities [that I choose];
similarly, the visitor to Disney World does not invent alternatives, but
chooses from a set of available “options”’ in what Errington sees as
a distilled version of consumerist existence (1995, 91–92). As Andrea
Mubi Brighenti’s (2010) work on augmented reality interfaces shows,
150 Mobile Subjects
portable networked devices are helping to extend this paradigm from the
theme park to the rest of reality. Part of a wider ‘governmental process
of the urbanization of territory’, these devices effect the ‘predisposition
of a field of possible events, calculation of ranges and thresholds’ in such
a way that ‘what the user actually gets is only one actualized possibility
(a syntagm) within a larger matrix of possibilities envisaged and fore-
known by engineers and programmers (a paradigm)’ (ibid. 482). Within
this framework, ‘users only get occurrences, not events … nothing un-
expected can be produced’ (ibid.). As Killer 7’s especially inflexible sys-
tem (which, as we saw in Figure 6.1 offers players a menu of locations
much in the manner of the software Errington describes) insists, there is
necessarily a limit to even the most ‘open’ of worlds, an order of rules,
systems and topographical boundaries established by the programmers
that exists ‘beneath’ or ‘beyond’ the represented space and governs what
can be done in it. The choices may be numerous, nuanced and nested but
they cannot be totally free.
The Geopolitics of SuperFlat Style

Setting hard-coded limits to the player’s ostensible ‘freedom’, Killer 7
also gestures towards the systems of generic convention, visual rheto-
ric and received wisdom that enable players to ‘read’ games’ represen-
tations in the first place, showing that layers of cultural context always
intervene between the player and the space. Kalata’s opposition between
open, ‘realistic’ American games and linear, stylized Japanese games
is, as he is well aware, rather simplistic – there are, after all, countries
other than America and Japan who make videogames (though A merica
and Japan are the only countries that have produced globally success-
ful videogame consoles), just as there are linear, abstract American
games and open-ended, photorealistic Japanese ones. Reading Killer 7
in these terms is appropriate, however, because the game is, to a great
extent, about the temptation to establish reductive oppositions (East
and West, depth and surface, abstract and realistic, good and evil, light
and shadow etc.). The game uses the uneasy relationship between the
second and third dimensions to talk about the uneasy relationship bet
ween America and Japan, both at the macrolevel of twentieth-century
history (which its plot engages) and at the more reflexive microlevel of
videogame convention (which its mechanics highlight). In this, Killer 7
is not without precedent: for Carole Cavanaugh (2007), the resounding
‘visual flatness’ of post–World War II Japanese films and manga, their
rejection of ‘the trompe l’oeil effect of fixed-point perspective’ in favour
of the insistent foregrounding of the page or screen, should be read
as ‘a rejection of bourgeois society and its acquiescence to A merican
political and cultural dominance’ (205–206), an assertion of loyalty to
traditional Japanese representational conventions. The virtual z-axis,
Mobile Subjects 151
in Cavanaugh’s argument, operates as a vector for a projective identifica-
tion, a link back to an era of Japanese cultural autonomy. The cartoon-
ish, self-aware ‘SuperFlat’ visual style of much late twentieth- and early
twenty-first-century Japanese pop culture – a style which, as Dean Chan
(2007) and David Surman (2008) have shown, is well represented in
twenty-first-century Japanese videogames – can be read in a similar way,
as a means of ‘reassert[ing] the continuities between the contemporary
Japanese postmodern experience and its premodern Edo counterpart’
(Surman 2008). Here flatness links the present to the past, not in a ges-
ture of subaltern defiance but as a display of ‘soft power’ from a nation
whose cultural exports were beginning to command a global audience.
Hiroki Azuma has expressed dissatisfaction with this interpretation of
SuperFlat art however: as Surman notes, ‘for him the constructed conti-
nuity between premodern and postmodern Japan obfuscates the period
between the Meiji restoration of the late-nineteenth century through
to the atomic conclusion of the Second World War’, denying both ‘the
traumatic memory of defeat’ and the links that still bind Japan to the
US (ibid.). Chan and Surman likewise see SuperFlat videogames such as
We Love Katamari, Warioware, Inc. Mega Microgame$! and Viewtiful
Joe not as triumphalist showcases for a defiantly Japanese aesthetic but
as conflicted, equivocal and ironic responses to Japan’s recent history
and experience of Americanization. The interplay of depth and surface
in these games is, for Chan, suggestive of the fact that SuperFlat style
‘operates in dialectical tension between Japan and the US, framed in
deeply entangled historical and contemporary terms’ (2007, 2). Super-
Flat visuality is not, for these critics, a celebration of some transhistori-
cal and quintessential Japanese style: for Surman (2008), it is better read
as a response to the postmodern regime of seriality and the proliferation
of images across the flat space of global(ised) ‘information-capitalism’,
while for Chan (2007) it constitutes an attempt to articulate a complexly
‘hybridised’ but nevertheless ‘intrinsically Japanese’ identity (787). In
either case, choosing how to simulate depth becomes a choice fraught
with historical and p olitical connotations.
It is a pity that neither Chan nor Surman discusses Killer 7; for where
in Katamari, Viewtiful Joe and Warioware such themes remain for the
most part implicit, Killer 7 tackles them head on (if rather inchoately). For
all that it centres on oppositions (recurrent non-interactive scenes show
two characters meant, respectively, to represent caricatured notions of
East and West, Good and Evil, playing chess – a classic Manichean game
in which, as in Killer 7, the players’ movements are circumscribed by
rigid rules), it also represents such dyadic thinking as hard to sustain. As
the game’s plot becomes increasingly involuted and unlikely, the balance
of power vacillates with increasing speed between Japan and America,
even while a succession of betrayals, red herrings and revelations renders
the two parties ever harder to disentangle. The game’s final level is set on
152 Mobile Subjects
Hashima or ‘Battleship Island’ – a site significant both for its coal mines,
which helped to drive Japan into the modern, industrial era, and for its
use as a labour camp for Chinese and Korean prisoners in the 1930s and
1940s. At the game’s last junction, players must decide whether to kill
or spare an isolationist Japanese politician, a decision made by going left
(West), and by doing so permitting a nuclear strike on Japan, or by going
right (East) and letting America be bombed. It is here that the game’s
suspicion of the tendency to reduce moral and political issues to opposed
poles on a 2D scale is most starkly apparent. To finish the game, one
must choose a direction, but neither choice seems justifiable on the ba-
sis of the fragmentary and ambiguous evidence that the game presents.
Here, designer Sid Meier’s oft-quoted dictum that a videogame should be
‘a series of interesting choices’ (Morris and R
ollings 2000, 38) acquires a
sinister resonance, as the teeming possibility space of the narrative and
the complexity of the histories it engages contract to two points on a
line, in an example of how digital media (which are, after all, based on
binary logic) lend themselves to reductive oppositions. From a contem-
porary perspective, the disparity between Killer 7’s mechanical strict-
ness and its semiological bagginess, between the limitations the game’s
2D paths place on movement within the gameworld and the degree of
hermeneutic legwork its players are invited to do, reads as an encap-
sulation of the early twenty-first-century moment Chun describes: the
network diagram emerges to offer a route out of postmodern confusion,
but at the cost of reducing all interactions to traffic between nodes along
edges. The game shows that if digital subjects are allowed to choose,
they are seldom granted true freedom.
Flatlands
Fez also uses ‘interdimensionality’ as an expressive resource. By contrast
with Killer 7, however, Fez’s premise is simple, even perfunctory. E choing
Edwin Abbott’s 1884 novel Flatland, in which protagonist A Square is
visited by a spherical herald from three-dimensional ‘Spaceland’, Fez
tells the story of Gomez, who is bequeathed a red fez that grants him
the ability to perceive the third dimension. In order to navigate Fez’s
gameworld, players have to repeatedly switch between ‘reading’ objects
and spaces as 2D or 3D, flat or full. Like Killer 7’s rails, this reframing
system has a thematic significance beyond its ludic function, establishing
the game’s concern with the degree to which digital life involves flipping
between competing frameworks, vantage points and scales. Aestheti-
cally, the game conforms to what Juul (2014) has argued is one of the
defining traits of ‘indie games’, ‘using contemporary technology to em-
ulate visual styles from earlier times, including pixel style graphics’ (1).
For Juul, ‘retro’ graphical styles allows indie games to elicit nostalgic
feelings while
Mobile Subjects 153
invok[ing] a type of authenticity and ‘honesty in materials’ that
marks [them] as distinct from the alleged realism of bigger-budget
titles … enabl[ing] videogames developed with few resources to
present themselves as, and be recognized as, the result of conscious
decisions rather than of a lack of resources.
(Ibid.)
In other words, one of the functions ‘retro’ graphics perform is that of

bridging the past and the present, setting up a contrast between how
games were then, how they are now and how they might be (or might have
been). In many cases, indie games also represent attempts to reach across
a geographical divide: many celebrated indie titles have seen A merican
(or, in Fez’s case, Quebecois) designers reckoning with the influence of
the Japanese games that were popular in North America during their
childhoods. Like fellow indie darlings Super Meat Boy and Braid, Fez
harks back to ‘classic’ 2D platform games of the 1980s and 1990s, most
notably Nintendo’s Super Mario Bros. and its sequels, games created in
Tokyo but beloved worldwide. As in those games, Gomez, a pixel sprite,
can only move in two dimensions. Unlike those games, however, play-
ers are given the ability to rotate Fez’s camera in 90-degree increments,
aligning forms so that new routes appear on the plane ‘facing’ the screen
(Figure 6.2). This is because, while Fez’s environments appear to be flat,
they are actually made up of voxels, cuboid forms framed and textured
in such a way as to resemble ‘old school’ pixel images.
Fez’s reframing mechanic, however, is about more than adding a new
dimension (as it were) to retro gameplay templates or staking a claim
to authenticity; it also offers a commentary on audiences’ changing re-
lationships with media technologies and the developments that those
technologies have undergone over recent decades. Unlike many ‘retro’
indie games, Fez’s evident affection for old games is freighted with a
kind of anguish or melancholy, with the sense that perhaps videogames
as a medium never lived up to the promise they seemed to hold in the
late 1990s and the suspicion that maybe ‘classic’ games are loved less for
Figure 6.2 S creenshot from Fez. Here rotating the camera reveals a pier, creat-
ing a route to a hitherto inaccessible island.
154 Mobile Subjects
their innate qualities than out of nostalgic narcissism. By having them
flip between incompossible framings of its world, Fez also asks players to
consider what it is we see when we look at a videogame, proposing that
there is both more to digital media than meets the eye (because there is
always the code behind the interface to account for) and less (because
viewers actively imbue what they see with associations and meanings
which can’t otherwise be said to be ‘there’, reading ‘into’ them).
Fez’s flipping and reframing mechanic is not, it should be said, with-
out precedent. In fact, it is prefigured in Nintendo’s own Super Paper
Mario, a game mostly played from the same side-on perspective as the
‘classic’ Mario titles, but which sometimes offers players the option of
switching to a three-dimensional playfield. There is an important dif-
ference, however – one that aligns Fez more closely with Sony’s Echo-
chrome, a spatial puzzle game inspired by the drawings of M.C. Escher.
In Echochrome as in Fez, the z-axis phases in and out of being: we
refer to it when looking for viable paths, but disavow its existence when
taking those paths. By reorienting the camera, we can squash onto the
same plane elements that, from another angle, do not appear to touch.
There are parallels here with anamorphic images, which require view-
ers to shift their vantage point relative to the picture plane in order to
bring certain elements into focus.1 For the ‘cybertext’ theorist Espen
Aarseth, such images provide a model of how certain videogames work.
In explaining his notion of ‘ergodic literature’ – a category that encom-
passes works, including games, in which a degree of ‘nontrivial effort
is required to allow the reader to traverse the text’ – he uses the term
‘anamorphic’ to describe games in which users must discover the correct
configuration in order to progress (1997, 1, 180–181). ‘Metamorphic’
cybertexts, by contrast, allow the user to plot their own paths (ibid.).
Fez literalizes Aarseth’s simile, in that ‘vital aspect[s]’ of its environ-
ment (such as the path that ‘appears’ in Figure 6.2) can ‘be discovered
only through the difficult adoption of a non-standard perspective’, by
switching angles in order to create viable routes (ibid. 181). But if Fez
is anamorphic rather than metamorphic insofar as progress is only per-
mitted along paths set out and sanctioned by the designers, we must also
consider the associative and interpretive ‘pathways’ that its reframing
system opens up. For, beyond enabling traversal of the gamespace, Fez’s
switching mechanic also performs a symbolic function. In order to solve
its puzzles the game requires us to cultivate a kind of spatial relativism,
acknowledging but selectively tuning out contradictions, admitting the
equal validity of incompatible points of view. And, by ensuring that
players must perennially hold at least two readings of the same space in
their minds, it gestures at the struggle between captivated credulity and
masterful cynicism that is part of gamer subjectivity.
In an age when re-releases, remakes of ‘classic’ titles and new games
that revisit ‘retro’ genres and graphical styles have become common,
Mobile Subjects 155
Fez’s reverence for gaming history is hardly remarkable. Throwbacks
to the 8- and 16-bit eras of gaming are now ten a penny, many of them
little more than comfort food for ageing gamers pining for simpler
times. Fez’s 2D/3D switching mechanic, however, announces that the
game is something more than an exercise in nostalgia, that in fact it
has something to say about nostalgia, and about what it means to un-
derstand one’s own life and identity in relation to the temporalities of
new media – of Moore’s law, generational cycles, iterative developments,
software updates and in-built obsolescence. As I have said, it offers a
spin on the 2D platformer, a genre that the original Super Mario Bros.
essentially defined. It also contains references to other older games: a
series of levels are rendered in green and black like a Game Boy game,
while constellations visible in the night sky evoke pieces from the puzzle
game Tetris, a title similarly preoccupied with rotating and aligning geo-
metric forms. 2 On one level, Gomez’s amazing ability to shift into the
third dimension is a droll reference to the shift that videogames made
from bitmaps to polygons – from the 2D pixel graphics of the earliest
Mario games running on the Famicom in the mid-1980s to the poly
gonal spaces of the paradigm-shifting Super Mario 64, released on the
Nintendo 64 a little over a decade later. At the same time it gestures at
the degree of imaginative investment players made in ‘filling out’ the ab-
stract, two-dimensional representations of early games. After all, players
had to want to enter the worlds that these 2D games represented – had,
in a sense, to have already mentally fleshed them out – for 3D iterations
to be commercially viable.
In 1990s gaming culture, 3D represented the future. In Super Mario
64, players accessed new worlds by jumping into paintings – a reference
to the game’s rounding out of the earlier Mario titles’ flat spaces and, at
the same time, a cute reversal of the gothic tradition of portraits com-
ing alive and breaking their frames (a staple, of course, of early cinema
(Nead 2007, 92–93, 100)). But where Mario 64 was concerned with
realizing the desire to flesh out the 2D Mario games’ crudely rendered
but evocative representations, Fez, like Super Paper Mario, is more con-
cerned with witnessing that desire than fulfilling it. Dating from an era
when 3D graphics have lost their air of millennial promise, when players
and designers alike have realized that 3D games are not necessarily go-
ing to be more diverting than their 2D forebears, these games wistfully
recall a time when imagination had to supplement shortfalls in process-
ing power. Rather than positing an inevitable onward progression from
flat to full, from abstract to realistic, Fez institutes a reversible relation
between the second and third dimensions, and, through them, the ‘past’
and the ‘present’. Through its marriage of retro gameplay and graph-
ics with new conceits rendered possible by 3D graphics technologies, it
interrogates the appeal of the spaces portrayed by 2D games, turning
our attention away from technology to address the role of the spectator
156 Mobile Subjects
in making sense of virtual spaces. While these spectators are, to be
sure, embodied subjects whose perceptual apparatuses are susceptible
to depth cues, optical illusions and so forth, Fez recognizes that they
are also imagining, desiring, interpreting, remembering individuals for
whom old games may be full of evocative cues.
Earlier in the chapter I proposed that practices like speedrunning point
to conflicting attitudes within ‘gamer culture’: on the one hand, gamers
revel in the superficial pleasures of illusionistic playspaces like Mario’s
mushroom kingdom; on the other, they feel the urge to strip games to
their algorithmic cores. I also suggested that this ambivalence reflects the
fact that there is still something of a stigma around gaming: as Helen
Thornham (2011) notes, for adults to play too enthusiastically is to risk
being marked out as immature, sexually inadequate or out of control
(19, 69–70). Elsewhere (Gallagher 2013) I’ve suggested that gamers often
respond to this lingering risk of ridicule or censure by cultivating forms
of irony and ambivalence akin to the ‘sophisticated naiveté’ that, for
Joseph Litvak (1997), is characteristic of queer cultural consumption.
Litvak observes that many queer subjects will have spent ‘late child-
hood or early adolescence’ seeking escape ‘from a heterosexual every-
day every day more banal and more oppressive’ by daydreaming about
‘Hollywood’, ‘the opera’, ‘haute couture’ and ‘other world[s], magically
different from the world of family and school’ (76). At the same time,
they will have become aware that such fantasies may seem questionable
or ridiculous in the eyes of society at large. There is an alternative to sim-
ply relinquishing these ‘bad’ attachments though, one that involves de-
veloping the ‘endlessly renewable (if latent) gift for inversion’ that L
itvak
calls ‘sophisticated naiveté’ (ibid. 75–76). This gift allows one to vacillate
between indulging and disavowing these guiltily extravagant, nostalgic
investments, maintaining an affection for objects that one simultane-
ously acknowledges to be tacky, trivial, silly or overwrought.
Today, gameworlds – and, through them, ‘worlds’ like ‘the videogame
industry’ and ‘Japanese culture’ – have become sites of escapist fantasy
for gamers gay and straight, 3 and gamers are developing their own
equivalents of Litvak’s sophisticated naivety. Games like Broforce ask
us to laugh at how thematically overblown, unremittingly violent and
graphically crude games like Contra were, while also affirming the guilty
pleasures of retro running and gunning. Such games retain gaming as a
source of pleasure and solace, while reserving the right to concede that,
yes, gamer culture can be rather juvenile, rather fanciful, rather geeky,
rather remote from reality. The ambivalence becomes more charged with
games like Mattie Brice’s Mainichi. Using 1990s Japanese RPG aesthet-
ics to talk about transgender experience, the game gestures towards the
importance of JRPGs as spaces in which players could escape a big-
oted world and playfully experiment with gender identity. At the same
time, the game’s concern with the quotidian and its downbeat tone mean
Mobile Subjects 157
Mainichi can be seen as taking games to task for failing to grow into
a medium capable of dealing with these kinds of experiences. Fez’s re-
framing system, meanwhile, essentially turns Litvak’s acts of ‘inversion’
into a play mechanic. Asking us to flip between sophisticated cynicism
and naive credulity, it admits that while games sometimes seem rich and
deep, they often seem flat and flimsy too.
The deeper one gets into Fez, the clearer it becomes that the game
is more than a throwback Mario clone. Initially, the player is mainly
preoccupied with physical movement, with discovering routes that allow
Gomez to reach the golden blocks strewn throughout Fez’s locations.
Gradually, however, it becomes apparent that the game has another,
more abstract dimension. Where Fez had been billed over the course of
its five-year development as a simple platformer, many of the game’s en-
vironments turned out to conceal complex puzzles requiring mental agil-
ity rather than physical dexterity to complete – something that had not
been evident from the many previews written about the game over the
course of its gestation. Moreover, players began to intuit that the symbols
with which the surfaces of Fez’s world were inscribed were not purely
decorative, eventually realizing that the game contained its own alphabet
and number system (made up entirely of squares and oblongs), as well as
various other codes and ciphers. Over the week that followed the game’s
release, players began to share speculations, findings and decryption
techniques online, tapping the collective intelligence of a sizeable ‘know
ledge community’ (Jenkins 2006, 26–27; Kubba and Orland 2012).
For our purposes, the important thing about Fez’s puzzles is that
they require players to realize that there may be a ‘deeper’ meaning to
what they are seeing. If connoisseurs will assure novices that there is
much more to Super Mario Bros. than meets the eye, Fez really does
contain another, altogether more abstract and intellectual level behind
or beyond its retro platforming action. In short, on various levels (and
it proves impossible, here, to avoid a metaphorical register of lay-
ers, levels, dimensions and depths), Fez draws our attention to video
games’ doubleness – their ability to be simultaneously flat and full, code
and image, crude playthings and evocative cultural talismans. Angela
Ndalianis (2004) sees such doubleness as a fundamental characteristic
of both Baroque art and the ‘neo-baroque’ spectacles of the digital era,
which for her are ‘simultaneous[ly]’ experienced ‘both as a technological
achievement and as an alternative reality’ (213–214). Baroque space, in
other words, is fetish-like; able to hold in tension contradictory prem-
ises, opposed ‘realities’. In much Baroque art, creating a tension between
2D and 3D forms serves a pedagogical function, teaching viewers to dis-
trust appearances, to seek significations or solutions that might dwell on
the other side of the 2D/3D binary. Truth either lies in the ‘hidden depths’
behind an illusory flat screen (for Descartes, the viewer so captivated by
a spectacle that they ‘can only perceive the first side of an object that
158 Mobile Subjects
is presented’ has a duty to see what lurks behind or around that plane
(Hanafi 2000, 191)) or emerges via the application of a flat filter, plan or
template ‘over’ an otherwise incomprehensible mass of volumetric forms
(like the baroque labyrinth which produces the wish for a 2D plan view,
or the algorithm which recognizes and causes a digital camera to focus
on a smiling face). Similarly, in Super Paper Mario, getting stuck in one
dimension can normally be rectified by switching to the other. But of
course, in these games, both sorts of image are ‘virtual’ – the 3D world
is no more solid than the 2D one. This is especially apparent in Fez, in
which progress is not about rectifying illusions but producing more use-
ful ones, and where there is finally no division between seeming and be-
ing. We are not asked to determine which reading of a space is ultimately
correct, but to cultivate the ability to switch between equally tenable
premises, either of which may be currently preferable. What is import-
ant is not what we are seeing but the process of learning to shift frames,
switch viewpoints, cultivate flexibility. By flipping between readings of
space, by alternately acknowledging and ignoring the playfield’s third
dimension, Fez has players rehearse the shifts between visual grammars
that are part of computer-mediated life, shifts that chip away at the sense
of there being a truth beyond appearance.
In Fez, this switching becomes a way to talk about what it means to
identify as a ‘gamer’, someone whose biography and identity is bound up
with this process of exploring increasingly sophisticated virtual spaces
and working out the rules that shape them. The game is a reflection
on gaming’s history and cultural status, its developing aesthetics and
technologies but also its bumpy ride from a culturally marginal acti
vity associated with deviance, addiction, violence and social isolation
to a mainstream pastime which nevertheless tends to be seen as a hobby
or a distraction rather than a mature cultural form worthy of serious
emotional investment or ‘deep’ thought. Like Braid, which built on the
Mario blueprint by incorporating a time-shifting mechanic, devious
puzzles and a thematic concern with regret, lost love, nuclear war and
the nature of time, Fez wants us to know there can be more to games.
Both titles already feel like they belong to a particular phase in gaming’s
history, a phase which saw various designers attempting to do new and
self-consciously grown-up things with genres familiar from the 1980s
and early 1990s. As we shall shortly see, Pokémon GO has become
popular in part because it allows players to reflexively perform the kinds
of nostalgia, irony and ambivalence that Fez and Braid gesture at. Play-
ers use an AR interface to insert cute fantasy creatures into everyday
environments, creatures powerfully evocative (at least for millions of
millennials) of childhoods spent immersed in virtual worlds that may
now seem painfully crude or charmingly innocent. Like the selfie pheno
menon, the game’s success speaks to the importance of framing in con-
temporary technoculture (Papacharissi 2015, 96, 135): as I noted last
Mobile Subjects 159
chapter, scholars like Celia Lury (1998) argue new media have fostered
an understanding of individual subjects ‘not as wholes but as the sum of
diverse factors amenable to analysis and manipulation’ (19). The digital
subject is expected to be flexible, to cultivate ‘a self that may be continu-
ally dis-and re-assembled across contexts’, ‘subject[ed] to regrouping …
[and] endlessly recombined’ to fit new frameworks (ibid.). Like the Fez
player forming a bridge by flipping the camera, digital subjects tacti-
cally foreground certain qualities while consigning others to the back-
ground (if only for the moment) as they move between different spaces.
Circumstantial utility, rather than objective truth, becomes the measure
by which any one framing is judged. It’s with these ideas in mind that
I want to end the chapter by considering Pokémon GO. Using AR to
turn real spaces into playgrounds, the game serves as an example of how
new media allow subjects to position themselves, while also hinting at
how videogames might help players to better understand the nature of
networked spaces.
You’ve Been Framed

As Anne Allison (2006) has shown, Pokémon is in many respects the
quintessential example of millennial Japanese soft power, a stagger-
ingly popular transmedia franchise spanning cartoons, movies, playing
cards and toys, which started with the RPG Game Freak Inc. created
for Nintendo’s Game Boy in 1996. Rooted in Japanese traditions, social
conditions and aesthetics (kawaii culture and its overlap with forms of
‘techno-animism’ derived from Shinto; the prevalence of long, solitary
commutes and the consequent popularity of portable media devices;
the Japanese playground culture of collecting insects and pitting them
against each other (ibid. 13, 201–206)), Pokémon nevertheless attracted
a global audience, and has remained popular even as Japan’s influence
on gaming and global pop culture has declined from its late 1990s peak.
In many ways Pokémon GO is a logical extension of series tradition: the
mainline Pokémon games have always appeared on portable systems and
placed an emphasis on connection, while the Nintendo 64 spin-off game
Pokémon Snap anticipated GO’s onus on framing and photography.
Developed by Google offshoot Niantic, GO uses AR to build on these
precedents, imbuing the familiar Pokémon formula of catching, training
and battling fantastical creatures with elements of ‘pervasive gaming’,
a term coined to describe digital and non-digital games that ‘expand
the contractual magic circle of play spatially, temporally, or socially’ by
‘using environments, people and information from the everyday world’
(Montola 2009, 12; Montola and Stenros 2009, 5).
GO alternates between two modes of representing ‘real’ space. The
first is a third-person map view. Pokémon show up on the map, as do
landmarks that have been nominated ‘gyms’ (where creatures can battle
160 Mobile Subjects
and train) and pokéstops (where players can collect items). These land-
marks are drawn from the Google Maps database, with many having
been submitted by players of Niantic’s Ingress, a game which was de-
signed as a means of gathering location data, and which provides the
foundations on which GO was built. When GO players draw near to a
pokémon, the game switches to a first-person perspective. The creature
encountered appears as a 3D model, superimposed over the feed from
the phone’s camera and oriented using the phone’s gyroscope (players
without a gyroscope just see the creatures against a generic backdrop).
As with Fez, the way the game frames space is linked to the way that
it frames time. GO is forward-looking in its use of state of the art aug-
mented reality techniques, but it is also backward-looking in its bid to
stir up nostalgic associations in lapsed Pokémon fans. That the game
was intended not just for children but also for nostalgic twenty-and
thirty-somethings is suggested by the fact that it initially included only
the 150 Pokémon featured in the original Game Boy games, which is to
say the characters who will be familiar to those who played the games
or watched the anime 20 years ago. Like Mario 64, GO fleshes these
familiar characters out into 3D models; unlike Mario 64, it uses AR to
insert them into the player’s adult lifeworld. As in many areas of digital
culture, familiar intellectual properties are employed to invest unfami
liar technologies and media forms with positive associations.
Here, I want to address two different strains of player practice that
have emerged in relation to GO, looking first at photos players have
taken using the app before briefly addressing players who plot routes
through urban space calculated to maximize the possibility of catching
rare and high-level creatures. I argue that between these two practices,
the comparatively ‘paidiac’ practice of exchanging photographs and
the comparatively ‘ludic’ one of plotting efficient routes (Caillois 2001
[1958], 27),4 we can gain a sense of how AR devices ground different
readings of space and of how they enable users to position themselves –
whether in relation to spaces, technologies, histories, other subjects
or their prior selves. To date, the popular discussion around GO has
been highly polarized, reflecting the tendency to understand techno
logy as ‘both a solution to, and the cause of social ills’ – a ‘pharmakon’
in Bernard Stiegler’s terms (Millington 2009, 634; Stiegler 2014, 23).
Optimistic accounts hold that GO encourages players to be more active
while attuning them to interesting features of the environment; pessi-
mistic accounts, meanwhile, argue that the game renders players obliv-
ious to the dangers around them (leading to muggings, traffic accidents
etc.) and insensitive to the historical resonances and social norms of
the spaces they traverse (leading to inappropriate, insensitive or reck-
less behaviour). A widely circulated story about GO being banned from
Washington DC’s H olocaust museum was often cited as evidence for
the latter view – reflecting, as we will see, a wider tendency to use sites
Mobile Subjects 161
commemorating Holocaust victims as limit cases in discussions of how
digital technologies are altering codes of spatial practice. In what fol-
lows I offer a more balanced account of how GO functions, drawing on
studies of street photography and pervasive gaming to assess it as a plat-
form for pictorial identity work before considering how the game medi-
ates the forces that shape networked societies and digital subjectivities.
Larissa Hjorth (2015) contends that the forms of ‘ambient play’ enabled
by location-sensitive, camera-equipped technologies like smartphones
‘play an important part in how we experience, represent and perform
in and through urban spaces’ today, subtending new cartographic prac-
tices in which the ‘social’ and the ‘emotional’ are interwoven with the
‘electronic’ and the ‘geographic’ (33, 24). So it proves when we address
the photographs created by players of Pokémon GO. Trawling the many,
many images uploaded to social media sites by players of the game,
several strains of imagery become evident. Many photos are framed with
the aim of making the creatures appear to fit seamlessly into the scene –
a Pikachu hunkered down in the luggage bracket of a hired bike, an
Ekans coiled on a bench in front of the Tower of London. Others make
visual jokes that riff on particular creatures’ looks or character traits: a
shot of real geese next to an ostrich-like Doduo; a bleary-eyed Drowzee
next to a coffee vendor. Such images highlight the use of AR technologies
not just to present information, but also to populate and render welcom-
ing spaces that might otherwise seem empty or unfriendly – as a means,
in short, of screening out anomie, anxiety and boredom. These photos
see players playfully submitting to the game’s premise while, in many
cases, sharing in-jokes that gesture at their knowledge of Pokémon lore
in the attempt to frame themselves as adorably (rather than lamentably)
geeky. Elsewhere, however, an element of malicious pleasure creeps into
the images. In some it is the pokémon who become the butt of the joke
(Psyduck’s gormless stare seems to have made the creature a favourite
fall guy). In other cases, though, the jokes depend on the fact that the
viewer can see things that the people being photographed cannot. Some
of these images are in decidedly questionable taste: one shows a Gengar
grinning malevolently in what appears to be a funeral home, feet away
from a young girl and a middle-aged man peering into an open coffin;
another shows a crab-like Parasect crawling along a woman’s thigh, and
is captioned with a joke about sexually transmitted infections. While it
is impossible to know whether the people depicted were in on the joke,
these images affirm Montola’s observations about pervasive games and
the potential for ‘dark play, where some of the players do not know
they are playing’ and, as a consequence, ‘are not shielded by the pro-
tective frame of playfulness’ (Montola 2009, 15–16, emphasis in orig-
inal). Such off-colour humour is also, of course, a way of distancing
oneself from the cute, wholesome values of the Pokémon universe and
from ideas of gamers as childish. They show how Pokémon GO offers
162 Mobile Subjects
players an opportunity to perform attitudes towards places and peo-
ple, towards technology, towards gaming culture, and – given that many
players have described the game as an opportunity to return as adults to
a fictional universe they loved as children – towards one’s own younger
self. In composing images of pocket monsters, players are also fram-
ing themselves, whether as geeky, nostalgic, Japanophile, childlike or
edgily irreverent.
Pokéstops and Yolocausts

Even a game as innocuous as Pokémon GO, then, can render the city
a canvas for ‘dark play’, raising some of the same issues that, for Jane
Tormey (2013), street photography brings to the fore. As Tormey argues,
by ‘snatching confluences of circumstance or uncanny juxtaposition’,
street photographers express points of view, making cities seem ‘cruel
or kind, beautiful or safe’ (96, 97). In so doing, street photography ‘in-
fluences perceptual information and produces particular conceptions
of spatiality’ so that cities, often experienced as ‘harsh, rational and
anonymous’ – not to mention hectic and heterogeneous – become easier
to comprehend and to locate oneself within (ibid. 191). The links bet
ween gaming and street photography feel particularly strong in the case
of photographers like Matt Stuart or Nick Turpin, whose images use
unusual perspectives or chance alignments of 3D bodies and 2D images
to create visual jokes and Fez-like puzzles (a dog apparently driving a
car, a commuter apparently being poked by a giant hand reaching out
from a poster). Their images require viewers to switch scopic codes,
oscillating between surrender to the trompe l’oeil effect and a critical
reconstruction of the concrete space depicted. Here, as with images cre-
ated by Pokémon GO players, the city is made strange so that it can be
rendered sensible once more by the viewer, who, by decoding the images
recodes their environment as a space of emergent poignancy, irony and
humour – and also reframes him/herself as knowing, streetwise, in on
the joke. For Tormey, there are serious ethical questions posed by the
street photographer’s assumption of ‘the right to look’, however, and
by their extension of that right to viewers (ibid. 100). She notes that,
while street photography can ‘reveal underlying practical realities’, im-
ages often showcase ‘the photographer’s inflection or prejudice’ instead,
propagating ‘stereotypes or sentimentality’ (ibid. 91–92, 102). In much
street photography, as in certain Pokémon GO photos disseminated on-
line, images convey meanings not available to those depicted, who thus
become the punchlines of visual jokes in compositions they may never
see. As Mubi Brighenti argues, ‘“personal” and “mobile” media’ often
presume a ‘type of individuality and … types of mobilities’ in the way
they address and position users (2010, 473); in these playful framings,
too, the positioning of the photographer and their audience as mobile
Mobile Subjects 163
and flexible, culturally and/or technologically literate often depends on
the depiction of others who are framed as out of the loop.
One of the ‘darkest’ and most widely circulated Pokémon GO im-
ages online shows a Koffing – a ‘poison gas pokémon’ – appearing in-
side Washington DC’s Holocaust museum. Journalists were unable to
determine the image’s origin and whether it was a genuine screenshot
or a fake created using image-editing software. The institution, how-
ever, asked for museum visitors to refrain from playing GO while on
the premises and for Niantic to remove the site from the game (Meyjes
2016; Peterson 2016). The uncertainty as to whether this image was the
result of a profoundly unfortunate coincidence (algorithms more or less
randomly determine which creatures will spawn where) or a particularly
tasteless joke perpetrated by a social media user suggests the complex
potential of AR technologies. From one perspective, these are stories
about digital devices promoting historical myopia, insulating users from
unpleasant realities and failing to recognize or register spaces’ histori-
cal and cultural significances; from another perspective, though, these
stories offer an arresting, albeit grotesque, example of AR activating a
space’s semiotic potential. Uneasy as to this particular image’s indeter-
minate status, journalistic accounts of the controversy also suggest an
unease with the way augmented reality interfaces and pervasive games
introduce new ambiguities into familiar codes of spatial practice – hence,
perhaps, the strong desire to draw a line in the sand by identifying spaces
and situations in which playing GO is definitely not appropriate. As
Valentina Rozas-Krause (2015) observes, however, codes of appropriate
behaviour emerge through ‘constant negotiations’ rather than top-down
prescriptions (62). Discussing the 2013 furore over men using Berlin’s
Holocaust Memorial as a backdrop for their profiles on the gay hookup
portal Grindr, Rozas-Krause argues that when a site with a charged his-
tory lends itself to ‘a multiplicity of quotidian functions’, from playing
hide and seek to having picnics, determining which actions are ‘appro-
priate’ can and should be difficult (ibid. 62–63). Where some saw these
men’s photos as manifestations of ‘the privilege of amnesia’, she suggests
that we might equally find in their refunctioning of the memorial as a
networked cruising ground an eminently ‘appropriate’ riposte to Nazi
homophobia (Mills 2013).
Such an argument is harder to make of the images that were com-
piled on Israeli satirist Shahak Shapira’s (2017) ‘Yolocaust’ blog. Having
combed Facebook, Instagram, Tinder and Grindr, Shapira presented
a range of selfies which showed carefree millennials5 smiling, posing,
juggling and practising yoga amidst the rows of cuboid concrete stelae
that make up the monument. As visitors moved their cursors over these
images, however, they transformed: figures were bleached of colour and
inserted into black and white images documenting Nazi atrocities, as
the monument’s geometric forms were replaced with mounds of corpses
164 Mobile Subjects
or the huddled bodies of emaciated concentration camp inmates. These
images are no longer available to view: all 12 selfie takers contacted
Shapira asking for their pictures to be taken down, and the page now
plays host to a range of reflections and comments on the project and the
images. Opinions regarding the blog were mixed: one could argue that
Shapira’s use of images from concentration camps to shame thoughtless
social media users is itself at least as misjudged as their selfies were,
though for Hatherley (2017) the project imbued the site with levels of
‘meaning’ it had hitherto lacked. The striking thing about the Yolocaust
images in the context of this chapter, though, is their appropriation of
the visual language of augmented reality. Like Pokémon GO, Yolocaust
used digital techniques to create composite images – with the difference
that the monsters here were grinning youths and the reality is that of
genocide. Like Shattered Memories (in which, as we saw in Chapter 3,
a smartphone renders visible traumatic tableaux from the past), mean-
while, Yolocaust imagines AR technologies not as a means of supple-
menting boring or inscrutable spaces with entertaining and informative
overlays, but as a way of putting users in touch with unpleasant histo
rical truths.
In the early 1990s, Usenet contributor Mike Godwin proposed
‘Godwin’s Law of Nazi Analogies’, which states that ‘as an online dis-
cussion grows longer, the probability of a comparison involving Nazis
or Hitler approaches one’ (Godwin 1994). Such comparisons, Godwin
felt, were not only offensive in their trivialization of the Holocaust, but
counterintuitive, foreclosing any possibility of a nuanced discussion of the
issues at hand. With the controversies I have discussed in the preceding
few paragraphs we can see a similar tendency at work. Focusing on sites
associated with Holocaust absolves us of having to engage with the comp
lex questions raised by emerging phenomena like mobile gaming, selfie-
taking and augmented reality interfaces; instead, Nazi genocide is invoked
to lend moral authority to the idea that new technologies promote narcis-
sism, ignorance, obliviousness and prejudice – even as Y olocaust also sug-
gests that such technologies could be salutary, a means of choreographing
humbling reckonings with the past rather than fostering regressive nostal-
gia. If we can see the tendency to understand technology as pharmakon
at work here, we can also see how popular accounts of emerging forms
of networked spatial practice tend to pass over ambiguities and ambi
valences in favour of either utopian fervour or dystopian ire.
As a result, we can miss the subtler ways in which AR and pervasive
gaming work to obfuscate and entrench – or to reveal and challenge –
social stratifications. We can also miss the fact that societies are strati-
fied not just along lines of ethnicity, religion or sexuality, but also class,
motility and technical literacy. It’s here that the communities of players
who use Reddit to trade tips for finding rare and powerful pokémon –
like the subreddit pokemongoLondon – become interesting. Insofar as
Mobile Subjects 165
they are focused on mastering the game rather than exploring its com-
municative and aesthetic potential, we might presume these players have
less to say about space, society and subjectivity than GO users more
focused on photography. The threads concerning optimal strategies and
routes through the city, however, suggest that AR games can attune us
anew to the ‘rules’ of public spaces. Documenting a community attempt-
ing to understand the workings of the game, these discussions also see
that community exploring the means by which, to use Mubi Brighenti’s
(2010) term, the world of Pokémon is ‘prolonged’ into that of the user.
The subreddit hosts discussions of transport links, bylaws, gyropscopes,
public WiFi hotspots, smartphone connection settings, data plans, SIM
cards, portable battery chargers, public parks’ opening hours and the
locations of particular franchise coffee shops’ electrical outlets (‘Cafe
Nero usually has more plugs than Starbucks’ (Dannah573, 2016)). In
raising these issues, the participants draw attention to the character
of the ‘bridges, corridors or thresholds’ – technological, economic and
legal, immaterial and infrastructural – through which players are able
to act in/on GO’s gamespace. Mediated via the gameworld, the forces
that shape the real world become visible in new ways: in response to
a user whose avatar moves erratically when they are in the vicinity of
a particular shopping centre, a user hypothesizes that it might be due
to ‘reception boosters … play[ing] havoc with your location services.
This might be why you appear to run about as your phone probes the
nearby wifi routers/network towers’ (Ralphus16 2016). A ‘safety PSA’
thread advising that players take precautions against ‘mugging and theft
attempts’, meanwhile, suggests an awareness that the augmented city is
also a space shaped by inequality, envy, anomie and suspicion (carricka-
ture 2016). These gamers don’t seem particularly concerned by snooping
corporations, nor are they interested in why some of their fellow citi-
zens might be driven to steal smartphones; they are strictly here for the
pokémon. Their stories, though, are intriguing as accounts of networked
life that avoid the hyperbolic extremes of articles about smartphone us-
ers violating the sanctity of memorials and museums in favour of the
affective middle reaches of experience. They show how digital interfaces
and infrastructures reframe spaces in ways that give rise to anticipa-
tion, satisfaction, anxiety, boredom, frustration and contentment. Their
jointly developed strategies, meanwhile, suggest how games can provide
motives and frameworks for learning about how digital cities work.
Conclusion
At a time when cultural geographers are trying to think beyond signi
fication and address the ‘diverse human, inhuman and nonhuman forces’
that compose environments (Anderson 2016, 1), it is important to re-
member that while games like GO often serve to screen out history,
166 Mobile Subjects
inequality and exploitation, they can also work to attune players to the
ways in which urban environments and individual spatial practices are
being reconfigured by new media. In trying to make the virtual creatures
they covet appear on their screens, pokemongoLondon participants
make a host of other chimerical entities apprehensible. Their discussions
point to the fact that, while urban space may not be as rigidly bounded
as Killer 7’s networked gamespace, cities, like interfaces, are increasingly
conceived in terms of ‘choice architectures’ which instantiate a ‘libertar-
ian paternalism’ by framing ‘the subject … as a free player in a defined
rule-space’, at liberty to make their own choices on the condition that
they accept ‘total surveillance’ (Schrape 2014, 21). Where many games
seek to efface their own interfaces and to make the player feel that defini
tive mapping and mastery of space is possible, Killer 7, Fez and (albeit
inadvertently) Pokémon GO invite consideration of what it means to be
caught between different viewpoints and frameworks, dimly aware both
of the networks we are connected to and of the fact that the technologies
we look through are probably looking back at us.
Notes
1 The classic example is Hans Holbein’s 1533 painting ‘The Ambassadors’,
which famously requires viewers to stand to the side of the image in order to
resolve an image of a floating skull.
2 These constellations are one of the game’s many conceptual jokes, suggest-
ing an analogy between the activity of reading clusters of stars as 2D images
(of ploughs, bears, hunters etc.) and that of reading Fez’s spaces as alter-
nately ‘deep’ or ‘flat’.
3 Consalvo (2012) interviews Western gamers for whom 1990s Japanese
games represented ravishing glimpses of another culture.
4 Caillois differentiates between ‘paidiac’ (free-form, improvisatory, creative
and ‘playful’) and ‘ludic’ forms of play (rule-bound, goal-oriented and
‘gameful’).
5 YOLO, or ‘you only live once’, being a byword for free-spirited millennial
positivity.
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7 Productive Subjects
Time, Value and Gendered
Feelings
In a September 2016 Washington Post article, Anna Swanson h ighlights

an ‘alarming’ trend. Amidst a general decline in unemployment, a
strangely high proportion of able-bodied, lower-skilled young A merican
men under thirty seem to be ‘rejecting work’. These men are ‘either not
working or not working full-time’. Many are continuing to live with
their parents. At the same time, surveys suggest that this group of men
are happier with their lives than at any point since the early 2000s.
The reason? According to economist Erik Hurst, videogames may be
to blame (Hurst 2016; Swanson 2016). Noting that the downturn in
employment and the upturn in mood among young men have coincided
with an increase in the number of hours per week they spend gaming,
Hurst and his colleagues contend not just that men rejected by a com-
petitive job market are finding solace in digital play, but also that ‘in-
creasingly sophisticated videogames are luring young men way from the
workforce’ (Swanson 2016). While this hypothesis is open to question,
Swanson’s article and Hurst’s research raise some important issues, ones
that will be at the centre of this final chapter. In the preceding chapter,
I argued that games can help us to understand how digital technologies
orient subjects spatially and help them to frame the world around them –
and, in so doing, how they facilitate identity work. I now want to shift
the emphasis from space to time. Addressing the temporal dimensions
of digital subjectivity and identity, this chapter offers an account of how
games both reflect and help players to negotiate changes to the rhythm
of everyday experience under ‘the new capitalism’ (Sennett 2006). The
examples it uses are Destiny and Kim Kardashian: Hollywood. While
one is a lavish console shooter set in outer space and the other a free-to-
play smartphone title set on Sunset Strip, both games see players acting
out the same rags to riches scenario, asking them to assume an entrepre-
neurial role and to fulfil the neoliberal promise that we can achieve our
dreams if only we are independent, resourceful and tenacious enough.
As this suggests, if playing videogames has become more appealing
than working, it is not necessarily because games allow players to for-
get or rebel against notions of productivity, efficiency, goal orientation
and profit. In fact, most contemporary games go out of their way to
reassure players that if they apply themselves patiently and methodically,
they will have something to show for it. As one of Swanson’s (2016)
interviewees puts it, ‘when I play a game, I know if I have a few hours
I will be rewarded … With a job, it’s always been up in the air with the
amount of work I put in and the reward’. To look at the likes of Des-
tiny and Hollywood is to realize that the ‘technological improvements’
that Swanson claims have helped to make the ‘increasingly sophisticated’
games of today more compelling than their forebears are not just a mat-
ter of higher-fidelity graphics, more responsive interfaces or more com-
plex artificial intelligence; at least as crucial has been the development of
new modes of witnessing and motivating player ‘progress’. In what fol-
lows, I refer to this development in terms of a ‘gamification of gaming’,
noting that while ‘gamification’ tends to be explained in terms of the
application of videogame design principles to other domains in order to
motivate behaviour change, games themselves have increasingly incor-
porated the kinds of behaviourist reinforcement techniques that pundits
are referring to when they discuss ‘gamification’. This shift has come
about because, with the development of data capitalism, online play has
become a source of value. While certain gamers have long engaged in
forms of ‘playbour’ or ‘instrumental play’, which blurred the lines bet
ween play and production, leisure and labour (Kücklich 2005; Taylor
2012, 86), today all play has become a means of generating potentially
valuable data, giving designers a strong incentive to keep gamers glued
to the screen. Where play was once scorned by the Puritans as sinful and
celebrated by the Situationists as a subversively wasteful alternative to
capitalist efficiency and productivity, we now live in an era of ‘produc-
tive play’ (Dibbell 2007, 64), a ‘ludified’ culture in which work has be-
come more playful even as digital play has started to look a lot more like
work (Raessens 2006). Videogames embody the paradoxes of this new
order. They still provide escapist relief, offering an increasingly popular
means of managing the stresses and uncertainties of twenty-first-century
working life. It is telling, though, that in many cases, the brand of escap-
ism they offer involves playing at being productive.
In addressing questions of time, motivation and progress, work and
play, this chapter also returns to the issue of gender. As we shall see,
Angela McRobbie has argued that ‘the gender of post-Fordism is female’
(2016, 89). What, then, can we say about the gender of gaming in an
era of ‘ludic capitalism’, when post-Fordist work and digital play are
increasingly entangled (Galloway 2011, 26)? Traditionally, of course,
gaming has been considered a male pursuit. In particular, it has been un-
derstood in relation to two masculine stereotypes. The first is that of the
‘geek’ gamer who (as journalist Keith Stuart (2014) suggestively puts it)
‘only want[s] to play with themselves’, using games as a crypto-onanistic
substitute for gratifications they are too shy or socially maladjusted to
seek out in the real world. The second stereotype, one that began to
Productive Subjects 173
crystallize as gaming was becoming more widely popular, is that of the
‘bro gamer’ who likes sports games, driving games and violent shooters,
a stereotype which Joe Baxter-Webb (2016) argues has been propagated
by middle-class male gamers who have sought to construct themselves
as enlightened connoisseurs by contrast. While the insufficiently manly
geek and the excessively manly bro might seem incompatible, these two
stereotypes often blur into one another, reflecting the parlous and con-
tradictory nature of masculinities in general and of gaming masculinities
in particular. Indeed, Kirkpatrick (2012) argues that gaming continues
to be defined by its tendency to veer haphazardly between the nerdy and
the ‘laddish’, gleeful juvenility and moody tilts at maturity.
Of course, games have always been enjoyed by people who fit neither
the stereotype of the geeky loner nor that of the rambunctious bro – both
of whom are implicitly understood to be white, straight and middle class
in most cases (Shaw 2014, viii). Gaming’s emergence as a cultural field
associated with young men was neither immediate nor inevitable – as
with Butlerite bodies, gender is something gaming culture does ‘through
the repetition or citation of a prior, authoritative set of practices’, a per-
formative unfolding potentially prone to slips and reorientations rather
than an ontological given (Butler 1993, 226–227). As described in
Chapter 3, the last ten years in particular have seen new platforms, new
interface technologies and new design philosophies bringing gaming to
a larger and more demographically diverse audience. This is, no doubt,
good news for videogames as a cultural form. As we also saw in that
chapter, however, the industry’s enthusiasm for accessible, socially ori-
ented gameplay experiences and its desire to consign to history the idea
of games as a medium for sad, solitary young men have been driven as
much by the development of new modes of monetizing players’ activities,
mining their data and levying their social ties as it has a conviction that
gaming culture should become more inclusive and diverse. Meanwhile,
a growing sense among diehard gamers that the gaming landscape is
changing around them has fuelled the rise of what Consalvo calls ‘toxic
gamer culture’ (2012). Feelings of martyrdom, resentment and paranoia
have found expression in campaigns of misogynistic, racist, homopho-
bic and transphobic harassment and abuse, most notably that waged
under the banner of ‘gamergate’ (Massanari 2015). Reading Destiny in
tandem with Hollywood allows us to address both questions of time
and the ways in which games, gaming platforms and gamer identities
might be said to be gendered. Crudely speaking, the former is a con-
ventional ‘hardcore’ shooter that appears to be aimed primarily at male
players, the latter a ‘casual’ celebrity roleplaying game that appears to be
aimed primarily at female players – though as Juul points out, whether
we start with games or with players, distinguishing between hardcore
and casual gaming is seldom as simple as we might expect (2010, 8–12).
So it proves here, for while Destiny and Hollywood are very different
games, they also turn out to follow a surprisingly similar pattern, invit-
ing players both to cultivate an entrepreneurial identity and to invest in
building up their avatar’s stats – even as they inflect this invitation in
markedly different ways.
Technology, Time and Gendered Feelings

At this point, I want to introduce two concepts that will underpin my
analysis of these games: Lauren Berlant’s (2011) notion of ‘cruel op-
timism’ and Robyn Warhol’s idea of media forms as ‘technologies of
feeling’ that mount ‘effeminate’ or ‘antieffeminate’ appeals to their au-
diences (2003, 71). Both concepts require some unpacking. Berlant is in-
terested in the temporal structure and affective texture of life under ‘the
new capitalism’, as neoliberalism disrupts the routines and invalidates
the expectations that used to structure day-to-day existence. Ours, she
holds, is a ‘postgenre’, ‘postnormative’ world (2011, 28), a world where
it is becoming ever more difficult to look forward to a better tomor-
row, or even to imagine what’s coming next. In response, she sees sub-
jects turning towards ‘cruel optimism’, a form of ‘emotional habitus’
whereby we cultivate attachments to objects, ideas, people or prospects
that make life bearable. As Berlant stresses, cruel optimism is about
managing time and our felt experience of it: ‘whatever the content of
the attachment is, the continuity of its form provides something of the
continuity of the subject’s sense of what it means to keep on living and
to look forward to being in the world’ (ibid. 24). Cruel optimism helps
us to sustain a sense of continuity and negotiate the burdensome de-
mand to be dynamic, autonomous sovereign subjects (ibid. 42–43). As
the word ‘cruel’ suggests, however, these are attachments that hold us
back at the same time as they keep us going (ibid. 25); cruel optimism
is about creating holding patterns that may help us to cope, but not to
change things.
Warhol (2003), meanwhile, is interested in how media forms ‘giv[e]
shape to [our] affective life’ and leave gendered traces on our bodies
by eliciting ‘effeminate’ or ‘antieffeminate’ feelings (71). Warhol under-
stands gender as a social construct, acknowledging that ‘a man may
participate in effeminate culture, a woman in antieffeminate culture’
even as subjects are nudged into thinking, feeling, behaving and con-
suming along gendered lines (ibid. 99). She is particularly interested in
the serial narrative as a form characterized by an
ambivalent agitation that comes with a sense of open-endedness, of

continued possibility, and of the contingency of events … ambiva-
lent because that agitation seems paradoxically to be accompanied
by a soothing effect that readers call ‘calming’ or even ‘boring’.
(Ibid. 76)
The extended, open-ended plotlines and the gaps between instalments
that are the key features of the serial form create space for anticipation,
speculation and suspense. They also mean that serials tend to be formu-
laic, repetitious and full of redundancies. While this predictability can be
boring, it can also be strangely comforting, especially if other aspects of
our lives feel unpredictable. Warhol contends that this contradictoriness
makes the serial a highly flexible form, a form that can be used to ‘struc-
ture readers’ feelings’ along either ‘effeminate’ or ‘antieffeminate’ lines,
giving them opportunities to ‘rehearse’ different emotional responses.
Thus, soaps and other ‘effeminate’ serial forms structure narrative time
in such a way as to elicit shock, scurrilous delight, or ‘the tightness in
the throat and the wetness in the eye that presage crying’ – reactions that
code the viewing body as effeminate (ibid. 89). ‘Antieffeminate’ serials,
by contrast, construct their audiences as masculine via an oscillation
between two different categories of ‘manly’ response: ‘the thrill and the
yawn’ (ibid.). Punctuated by violent action scenes to which audiences are
expected to respond with a ‘pounding heart … quick breathing … [and]
mild sweating’, such serials also find room for quieter stretches that
effect a ‘negation of affect, a state of (non)feeling our culture marks as
the opposite of effeminacy’ (ibid. 89, 77). Warhol also looks beyond lit-
erature, film and television to new media forms, arguing that the e-mail
conversation can also be read as both a serial form and an antieffemi-
nate technology of feeling, fostering ‘a “masculine” intimacy, structured
by and reinforcing the antieffeminate ethic of maintaining control, self-
sufficiency, and the option of ambivalently lonesome isolation’ by put-
ting the user in control of ‘a machine that imposes certain limits on the
quality, the intensity and the content of the relationships it brings into
being’ (ibid. 97, 71).
While neither author explicitly mentions videogames, I hope that the
reader is already beginning to see how the ideas Berlant and Warhol
advance might be useful in a game studies context, particularly when
it comes to addressing how games use ‘gamified’ progress mechanics to
hold players’ attention. Berlant’s observations have clear relevance to
videogames as a form that has become a key means of shaping time and
imbuing life with a sense of continuity, comfort and purpose for many
(see Thornham 2011; Enevold 2012; Deterding 2016). Warhol, mean-
while, equips us to think beyond imagery and plot to address how games
can enforce or challenge gender norms by way of rhythm and temporal
structure. The traits that define the serial (repetitious but punctuated by
compelling affective crescendos, often boring but also strangely compel-
ling) will be familiar to gamers, especially those who play games that,
like Destiny or Hollywood, are structured around gamified progression
systems and/or the periodic release of expansions and supplementary
downloadable content. I hope that it is also clear how the two concepts
work complementarily: where Warhol dissects the complex appeal of
forms like the serial, Berlant suggests why such forms might be parti
cularly appealing at a time of uncertainty, when people are casting about
for anything that promises to imbue life with a sense of stability, pur-
pose or continuity. In what follows, I look closely at how Hollywood
and Destiny encourage players to understand and manage the flow of
time, to incorporate play into their everyday routines and to inhabit gen-
dered subject positions, proposing that these games are prime examples
of how game designers have learned to levy the power of cruel optimism.
First, though, I want to say more about gaming’s ambivalent relationship
with the fantasies that underwrite neoliberal work culture.
All Work and All Play

Digital technologies have played an important role in fostering the kinds
of unrest Berlant describes. Thanks to new media, our experience of
time has become at once more homogeneous (what with instantaneous
international communication, 24/7 markets, content on demand and
collapsing distinctions between labour and leisure) and, paradoxically,
less predictable (what with accelerating technological change, political
and economic instability, shrinking welfare provision and the disappear-
ance of career ladders and jobs for life). In a work context, this means
the steady micro- and macro-cadences of the nine to five workday and
the lifelong career giving way to a stop-start order of gigs, pitches, part-
time and short-term contracts. As we saw in Chapter 2, these changes
are a matter of profound concern for many critics, who argue that they
not only impair individual well-being, but obstruct attempts to construct
a coherent identity (Sennet 2006; Berardi 2009). For Berlant (2011), ‘the
retraction of the social democratic promise of the post-Second World
War period’ – and, with it, dreams of ‘upward mobility, job security,
political and economic equality … [and] meritocracy’ – limits the ability
to believe in ‘life as a project of adding up to something’ (3).
It is important to note, however, that these shifts away from the tem-
poral patterns that used to organize working life were, at least in part,
a tactical response on the part of capital to widespread dissatisfaction
with the old order of things and the prospect of a widespread ‘refusal of
work’ (Kirkpatrick 2013, 28–29; McRobbie 2016, 91, 97). If, for many,
life under Fordism meant the stultifying monotony of an unfulfilling
job for life (or, for women, of life married to a breadwinner), then the
post-Fordist ethos of ‘passionate work’ promises autonomy and creative
fulfilment (McRobbie 2016, 90). In this culture, ‘a desirable job becomes
part of the panoply of attributes by which cultural intelligibility is ac-
quired’ (ibid. 87), and Romantic notions of innate individual talent un-
derwrite the sense that everyone is responsible for fulfilling their own
personal potential – a notion that justifies the withdrawal of benefits
and social safety nets. For Kirkpatrick, it is crucial to account for the
role of games and playfulness in this transformed cultural landscape.
As Kirkpatrick observes, ‘gaming was an important driver behind the
development of networked computing’ and has helped to pave the way
for a culture in which work takes on ‘a more engaging and even playful’
guise, while self-representation assumes overtones of ‘aesthetic perfor-
mance’ (2013, 19, 23, 24). This world came about thanks to the ‘assimi
lation of the 1960s counterculture into contemporary management and
business practices’ (ibid. 28); if that counterculture saw in play a subver-
sive counterpoint to the ‘oppressive regime of bureaucratic, rationalized
procedures and hierarchies that defined much of life in the 1950s and
1960s’, capitalism responded by becoming more playful, appropriating
and adapting the ludic strategies of its critics to its own ends (ibid. 29).
Games, then, ‘fit with the new social order’ (ibid. 26). Performing an
important but also a rather contradictory function, they offer proce-
dural parables about the ability of tenacious, enterprising subjects to
work (or play) their way to the top while also taking on the role of ‘com-
pensat[ing] individuals for instabilities and insecurities experienced in
the economic domain’ (ibid.). The fact that (as we saw in Chapter 3) play
has become a source of profit for publishers and platform holders means
that ‘play becomes both a source of strength for people and another
way in which their struggle to achieve autonomy, or even just a sense of
coherence over the life course, is confronted by various forms of domi-
nation and exploitation’ (ibid. 22). In other words, videogames provide
a cathartic release from the vicissitudes of precarious professional lives
even as they acclimatize players to the logics of technoculture and open
up new fronts on which economic exploitation can occur; they reiterate
the logic of productivity and progress even as they coax us into investing
excessive amounts of time, money and effort into activities that do not
seem to offer anything tangible by way of reward; they console, excite,
motivate, bore, distract and frustrate players who may be fully invested
in a ‘gamer’ identity but might equally see gaming as a meaningless,
perhaps slightly shameful habit.
The games that I discuss in this chapter witness these dualities. On
one level, they are timesinks, meant to offer distraction or relief from
the stresses of contemporary life even as they keep players tied into the
networked attention economy. Yet they also tell stories of motivated,
self-reliant individuals’ entrepreneurial triumphs (or they do, at least,
if players have what it takes to take their avatars to the top). Equally
complex are the terms on which they present sociability: as we’ll see,
Destiny and Hollywood alike vacillate between affirming the value of
cooperation and collaboration, and reminding us that we are special
and should be looking out for number one. Tuned to coax players into
the states of ‘animalized’ ‘eurhythmia’ discussed in Chapter 4 (Nemorin
2016; Apperley 2010, 39), they also keep them in touch with fantasies of
progress and productivity, and it is this that makes them ideal ‘object[s]
of cruel optimism … object[s] to which one passes one’s fantasy of sover-
eignty for safe-keeping’ while one attempts to attain a kind of ‘passivity’
or ‘coasting sentience’, to circumscribe a ‘breathing space’ amidst the
attritional grind of everyday life (Berlant 2011, 43, 42, 66).
Gaming Gamified
It is important to note that videogames have developed to better serve
these ends. Over the period this book covers, we have witnessed a gam-
ification of gaming, as core and casual games alike introduce systems
calculated to reassure players that they are not wasting their time and
effort but investing it in order to reap the benefits later – whether those
benefits constitute points, perks, equipment, in-game abilities, markers
of prestige or, as with ‘exergames’, the shedding of real-world weight.
Metagamic reward systems and social features fold each play session
into wider projects of acquisition, progress and self-promotion. Such
measures recognize and enhance the videogame’s potential as an object
of cruel optimism: absolving us from having to account for what we
are doing right now (because it is always framed as an effort towards
accruing or maintaining something for the future), they also spare us
from having to imagine the future we are notionally working towards
in any detail (because there is always a task at hand to focus on). In
order to understand how and why these processes work, we first need
to acknowledge videogaming’s dirty secret: that games aren’t actually
all that much fun most of the time. As Ruggill and McAllister (2011)
point out, people who make, sell, promote and discuss games – and, for
that matter, people who play them – often go to great lengths to pres-
ent videogames as ‘compelling, radical, funny, artful, dangerous, and so
forth’ (37). For Ruggill and McAllister, however, they protest too much,
and the very avidity with which they reiterate these claims points to the
degree of ‘discomfort’ and ‘drudgery’ inherent in digital play (ibid. 34).
While certain games might succeed in being thrilling, moving or endur-
ingly engaging, Ruggill and McAllister argue that these are the excep-
tion rather than the rule. Such exceptions, they hold, are the products
of ‘an enormous amount of craft, talent and luck’, and at their core lies
a battery of techniques designed ‘to entice, encourage and especially
coerce players into active engagement’ and the assumption of certain
subject positions (ibid. 32). Drawing on Adorno, Ruggil and McAllister
discuss these techniques as modes of ‘interpellation’ (ibid. 36). Games,
they argue, are like ventriloquists’ dummies, through whose mouths
designers flatter, coax, threaten and chivvy players into playing – and
perhaps even enjoying playing. Echoing Barry Atkins (2006), they ar-
gue that one of the main ways in which games interpellate players is by
making them look forward, whether to what might be around the next
corner or – via gameplay innovations, cutting-edge graphical techniques
and similar ‘advances’ – to where the medium as a whole might be head-
ing. Gamified progression mechanics are another way of inviting players
to look forward, encouraging them to spend more time gaming and to
feel better about it even as they seek to defuse notions of videogaming
as a sedentary, antisocial, perniciously addictive waste of time, enjoyed
only by geeky loners and losers. If many independent games want to
show that games can be meaningful in the sense that cinema or literary
fiction can be meaningful, these systems focus instead on presenting play
as profitable or generative, a matter of playing towards something.
As I have already conceded, to talk about a ‘gamification of gam-
ing’ might seem odd. According to Detereding et al.’s influential for-
mulation, gamification is ‘the use of game design elements in non-game
contexts’ (2011, 2). It is often discussed in terms of importing feed-
back and reward systems developed by videogame designers into other
domains – and sometimes in terms of turning the baleful power of dig-
ital games to good account, levying the same force which compels kids
to keep playing Mario Kart when they should be doing their homework
to incentivize learning, healthy eating, the completion of household
chores, civic engagement, etc. In fact, though, the work of research-
ers like Schrape (2014), Schüll (2014), Karlsen (2016, 72–73, 79) and
Elmer (2003, 56–57) shows that so-called gamification often owes less
to videogame designers than it does the operators of airlines, casinos,
supermarkets and jails, who have spent decades honing modes of mon-
itoring and recasting behaviour, from prize draws and loyalty cards to
electronic tags. Gamification, in other words, is arguably something of
a misnomer. That being the case, what do I mean by the g amification of
gaming? In a 2014 article, I suggested that one way to narrate this pro-
cess is in terms of how designers of console games responded to the in-
creasing availability of storage and ‘save game’ facilities over the course
of the 1990s. I argue that as writable memory became more widely avail-
able, we saw a subtle but significant shift in design philosophy, a move
towards rewarding players for succeeding rather than just punishing
them for failing. Videogame designers began motivating players with
unlockable rewards (items, characters, costumes, game modes) and in-
tegrating the kinds of progression and character ‘levelling’ systems that
had hitherto been the preserve of roleplaying games (RPGs) into other
genres. Indeed, gamers sometimes used the term ‘RPGification’ to de-
scribe the trend, referring to racing games that require players to ‘grind’
to unlock more powerful cars, or action games where players must save
up for and buy new combat abilities as ‘RPGified’. This reorientation
towards earning upgrades and rewards rather than just besting obstacles
brings questions of anticipation and motivation to the fore. As the player
jumps through the hoops necessary to unlock this or that character, cos-
tume, weapon or vehicle, they are invited to look forward to the moment
when everything will be at their disposal. Is this, though, the moment at
which true play can begin or the point at which it ends? Caught up in the
cycle of earning and unlocking, it is easy to tell ourselves that the best
is yet to come – and that, even if we are not enjoying ourselves at this
precise moment, we are at least laying the groundwork in anticipation of
the moment when the real fun will begin. What we often find, though, is
that in the absence of more treats to unlock, more extrinsic motivators,
play loses much of its allure. Perhaps this is because the pressure to enjoy
play for its own sake can in fact be rather burdensome; perhaps it is be-
cause, without the prospect of a carrot to motivate us, we risk realizing
just how boring, meaningless and repetitious gaming really is most of
the time.
This trajectory mirrors that of the hoarder, whose behaviour is, for
Berlant, a classic expression of cruel optimism. She argues that hoarding
‘performs the enjoyment of an infinite present of holding pure potential’
(2011, 42). Should the hoarder attempt to exercise their sovereignty and
realize the potential that the hoard represents, however, they are cer-
tain to be disappointed. Videogames beguile us with the promise of a
kind of pure play – an autotelic, fully voluntary activity that constitutes
its own reward. Chapter 4 stressed that if games do provide pleasure,
satisfaction and contentment, the industry’s high-flung rhetoric of flow
and immersion masks the fact that they also elicit boredom, frustration,
discomfort, hilarity and disorientation. I would argue that if something
like pure play is possible, it shapes gaming culture as much as a prospect
as it does a reality, a prospect that is put to work for the purposes of
monetization and subjectivation.
This process of gamification or RPGification was occurring at the
same time as the emergence of online gaming, first on PC and then
on consoles. If online gaming opened up new forms of competition,
collaboration community and creativity for gamers, from an industry
perspective it also transformed play into a source of data, supplementary
income and surplus value. Publishers and developers began to incorpo-
rate data mining techniques and shopfronts into games alongside social
features intended to keep people playing and tie them into particular
corporate ecosystems, with the Xbox 360’s ‘gamercard’ system proving
particularly influential. Players were invited to create an online profile
and were awarded points for completing game-specific challenges cre-
ated by developers, unlocking ‘achievement’ badges, which would in-
crease their overall ‘gamerscore’. Suddenly, by playing any particular
game, players were also making progress in a system-level metagame.
In Chapter 3 I discussed how, for Microsoft and their affiliates, achieve-
ments provide a means of gathering data about which games users are
playing and how they are playing them. For players, meanwhile, the
gamerscore system provides an ongoing measure of commitment and
competence, taking into account all the games that a user has played on
that platform. On one level, the system can be understood as a means
of ‘redeeming’ what would otherwise be solitary, gratuitous or unwit-
nessed acts: where once one might have felt a faint glow of personal
pride at having pulled off a particularly tricky, ingenious or comedic in-
game feat, such acts are now recognized, recorded and published online
for all to see. These systems also provide players with a greater number
and diversity of goals, so that even if we are not making any progress
towards a particular milestone (such as completing a game’s next story
mission), we may nevertheless be contributing to the fulfilment of other
criteria (working towards having killed 50 hunters, decrypted 25 coded
engrams or found 50 hidden ‘ghosts’ in Destiny for example). Such sys-
tems encourage us to see videogaming not in terms of fruitless repetition
and futility but according to a teleological philosophy of purpose, prog-
ress, direction and development.
Systems like the gamerscore are essentially attempts to literalize what
Mia Consalvo (2007) calls ‘gaming capital’ (184). If ‘cultural capital’
describes aptitudes, knowledge, possessions and qualifications valued
within a particular ‘field’ of social relations (Bourdieu 1993, 163–164),
then gaming capital can be taken to refer to the skills and know-how
that distinguish a player in the eyes of fellow gamers (or some imagined
homogeneous group thereof). Offering a constantly updated record of
who has played what and how well they have played, the gamerscore sys-
tem has created what de Peuter and Dyer-Witheford term ‘a sort of com-
petitive exchange rate’ (2009, 79), a currency of fungible units by which
to evaluate the credentials of a particular player. While we should be
careful about claiming that gaming’s appeal was ever ‘pure’ (see, for ex-
ample, Karlsen’s (2016) comments on the difficulty of disentangling in-
trinsic and extrinsic motivators (89)), such systems have helped to gamify
gaming, enhancing games’ capacity to colonize and monetize time, at-
tention, effort and emotion, offering a framework of intelligibility – not
to mention a means of quantification and ‘capture’ – for hitherto nebu-
lous or evanescent investments, resources, relationships, phenomena and
feelings. In Lone Bertelsen and Andrew Murphie’s (2010) terms, they
are a means of ‘refraining’ the affects to which play gives rise. Bertelsen
and Murphie offer an account of how ‘refrains structure the affective
into “existential Territories”, enabling the ‘micro-coloniz[ation of] the
infinity of little affective events that make up our everyday lives’ and
allowing pre-personal affective atmospheres to crystallize into personal
emotional experiences (ibid. 139, 141).
Creating contexts for showboating, competition, collaboration and
gossip, ‘territories’ like Xbox Live, the PlayStation Network and Steam
can be understood to be constituted of ‘slow[ed], refrained or looped
affects’ (ibid. 145). Games have always supported the emergence of ri-
valries and alliances, feelings of ambition, triumph, belonging, schaden-
freude and pride, but Microsoft’s gamerscore and other such metrics
enable these relations and affects to be visualized, consolidated and
channelled. They exemplify what Steven Shaviro sees as a shift towards
understanding ‘media works’ as ‘machines for generating affect, and for
capitalizing upon, or extracting value from this affect’ (2010, 3, empha-
sis in original). Economically speaking, the character of the feelings to
which games give rise is less important than the fact that those feelings
can be refrained, measured and monetized. Trolls and cheats can play an
important role in keeping the affective tenor of online spaces profitably
volatile by generating negative or hostile feelings; games like FarmVille,
which emphasizes nurturing, creativity, gift giving, collaboration and
sharing, and was highly popular among middle-aged women (Ingram
2010), may afford opportunities to rehearse ‘effeminate feelings’, but
they can be every bit as ruthless as ‘hardcore’ shooters in their attempts
to levy players’ social ties and drain their wallets. In fact, it is often
tonally upbeat casual games – many of which are free-to-play – that
are most persistent and audacious in pumping the player for cash, con-
tacts and data. To recap, then, over the course of gaming’s recent his-
tory a new answer to the question ‘what is a videogame’ has emerged: a
videogame is a means of modulating feelings, of managing the flow of
time, of creating and exchanging data – and, publishers hope, of capi-
talizing upon these processes. Whether ontogenetically – at the level of
console dynasties – or phylogenetically – at the level of players’ experi-
ences within one game – the games industry aims to instil a reassuring
sense that players are perpetually earning, investing and making prog-
ress. And, as the following sections show, this is every bit as true of
‘antieffeminate’ triple A shooters as it is ‘effeminate’ smartphone games.
Destiny Calls
Destiny is in many ways a typical ‘hardcore’ console game – and also,
as I will argue, an exemplary ‘antieffeminate technology of feeling’ on
Warhol’s terms. As I have emphasized, to call Destiny ‘antieffeminate’ is
not simply to accuse it of being sexist or homophobic. While the games
industry still has a tendency to privilege combat over other forms of
interaction, to caricature queer characters when it represents them at
all and to portray women as sexualized playthings and prizes, these
tendencies are not my bone of contention here – and indeed, by these
standards, Destiny comes off as fairly progressive, at least by compar-
ison with many of its peers. Rather, without discounting the way that
imagery, plot and other such diegetic elements mount gendered appeals
to players, I want to use Warhol’s work to shift the discussion of gaming
and gender beyond questions of who is portrayed and how, and towards
questions of temporal structure and affective valence. As Warhol (2003)
notes, while narrative media of course ‘offer representations of “virtual”
time and space’ and of characters who move through diegetic space and
time, they also ‘take up “real” time in the lives of audiences who have
to “make space” in their days for reading or for viewing’ – or, indeed,
for playing (72). For her, it is crucial that without losing sight of content,
we address the role of form in eliciting gendered feelings, while also
accounting for the routines and spaces within which different kinds of
readers, viewers and players make room to engage with media.
Warhol makes these claims in the course of an analysis of the serial,
a form that, like the ‘gamified’ or ‘RPGified’ videogame, is highly depen-
dent on repetition with variation. Like serials, games structure time and
mediate access to information about real or imagined others in ways that
promote gendered habits of feeling, leaving traces in and on the bodies
of players. Focused on combat, graphically cutting-edge and requiring
specialist hardware, Destiny addresses a demographic already au fait
with gaming’s conventions, promising to challenge and reward those
willing to devote enough time, effort and attention to it. This audience’s
familiarity with, for example, the principle of manoeuvring the avatar
with one thumbstick while they aim with the other, speaks to the time
they have already invested in moulding their body into that of ‘a gamer’.
Destiny’s visuals at once tie the game into the aesthetic traditions of
sci-fi, cyberpunk and anime, and aim to instil awe and pride in the own-
ers of devices capable of rendering the game’s glittering dunes, burnished
crags and creeper-clad ruins. In gameplay terms, meanwhile, Destiny
offers players the chance to prove their worth in both player versus en-
emy (PvE) and player versus player (PvP) confrontations. While none of
these characteristics bar Destiny to non-male players, they all contribute
to the game’s construction of a space where (putatively) ‘manly’ states of
feeling can be ‘rehearsed’, generated and managed, a space designed for
digital subjects who are skilled, tech-savvy and genre-literate.
Videogames have many ways of eliciting ‘manly’ feelings from players,
and even within the category of violent games, we see a wide range of
ludic and aesthetic cues that invite an equally wide range of responses.
Military shooters aim to elicit righteous patriotic ire with stories of inva-
sion; Grand Theft Auto games invite an attitude of knowing irreverence
through endless parodies, travesties and pastiches; games like OtoGi:
Myth of Demons or Shadow of the Colossus generate a sense of fleeting-
ness and pathos that, following William Huber (2007), we might trace
back to the Japanese aesthetic tradition of mono no aware (212). From
the panoramic grandeur of its scenery to NPCs who offer swashbuckling
wisecracks or dire prognostications through our headphones, Destiny
uses a number of techniques to convince players that they are engaged in
a heroic, high stakes endeavour with galactic implications. Beyond any
of these elements though, even games that might seem to invite more
or less ‘effeminate’ responses (say Nintendogs or Cooking Mama) can
function effectively as antieffeminate technologies of feeling insofar as,
at a mechanical level, they are incorruptibly objective rule-bound simula-
tions running on computers incapable of empathy. Games can neither go
easy on players who are feeling vulnerable, nor push players out of spite.
In a culture where forms of ‘affective labour’ are increasingly prevalent,
this renders videogames a welcome break from the work of feeling. It
also makes them a potent source of solace or catharsis for players who
have been patronized, turned down, stood up, laid off, bereaved, repri-
manded or otherwise subjected to putatively ‘emasculating’ feelings (and
of course, most feelings are considered emasculating in a culture that
persists in equating sensitivity with femininity). In other words, while
we might justifiably call the original Tomb Raider sexist for the way it
used Lara Croft’s improbably proportioned virtual body to attract male
players, and while we might also call it antieffeminate insofar as it was
content to leave those players alone to probe its possibility space and
piece together its puzzles, these two qualities are not the same. Which is
not, of course, to say that sexist visual content can’t amplify the effects
of antieffeminate formal patterning and vice versa.
A Very Long Engagement

Having clarified what I mean by calling Destiny an antieffeminate
technology of feeling, I want now to address how it is designed as a
temporal object. On the micro-level, this will mean addressing the
game’s moment-to-moment rhythm; on the macro-level, it means think-
ing about both the player’s ongoing relationship with the game over
the course of months and years, and the game’s relationship with its
precursors. This relationship is a close one. Destiny draws heavily on
Bungie’s past work, particularly the Halo series, which was instrumen-
tal in securing Microsoft’s Xbox hardware and its Xbox Live service a
place in gaming culture. Bungie themselves attributed Halo’s success to
their understanding of the principle of repetition with variation, using
the interplay of a few basic elements and a rhythmic structure founded
on syncopated three-second, thirty-second and three-minute ‘loops’ to
draw players along (Kietzman 2011). The formula proved durable and
dynamic enough to sustain not just a whole game, but also the numerous
sequels and spin-offs released over the succeeding decade and a half.
Destiny retains many of Halo’s key characteristics, from weapon types
to the lofting, pleasingly spongy way avatars jump, but it also wagers on
the dynamism of a Halo-like combat model providing enough interest
to keep players ‘grinding’ through the same environments and adver-
saries again and again over the hundreds of hours needed to earn the
resources necessary to fully upgrade one’s avatar. For where, in Halo,
the only way to become deadlier is to internalize the game’s principles
and develop more effective strategies, the RPGified Destiny is all about
acquiring resources (experience points, equipment, crafting materials,
reputation, currency and so forth) in order to become more powerful,
better equipped and more specialized.
Here, Destiny betrays the influence of two videogame properties also
owned by Activision-Blizzard, properties that have played a significant
role in making them one of the largest and wealthiest companies in the
industry: Blizzard’s World of Warcraft and the blockbusting Call of
Duty series of first-person shooters. Released in 2004, Blizzard’s game
became the definitive Massively Multiplayer Online Roleplaying Game
(MMORPG). Infinity Ward’s 2007 Call of Duty title Modern Warfare,
meanwhile, essentially RPGified the online shooter, awarding players
experience points based on their performance in each multiplayer match
which they could use to level up and customize their character and equip-
ment. Destiny blends these influences to offer a Halo-like first-person
shooter set in a shared, persistent world, wherein players compete, col-
laborate and undertake missions in order to level up their avatars. Like
World of Warcraft, its design is rooted in behaviourist psychology, re-
lying on a suite of reinforcement mechanisms and the interplay of fixed
and variable ratios and intervals. Players level up at a steady rate, and
particular enemy types always yield a certain number of experience
points (a fixed ratio). In-game shops receive new stock at set times each
week (fixed intervals). Only some enemies will drop items when killed,
however (a variable ratio). And, as in World of Warcraft, certain power
ful enemies will ‘respawn at a random moment within a set period of
time’, following a variable interval schedule (Karlsen 2016, 77). These
interlocking schedules keep players looking forward, steadily working
towards the rewards they know are coming while hoping that an enemy
will unexpectedly drop a ‘legendary’ weapon that might radically boost
their avatar’s light level. As Karlsen is careful to argue, the presence of
such extrinsic motivators does not mean that the appeal of games like
Destiny can’t also be explained in terms of ‘self-determination theory’,
as an ‘intrinsically rewarding’ activity that ‘gives players a sense of au-
tonomy’, a chance to ‘experience relatedness by interacting socially with
other players’ and ‘many opportunities to experience competence and
mastery’ (ibid. 89). Karlsen is surely right to argue that MMORPGs are
more than mere ‘hamster wheels’ based on behaviourist coercion – after
all, if this was the case, surely anyone could design a game as compelling
and successful as World of Warcraft has proved to be? At the same time,
it is important to acknowledge the way that these overlapping reward
schedules and progress metrics make it easier to justify continuing to
play, so that ‘I’ll just play until I finish this mission’ becomes ‘I’ll just
play until I hit the next level’, which becomes ‘I’ll just find out what this
item is’, which becomes ‘I’ll just try out this new weapon in a multi-
player match’. Like the antieffeminate serials Warhol analyses, the game
is punctuated by nail-biting battles against overwhelming odds – but it
frames these within neat, constantly updated lists of imperatives, chal-
lenges and chores, suggesting that the title’s appeal is equally grounded
in the pleasures of methodical application, self-improvement and the
satisfaction of a job well done. In Berlant’s terms, there is always an
excuse to defer the moment of resuming sovereignty and shutting off
the game.
Journalistic reports suggest that Bungie had originally intended for
Destiny players to develop their avatars over the course of a decade as
they periodically doled out updates, expansions and sequels – a plan
that has since been abandoned thanks to development headaches caused
by the game’s engine which meant it was released late and in radically
pared-back form (Phillips 2016a). Whether the prospect of spending ten
years nurturing the same avatar sounds delicious or nightmarish will
depend on one’s point of view. And indeed, the same person might alter-
nate between these two stances: as Warhol (2003) argues, to invest in a
lengthy serial narrative is to open oneself up to ‘a profound ambivalence
that leaves its marking on the reader’s affective life’ (81). Those who do
make such a commitment are ‘propelled forward by the story’s momen-
tum’ even as they remain ‘invested in the text’s keeping the conflicts un-
resolved, keeping the instalments or the series going indefinitely’ (ibid.).
The desire to move on vies with the desire to linger. Ultimately, Warhol
argues, this vacillation proves compelling in and of itself: ‘one of the
strongest pulls of serial fiction is the obscure hope that this alternation
of feelings might – as indeed daytime soap operas sometimes do – go on
literally for a lifetime’ (ibid.). In the context of an economy where most
people will change jobs multiple times in the course of their working
lives if they can find work at all, where many renters will struggle to
ever qualify for a mortgage, the idea that a videogame – a medium we
still associate with throwaway instant gratification – would ask for a
decade-long commitment might seem strange. In fact, though, its ability
to offer a sense of progression and continuity is an important aspect of
gaming’s appeal.
Lonesome Tonight
Structurally, then, Destiny echoes the push-and-pull rhythm of the anti
effeminate serial, alternating between breathless skirmishes against
high-level enemies, the ongoing business of buying, selling and crafting
equipment and the process of grinding through the same missions for
loot drops while waiting for the next update. It also elicits the kind of
powerfully ambivalent feelings that, for Warhol, leave gendered marks
on the bodies and the affective lives of serial audiences, having received
stern criticism from players who have nevertheless poured hundreds of
hours into it. As one high-level Destiny player puts it, ‘we don’t play the
raid because we just love playing that content over and over again, ad
nauseum [sic]. We play it because we might get a Vex or essential raid
gear [at] the end’ (dinosuzuki 2014). Such players seek out ‘exploits’ to
try and circumvent the grind and expedite progress – a process that can
be both challenging and sociable, as players collaborate to discover and
capitalize on loopholes in the game’s logic before Bungie can close them
(Phillips 2016b). Destiny’s gamified systems, in other words, appear to
aggravate and alienate players even as they keep them playing – proof,
perhaps, of the fact that gamification is less about ‘chang[ing] the way
people think’ than ‘how they behave’ (Schrape 2014, 24).
Indeed, one of the ways that Destiny serves as a forum for manly feel-
ings is by giving players a chance to complain and to criticize Bungie’s de-
sign decisions, in so doing affirming their manly resistance to the game’s
attempts to captivate them. Bungie would surely prefer people were not
complaining about their game. At the same time, these complaints prove
consistent with the way that Destiny seeks to draw players in, even as
it gives them alibis for asserting that they are not overinvesting in the
game, speaking in so doing to the contradictoriness of gaming mascu-
linities. As Helen Thornham observes, many male gamers are loath to
admit to becoming immersed in solo play; for her interviewees, playing
alone too often and too enthusiastically is a form of ‘“Geek” gaming …
laden with signifiers of the lone, perverted male, essentially fulfilling all
his abnormal pleasures and desires through the technology’. To become
too fixated on play is to depart from the ‘temporal structure of working
lives where every hour has meaning or purpose’, threatening your status
as a man who gets things done (2011, 19, 30). Such attitudes help to
illuminate Destiny’s attempts, and those of similar games, to present
play as something other than a solitary waste of time through its social
features, its various multiplayer modes and its gamified progression sys-
tem. The range of mission types and modes available makes it possible
to jump into the game for twenty minutes or to spend hours on a raid –
and, in both cases, to feel like you’ve achieved something in the context
of your character’s overall progression. While the game is demanding
in certain respects (its requirement that we have the right hardware and
sufficient gaming literacy, the fact that it takes hours of concentrated
play to climb its ladder), in others it is very accommodating – hardly
all things to all people, but certainly a console videogame calculated
to appeal to different kinds of console gaming fans. Depending on our
mood, our preferences, our playstyle and the amount of time available to
us at that moment, the game offers a variety of character classes, modes,
difficulty levels and mission types to try. In certain respects, the Destiny
that I played is different to the Destiny played by an avid PvP player, or a
member of a guild who coordinates with a team of friends to repeatedly
run ‘raids’ in search of the most exotic loot. The game demonstrates an
awareness of itself as a mode of passing time, supportive of different
routines and styles. In giving players the option of playing more or less
alone, of engaging in competition or collaboration, Destiny witnesses
‘the feelings of restless dissatisfaction, of isolation, lonesomeness, and
ambivalent self-sufficiency that partly constitute what has been coded
as masculinity’ in our culture (Warhol 2003, 96); like the serial, it pro-
vides ‘both a “workout” for solidifying solitary feelings and a means
of entering into virtual and actual communities that would offset those
feelings’ (ibid. 96–97). At the same time, it is absolutely insistent that
we play online – if the servers are down, or our Internet connection isn’t
working, or an update file is downloading, the game is inaccessible. Even
playing alone, we are kept company by the software agents working to
turn our play into profit.
Kim Kardashian: Hollywood, too, insists that we remain online while
we play. In other respects, though, it differs profoundly from Destiny.
For one thing, the barrier to entry for potential players is considerably
lower. Where Destiny players must have the right hardware, buy the
game and subscribe to PSN or Xbox Live, Hollywood is a free download
with modest hardware requirements that mean it will run on almost any
laptop, tablet or phone. Where Destiny requires a console hooked up to
a TV, Hollywood is always to hand, seconds from booting up. Destiny
assumes a knowledge of console shooter conventions and the ability to
react to in-game threats in real-time; Hollywood has a simple interface
vocabulary of taps and swipes, and shows no interest in testing the play-
er’s reflexes, memory or puzzle-solving skills. From a development per-
spective, too, Destiny’s tortuous gestation stands in stark contrast to
the apparently relatively simple process of applying the Kim Kardashian
licence to a ludic skeleton that developers Glu had already constructed
(Tweedie 2014). Graphically, meanwhile, Hollywood swaps Destiny’s
photorealistic renderings of alien worlds for stylized line drawings of
familiar locations, rendering Los Angeles, Florence and Paris as cute,
stylish caricatures. Like Destiny, Hollywood is RPGified, but here the
scenario sees us creating a character and working our way up the celeb-
rity ladder from the E-list to the A-list, expanding our network, our fan-
base and our wardrobe alike across reality TV appearances, modelling
jobs, dates, premieres and launch parties.
While this is still a fantasy, it is a fantasy that is (literally) more down
to earth than Destiny’s interplanetary odyssey. Likewise, where Destiny
invites players to shut out everything else and lose themselves, Hollywood
expects and enables them to remain in touch with real life – to snatch
scraps of play here and there as they go about their day, putting the game
down if something more urgent arises. In what follows, I propose that
these differences reflect the fact that while both games seek to capitalize
on ‘cruel optimism’, Hollywood is a more effeminate (or at least a less
‘antieffeminate’) technology of feeling than Destiny. This difference is
clearly signposted by a story that hinges on trysts, break-ups, shopping
sprees, catfights and other staples of ‘effeminate’ media rather than the
epic battles and voyages that are the stock-in-trade of ‘antieffeminate’
narratives. As I’ll argue presently, Hollywood’s story is a classic exam-
ple of how, as Tiqqun (2012) and McRobbie (2016) argue, style-savvy,
go-getting young women have become privileged avatars of neoliberal
values – though it is also more sceptical of those values than we might
anticipate. Again, however, I want to underline the importance of looking
beyond images and storylines to ask how games’ structures, mechanics
and distribution methods reflect the logic according to which gendered
digital subjects are constructed. Thus, having considered H ollywood’s
scenario, I will move on to address the way that Hollywood’s systems
and mechanics work to structure both the player-character’s ascent to
the A-list and the player’s time – and from there to show how the game
operates as a ‘connective commodity’ which is at least as unrelenting as
Destiny in its attempts to elicit money, time, attention and information
from the player (Nieborg 2015).
California Dreaming
In their Preliminary Materials for a Theory of the Young-Girl, the Tiqqun
collective propose that the ‘model citizen as redefined by consumer so-
ciety since World War I’ is the ‘Young-Girl’: an ambitious, adventurous,
glamorous, youthful, ruthless figure devoid of scruples or political com-
mitments (2012, 15). While Tiqqun stress that men, too, can be ‘Young-
Girls’, and while feminist scholars have objected to the way that their
text makes young women ciphers for the ills of culture of which men
remain in command (Power 2013), for Angela McRobbie (2016) Prelimi
nary Materials points nevertheless to an important truth about the new
capitalism: that ‘the gender of post-Fordism is female’ (89). McRobbie’s
analysis of the gender dynamics of the new capitalism can help us to un-
derstand both the world Hollywood represents and the cultural and eco-
nomic context within which it functions. As she notes, the working-class
men whose labour underpinned Fordist capitalism have struggled to ad-
just in the wake of rapid and aggressive deindustrialization – a struggle
figured by Swanson’s Washington Post story about unemployed young
men who’d rather play videogames than seek work. At the same time,
more and more young women are entering higher education and the
workplace. Many have carved out careers in the creative and service
sectors of economies increasingly oriented around forms of ‘immaterial’
and ‘affective’ labour, sectors that prize qualities traditionally consid-
ered ‘feminine’: empathy, emotional intelligence, ‘girlish’ enthusiasm
and quiescence, the maintenance of an attractive and appealing image.
While such jobs do not necessarily offer security or prosperity, they re-
main appealing to post-Fordist, post-feminist subjects taught to prize
the ability to secure ‘an interesting, possibly creative and ideally glam-
orous job’ while maintaining an ‘attractive, well-groomed body’ that
functions at once as a professional asset, ‘a mark of pride, a sign of self-
responsibility and a way of “feeling good” about the self’ (ibid. 89, 90).
The ‘fashion-beauty complex’ plays a key role here, both as an employer
(or at least a purveyor of jobs to aspire to) and for its role in propa-
gating this ‘agenda of self-management’ and ‘focus on self-presentation’
(ibid. 87, 90). These discourses rework Romantic notions of the subject,
valourizing ‘individualism[,] uniqueness and creative genius … elevated
imagination and “otherworldliness”’ while downplaying the role of
craft, graft, education and socio-economic circumstances in informing
who has the potential to succeed (ibid. 108).
Hollywood makes these values the engine of an RPG. The game be-
gins with Kim plucking our character from obscurity, having discerned
(in keeping with neoliberalism’s co-option of Romantic individualism)
that we possess that special yet ineffable something that could make
us a star. While the game gives us the option of choosing both our ava-
tar’s gender and their sexuality, it also posits a reality in which everyone
(including the player) is a ‘Young-Girl’ in Tiqqun’s sense: all of the NPCs
we encounter are ageless, slim, able-bodied, snappily dressed and ready
to network.1 If its portrayal of these ‘Young-Girls’ is hardly as savage
as Tiqqun’s (whose text, for Power (2013), raises questions as to where
reflexive parodies of misogynistic discourse shade into the real thing),
neither is it entirely uncritical. The process of interacting with NPCs,
for example, shows just how mercilessly Darwinian life as a Young-Girl
can be: only NPCs on or below our rung of the celebrity ziggurat will
deign to speak to us, with D-listers fraternizing with D-listers, C-listers
with C-listers and so on. The only exception here is Kim herself. Kim,
however, can afford to be munificent – after all, she is at the top of
the celebrity tree. For the other characters, however, fame is literally a
zero-sum game: every time somebody moves up the league table, some-
one else has to move down it. When NPCs do consent to speak to us,
they invariably introduce themselves with their name and career, reflect-
ing the centrality of the cool job to neoliberal identity (most NPCs are
actors, DJs, set designers, ‘writers’ or creatives of some kind, though the
odd improbably handsome geophysicist crops up too). Upon striking up
a conversation, we are given the option to ‘network’ and in some cases
to ‘flirt’ – though as we will see, love is very much understood as a career
move in Hollywood’s world, in line with McRobbie’s (2016) contention
that in recent years, ‘the idea of “romance” has been deflected away
from the sphere of love and intimacy and instead projected into the idea
of a fulfilling career’ (91). Once added to our network, contacts can be
called upon to help out on jobs (having a top set designer on call makes
it easier to get a five-star rating on a fashion shoot; inviting a fellow re-
ality star to make a cameo in our show is likely to boost ratings). We are
also given a nemesis, Willow Pape, who is forever attempting to outshine
our character, criticizing our outfit choices and goading us into making
a scene. 2 Pape’s attempts at career sabotage have a tendency to back-
fire, however, often proving more useful in boosting our profile than
the efforts of our friends and collaborators. In short, everyone we meet
in Hollywood is both a potential rival and a potential resource. Much
as in the social networking satire Redshirt, analysed back in Chapter 2,
we are very much invited to view others in instrumental terms. On the
one hand, we could argue that it is refreshing that the game is willing
to admit that celebrity is such a nasty business; on the other hand, there
is no option but to comply with the rules of the game – the idea of fame
as an individualistic struggle to surpass one’s rivals is fundamental to
Hollywood as a ludic system. Moreover, while it portrays this system
as savage, it also assures us that, as the hero of our own game, there is
nothing to stop us from reaching the top, as long as we are sufficiently
patient and diligent – or, failing that, willing to spend what it takes to
buy our way onto the A-list.
Which brings us to the question of how Hollywood structures time.
For Bea Malsky (2015), the game exemplifies the way that ‘by welcom-
ing fragmentary engagement, casual games subtly pervade the lives of
their players in the minutes of getting a snack at work or sitting on the
bus during a commute’. As Hjorth observes, players of smartphone and
mobile games tend to ‘move between different types of immersion, en-
gagement and distraction’, with play falling into the category of ‘nagara’,
a Japanese term for ‘an activity that is done “whilst-doing-something-
else”’ (2011, 116). Where Destiny demands prolonged focus (at least
during battles), games like Hollywood ‘fill in the empty spaces of their
players’ lives, never capturing an extended period of full attention but
also never receding fully into the background of awareness’ (Malsky
2015). While Glu describes the title as a roleplaying game, it is a long
way from the forbiddingly complex, often fantasy-tinged RPGs popular
among PC and console gamers. As in most free-to-play games, the game
allocates us a limited stock of action points per real-world day, signified
by a lightning bolt icon. Once that energy is spent, players can either
wait five minutes for a unit to replenish or pay real money to refill the
reservoir immediately. We spend this energy on completing tasks (mod-
elling assignments, public appearances, tapings of reality shows) all of
which boil down to tapping at coloured circles to fill meters. Events can
last for one hour, three hours and eight hours, with eight-hour gigs re-
quiring more energy but yielding better rewards in terms of popularity
and money. Not, of course, that players are expected to remain glued
to the game for eight hours; rather, they are expected to start the event,
blow their stock of energy, do something else, come back, rinse and
repeat – or perhaps pay to speed things up a little.
Such ‘time-lapse’ or ‘energy system[s]’ are common in free-to-play
games and have proven controversial (see Burroughs 2014; Evans 2015;
Nieborg 2015). Many gamers see them as a manipulative means of capi-
talizing on players’ impatience, holding that they compare unfavourably
with the tradition of paying an upfront fee to buy a game outright. While
it is entirely possible to grind through Hollywood without ever making
a payment, paying money speeds things up dramatically, and certain
status-boosting items (like the reproductions of pieces from this season’s
Balmain collection currently on offer in the game’s store) are all-but im-
possible to acquire without converting some of our real cash into ‘Kim
Coins’, the scarcest of the game’s many currencies. I am less interested
in the rights and wrongs of this business model, however, than I am in
the temporal structures that it helps to establish. Drawing on studies
of soap opera, Aubrey Anable (2013) proposes that casual smartphone
games perform a similar role to that which TV soaps used to in the
lives of housewives, ‘punctuating and providing a rhythm and timing
to work wherever and whenever it is done—mediating shifts between
different tasks, different emotional tones, and attention and inatten-
tion’. Like most casual games Hollywood is highly interruptible (Juul
2010, 50), letting us break off at any time to answer a phone call, check
our e-mail or placate a wailing toddler. It also expects us to keep com-
ing back, however, and unlike Destiny, uses both positive reinforcement
techniques (daily in-game gifts) and negative ones (the longer players
stay away from the game, the more fans their character will lose) to
spur players to check in regularly. It also offers perks for getting friends
to play, encouraging us to publish our in-game activities to Twitter and
Facebook. In short, it wants to weave itself into both our routines and
social worlds.
Indeed, Malsky (2015) notes that if Hollywood teaches players to
see both material assets (like ‘money, furniture, and clothes’) and im-
material ones (like ‘energy, happiness, and social or cultural capital’) as
‘comparable and exchangeable currencies’, it also extends this logic of re-
source management, investment and exchange beyond the diegetic frame.
Hollywood is perpetually breaking the flow of play to cut the player
deals – a wad of in-game dollars or an extra lightning bolt in return for
watching a thirty-second advertisement, say. In doing so, it literalizes the
founding metaphor of the attention economy, turning our cognitive band-
width into a resource that can be exchanged for in-game items. The ad-
verts featured in Hollywood hail us in terms compatible with the game’s
scenario, constructing the player as enterprising, stylish, aspirational,
dynamic and desirable – and, implicitly, female. Some of those I saw ex-
tolled the virtues of apps for booking bargain beauty treatments, specu-
lating on the stock market or arranging family photos. Others promoted
universities and job search sites using images of confident-looking female
students and searchers. There were also ads for other videogames, from
cute smartphone puzzle games to visual novels and triple A Nintendo
console games (which certainly don’t contain ads for Hollywood). In this
way, our (fictional) struggle to become a star begins to blur into our (pre-
sumed) role as a real-life post-Fordist Young-Girl.
The most head-spinning of these invitations to convert extra-gamic
assets into in-game advantages came after I had been playing for some
time. At one point in my playthrough, my character’s agent rang to say
that it would be good for my career if I started dating a fellow celeb-
rity. I duly made advances to the first NPC with whom the game gave
me the option of flirting, a fellow D-lister named Maria, before taking
her out for a meal (tap to order dessert, tap to flirt, tap to kiss – which
requires less energy than flirting). Returning to Hollywood after an ab-
sence of a few days, I received a message from Maria, telling me she felt
neglected. The game offered me the opportunity to placate her for the
cost of five Kim Coins; unfortunately, however, I had only four coins
to my name. I selected the option anyway, only to be asked whether
I wanted to earn more Kim Coins by completing a special task. Many
of these tasks amounted to downloading, installing and then booting
up one of the games and apps Hollywood was currently advertising.
Alternatively, I could fill out a survey. Curious, I selected this option,
discovering that in order to keep my avatar’s love life alive I was being
asked to yield my household income, relationship status, postcode, level
of education and other such details, trading demographic information of
interest to data brokers for a currency only valuable within the context
of the game.
Where, as we saw in Chapter 3, Cobra Club aims to jar us into an
awareness of the ‘leakiness’ of an avidly surveilled internet, Hollywood
aims to naturalize the idea of the game as a ‘connective commodity’,
a networked platform for advertising, product placement, social inter-
action and spending (Nieborg 2015). My experience of being asked to
surrender personal data to keep a fictional romance going highlights
how Hollywood’s interpellation strategies differ from those of Destiny
and similar ‘hardcore’ games. Destiny is forever coaxing and goading us
into remaining engaged via a steady flow of new goals, challenges and
rewards; Hollywood, by contrast, is stop-start. Abruptly blocking our
progress and breaking the frame to feed us advertising – including ad-
vertising for other games – it is willing to acknowledge that the outside
world exists, but confident that the gamified force of inertia will keep us
coming back. Where Destiny alternates between testing us and praising
us, Hollywood’s interpellative approach is more about an ongoing pro-
cess of negotiation and speculation, bolstering Hjorth and Richardson’s
claim that the term ‘casual belies a broader shift in contemporary work
and leisure practices, whereby leisure is further commercialized and pro-
fessionalised’ (2016, 23). The key moment here is that of hitting zero
lightning bolts. Each time we exhaust our energy, we are faced with a
decision – a decision as to whether we’d rather wait, pay or stop playing.
This being a casual game, there’s a good chance that we’re only playing
in the first place to while away time – perhaps to inure ourselves to the
queue we’re in, as a break from the PowerPoint slides we’re supposed to
be assembling or the housework we’re meant to be doing. As Tobin notes,
mobile games are designed to be more absorbing than doing nothing,
but not so absorbing that we miss our bus stop (2013, 103). Who, we
might ask, would pay to continue doing something they’re only doing
for want of something better to do anyway? And yet, free-to-play games
like Hollywood are predicated on the fact that enough people will pay to
make the whole affair profitable for the publishers. And if we don’t pay,
we can stick around, watch some adverts or walk around the gameworld
jabbing at the scenery in the hope that a Kim Coin or a bundle of cash
will pop out. Free-to-play games, in short, bank on the power of cruel
optimism: as long as we continue playing, we don’t have to do something
else and are free to remain in the tepid shallows of what Berlant (2011)
calls ‘“lateral” agency, a mode of coasting consciousness within the or-
dinary that helps people survive the stress on their sensorium that comes
from the difficulty of reproducing contemporary life’ (18). Like Destiny,
with its players who are often at a loss to explain why the game seems
to command so much of their time, Hollywood elicits a strange kind of
ambivalence, making it hard to decide what it means to keep playing.
If someone pays to refill their energy bar should we read this as a sign
they’re enjoying themselves? Or merely as a sign they’d rather not stop
playing, if only so they don’t have to go back to ‘real life’? Couldn’t we
also read it as a desire to be done with the game – or, as psychoanalyst
Adam Phillips might phrase it, ‘an attack on the desiring part of the self,
a wish to get to the end of [one’s] appetite and finish with it once and for
all’ (1993, 71)?
The Only Game in Town

We’ve established, then, that no one would mistake Hollywood for
Destiny. Beyond questions of plot, genre, platform and so on, the games
make very different claims on the player’s time and attention. Where
one aims to monopolize our leisure time, the other elicits partial and
fragmentary engagement, introducing play into the interstitial times and
spaces when we aren’t quite at work even as it reminds us that everything
from smiling to kissing can constitute a form of labour. Its ‘effeminacy’
is a matter not just of its debt to soaps, ‘chick lit’ and fashion maga-
zines, but also its ‘interruptibility’, which means we can stop and come
back if a friend calls for a chat, or the baby starts crying and needs
feeding. And yet, Hollywood and Destiny also have much in common.
I design an avatar, I earn points, I dress them up. Whether it is equip-
ping my hunter with better armour or buying my Hollywood avatar an
eye-catching frock for a magazine launch party, the same rhythm of jet-
ting from location to location, ticking items off my to-do list and reaping
the rewards obtains. Both games demand that I remain connected to
the network, both encourage me to be more sociable (despite the fact
that, as Deterding argues, players are more likely to experience pleasur-
able feelings of autonomy in solo play (2016)), and both use overlapping
objectives and syncopated reward schedules to keep me playing – or,
in Hollywood’s case, to keep me calculating whether I am willing to
stop playing yet. And, in fact, the ways in which the games differ make
them highly complementary: jabbing at Hollywood is the perfect way
to fritter away the time it takes for Destiny to load a map or match
me with other players for a cooperative strike mission. Aspects of their
‘game feel’ are also surprisingly similar (Swink 2008). As I have men-
tioned, one of the options open to those who have run out of energy
in Hollywood is to tour the gameworld, prodding at the objects that
populate its backgrounds – sandwich boards, pigeons, fire hydrants
and jet-skis. At the touch of a finger, these objects jolt, warp or jitter
before expelling wads of cash, icons and tokens with a satisfying pop.
Sometimes, they will yield a lightning bolt; even if they don’t, picking up
other items shaves a few seconds off the countdown to our next fix of free
energy. Destiny’s control scheme is much more complex, but its gunplay
is founded on a similar sensation – hit enemies’ weak spots and plumes
of energy spurt into the air, accompanied by triple – or quadruple – digit
numbers that testify to the potency of our weapon. Such pleasures are
hardly more sophisticated than that of bursting bubble wrap – but they
can be just as satisfying.
To this extent, and as I noted in Chapter 4, there is much to be said
for Kirkpatrick’s (2011) argument that on a fundamental level, games
are not about stories or social commentary, but rhythm, texture, and the
aesthetic experience of form. He holds that the representative contents
that have received so much attention – whether from news anchors wor-
ried that war games will turn kids into killers, or scholars exasperated
by the sexualization of female avatars – have been either overemphasized
or misread. Which is not, however, to say that, beneath the surface, once
you strip away their scenarios, Hollywood and Destiny are somehow the
same. It is to say, however, that in order to address how games elicit and
maintain gendered forms of subjectivity and kinds of ‘emotional habitus’,
we need to look beyond their scenarios and to consider how, as ‘indus-
trial temporal objects’, they enable (gendered) subjects to negotiate time
and agency, fitting into routines and facilitating the refraining of affects
which our culture associates with masculine or feminine subjectivities
(Crogan 2010, 225). To this extent, the worlds they represent may be
less significant than the assumptions they make as to the value of the
player’s time. If games targeted at men often resemble Destiny and games
targeted at women often resemble Hollywood, what does that say about
gender, play, time and value? Does it suggest that women may be less
willing to consider gaming a productive use of their time, and more likely
to have social lives or domestic duties that demand their attention? Or
does it suggest that we consider women’s time less valuable – that while
we accept that men need to set aside space and time to let off steam and
lose themselves, we feel like women should be making themselves useful?
I have noted that players of Hollywood and Destiny are often a little
ashamed or even concerned by their capacity to lose hours to these games.
In their own ways, both games constitute evidence of the unsavoury
economic realities of the contemporary videogame industry. But in the
way that they are designed and in players’ responses to them, we also
see how videogames, as a form, are capable of raising questions about
balance, value and fairness. Indeed, rather than positioning Destiny and
Hollywood at either end of a hardcore/casual continuum, we might think
instead about how they articulate or ground understandings of what it
is reasonable to expect from gamers and from game designers. Should
Destiny be tweaked so that the chances of powerful gear dropping are
improved? How much ‘content’ should be in a game that costs $60? And
what is a fair game? For those who complain Hollywood is not a real
game, a fair game should give skilled players (which is to say players who
have invested in becoming au fait with gaming conventions) the chance to
distinguish themselves, and it should not offer them the option of paying
to gain an advantage. We could equally argue, though, that Hollywood –
which is free to download, mechanically simple enough for anyone to
play, available on a range of platforms, doesn’t make excessive demands
on the player’s time and can be picked up and put down – is more ‘fair’ in
what it expects of the player than Destiny, and fairer to players who might
be readier to spend a little money than to grind for hours on end. Other
assumptions lurk behind these positions. Is it reasonable to assume ‘every-
one’ owns a smartphone? Is it reasonable to give over hours each week to
gaming, or to spend hundreds of pounds on specialist gaming hardware?
The answers to these questions are often gendered. As Thornham (2011)
observes, the men she interviewed worked hard to rationalize owning a
gaming device in terms compatible with their idea of masculinity (28),
while Leopoldina Fortunati (2015) contends that the 1990s saw a new
‘ir-responsible’ masculine subjectivity emerge in step with the ‘new elec-
tronic, ludic culture’ of digital play, so that, by affirming their ‘right to
play’, men could reject calls to take on a fair share of domestic labour
(300). The gendering of these games, in short, goes beyond aesthetics,
scenarios and mechanics, manifesting itself in the way that Destiny pre-
sumes that we will set apart time and space to play without interruption,
while Hollywood presumes that play is to be snatched in the moments be-
tween pressing professional and personal obligations. But even as Destiny
and Hollywood speak to different understandings of what is fair and rea-
sonable, they push the same meritocratic mythology. Both games hold
that, within their own game, the player should be able to reach the top
if they invest enough time and effort. Whether they aim to or not, then,
videogames inevitably start debates about what you should be able to get
out for what you’re willing to put in – an important question in the age
of the attention economy and immaterial labour, as new media platforms
fuel experiments with new forms of patronage and measures of value.
Conclusion
For a more lyrical riposte to the notions of value and the models of time
and subjectivity articulated in games like Hollywood and Destiny, we
might look instead to Porpentine’s nightmarish text adventure Skulljhabit.
The game maroons its protagonist in an eerie, fogbound mountain village
under the dominion of the ‘skull queen’. Paid a weekly wage in return for
shovelling skulls from a mound into a pit, players are also given the option
to sell them to black market skull traders. With this money, it is possible
to buy items from the village shop – a calendar, a cuckoo clock, a shin-
ier shovel, books rendered half-legible by wear and tear. Much about the
game’s storyworld remains obscure, though by perusing the books and pa-
tiently, methodically exploring the gameworld, we can glean some hints.
The game’s rules and mechanics are also opaque: the number of skulls
Skulljhabit is capable of shifting before becoming exhausted fluctuates
from day to day, for example, as does the monetary value of each skull.
Our purpose is unclear too, as are the stakes of our actions. Are we sup-
posed to escape the village? Having saved up for a ticket for the train and
waited for the one day of the week on which it runs, we board it only to
be told that Skulljhabit falls asleep before reawakening back in the village.
Are we meant to buy everything in the shop? Emptying its shelves seems to
do nothing. Are there consequences for slacking off, or for becoming too
involved in the black market skull trade? And how much of the game is lit-
erally random, a consequence of algorithmic improvisation more than au-
thorial intention? The game’s narrative might attempt to unsettle us with
rumours of political unrest and gleefully grandiloquent, cod-Lovecraftian
accounts of unpronounceable horrors who lurk in mountain caves, but it
is this uncertainty as to our role and goals that is truly disturbing. With-
out explicit challenges, feedback or fail states, it is easy to feel like we are
wasting our time or being taken for a ride. In the absence of a clear can-
didate for what Berlant (2011) calls an ‘object to which one passes one’s
fantasy of sovereignty for safe-keeping’, a next level or a new tool to grind
towards, we are left to our own devices (43). Eventually, Skulljhabit may
be promoted to the position of censor, at which point our duties shift from
processing skulls to deciding whether or not to ban books on the basis of
their procedurally generated titles (which, given our lack of knowledge
about the gameworld, is to say more or less arbitrarily). This, we are told,
is a step up in the world – but the experience is much the same.
In her notes on Skulljhabit, Porpentine (2014) makes clear that the game
is an attempt to use ‘mobile game kinda elements’ like ‘tracking energy and
making resources scarce’, not, as in Hollywood, to tie players into a grind
but ‘in the service of narrative’, as ‘a way to embody players in the world and
give a sense of time’. She also comments on the game’s opacity, noting that
‘people were telling me about little routines they’d pick up in hopes of influ-
encing the outcome of their actions. mechanics + obfuscation = superstition’.
While it is fantastical and grotesque, Skulljhabit’s world is also truer to the
felt experience of life under networked capitalism than those of Hollywood
or Destiny. Players are left to the mercy of dauntingly powerful yet mad-
deningly abstract systems, offered ‘rewards’ that don’t feel commensurate
with what they’re asked to put in. At the same time, Porpentine offers an
answer to the question of how gamers can become so emotionally invested
in pieces of software, showing how the inhuman objectivity and rationality
of game engines, the gap between the systems as they are executed by the
computer and surfaced to the player, can drive players to speculate, emo-
tionally invest, experiment and establish routines, attempting to find order
and meaning in randomness and inscrutability. What she calls superstition
can also be understood as cruel optimism.
This interest in gameplay and superstition is something Skulljhabit
shares with Dennis Cooper’s 2005 novel God Jr., with which I want to
end both the chapter and the book. Cooper’s novel is narrated by Jim,
an unhappily married real estate developer who has recently lost both
his son Tommy and the use of his legs in a car accident. Jim discovers
that Tommy was obsessed with a particular Nintendo game, or rather
with a mysterious structure that appears in one of the game’s early levels.
Unable to find a way of accessing this space, unsure whether it’s a glitch
or his inability to find a door that’s preventing him from entering, Tommy
spends hours fantasizing about what this mysterious building might con-
tain. Feeling guilty and bereft, Jim opens Tommy’s save file, determined
to gain entry to the structure. Jim is hardly the most reliable of narra-
tors, meaning that much of what happens next is open to interpretation.
What is clear, however, is that Cooper’s book is very much about the
intersection of gaming, masculinity and cruel optimism. Functioning as
an illustration of Porpentine’s ‘mechanics + obfuscation = superstition’
equation, the novel also calls to mind another alt-gaming design mantra:
the Arcane Kids collective’s oft-cited proposition that ‘the purpose of
gameplay is to hide secrets’. The novel corroborates this statement to the
extent that, for Tommy and Jim alike, the prospect of finding out what
might be hidden in the structure is much more compelling than that
of completing the game as intended. But it also suggests that the claim
might be true in another sense, that part of gaming’s draw lies in the way
that, while we are wrapped up in uncovering digital mysteries, we are
freed from having to face up to our own dark secrets and absolved from
having to account for our behaviour. In a novel where almost everyone is
stoned almost all of the time, gameplay is often accompanied by, and im-
plicitly equated with, the act of smoking weed: a means of escaping into
a cosily blunted bubble, of taking the edge off reality, of hiding (from)
secrets we can’t bear to share. Thus, while play is, in one sense, a way for
Jim to reconnect with Tommy, this connection is underwritten by their
shared status as men looking to escape confusing and unfulfilling lives.
As the novel progresses, Jim spends increasingly long stretches of time in
Tommy’s room, joypad in hand, glued to the screen. While Jim frames
play as a means of making contact with Tommy, Cooper also portrays
videogames as an antieffeminate technology of feeling which Jim uses to
escape the reality of Tommy’s death and the emasculating experiences of
guilt, shame, loss and (literal and figurative) impotence it has prompted.
The few glimpses we receive of the outside world suggest that Jim’s real-
ity is collapsing around his ears, as do his attempts to threaten, haggle
and play head games with the game’s NPCs, attempts that read as funny
and affecting precisely because we know that, in reality, games don’t do
this; that whatever emotions they might try to elicit via images, sounds,
stories and vocal performances, at a mechanical level, their systems are
immutable and incapable of empathy.
Like Skulljhabit, God Jr. lacks a proper conclusion. Refusing to move
forward, continuing to circle around a structure that may not even have
an entrypoint, Tommy creates for himself a gameplay experience not
unlike that which Porpentine’s game, with its lack of clear goals and
feedback, enforces. Moments of release and revelation – plot twists, un-
locks, achievements, and dilemmas – are built into the serials Warhol
analyses just as they are into games like Hollywood and Destiny. As
Warhol shows, such moments of intensity work to qualify and give a
gendered form to the affective experience of engaging in a narrative’s
unfolding – eliciting the tears that code the effeminate serial’s viewer as
effeminate at the moment a beloved character dies; the sweating palms
that code the body of the antieffeminate shooter’s player as antieffemi-
nate at the moment a boss finally bites the dust. Denying us such oppor-
tunities for visceral and cognitive sensemaking, Cooper and Porpentine
leave us feeling rather queer, rather flat, confused and perhaps a little
cheated. At the same time, however, they help us to see the videogame as
a form that invites players to probe the limits of digital systems, and of
the identities and subjectivities to which they afford us access.
Notes
1 The only character who comes close to being an exception is our agent,
whose inability to understand the modern world provides grist for many
jokes.
2 Fans of the game believe that Pape is based on Kardashian’s erstwhile friend
Paris Hilton, making Hollywood a kind of jeu à clef.
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Index
Aarseth, Espen 123, 154 behaviourism 4, 12, 52, 71, 133–4,

Abidin, Crystal 70 179; and game design 65, 94–6,
Agamben, Giorgio 46 172, 185; and profiling 18–19, 26–7
Agre, Phillip 115 Beller, Jonathan 2
Ahm, Kristian Redhead 34 Berardi, Franco ‘Bifo’ 43–4, 176
Ajana, Btihaj 30–1, 36, 38 Bergson, Henri 46–7, 128, 129
Alien franchise 115, 131–5 Berlant, Lauren 14, 97, 174–8, 180,
Alien: Isolation 13, 41, 115, 116, 130, 186, 188, 194, 197–8
131–5, 137 Bertelsen, Lone 181
Allison, Anne 87, 159 biometrics 1, 30–6, 65–6, 95–7
Anable, Aubrey 192 Bioshock 2: Minerva’s Den 115
Anderson, Ben 165 Birchall, Clare 53, 62
Andrejevic, Mark 58, 72, 143 Blas, Zach 78
Apperley, Tom 89, 94, 177 Blast Theory 58
Apple 32, 51–2, 74, 89, 114 Bogost, Ian 10, 19, 21
Arcane Kids 198 Botting, Fred 116–18, 126, 136
Arendt, Hannah 35 Bourdieu, Pierre 181
artificial intelligence 4, 64, 85–6, boyd, dannah 5, 68, 74
114–16, 118–20, 127, 130, 136–7; Braid 153, 158
in Alien: Isolation 131–5; and Braidotti, Rosi 86
anthropomorphism 115, 118–22; Brenton, Howard 120
and Silent Hill 2 121–22; and Silent Brice, Mattie 156–7
Hill: Shattered Memories’ profiling Browne, Simone 20, 30, 32, 33–4,
system 64; in the Siren series 124, 37–8, 44
126, 128–9 Brunton, Finn 69
Atkins, Barry 10–12, 98, 178 Butler, Judith 102, 173
augmented reality 51, 61, 96, 144–5,
149–50, 162–4; in Pokémon GO Caillois, Roger 5, 160, 166n1
158–62; representation in games Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare 185
141–3 Calleja, Gordon 90
Azuma, Hiroki 28–9, 151 Carbó-Mascarell, Rosa 58
Carr, Diane 109n4
Balmain, Colette 61 Castle, Terry 61
Barlow, Sam 58 ‘casual’ games 14, 56–8, 173, 191–4;
Barrett, Duncan 39 and gender 173, 192; and growing
Barrett, Michèle 39 popularity of gaming 8, 56–7; and
Barthes, Roland 73, 78–9 ‘hardcore’ games 9, 58, 173, 196;
Batman: Arkham Asylum 141–3, 145 motivation and monetization in
Bauman, Zygmunt 42, 45, 53, 62, 66 178, 182, 193–4
Baxter-Webb, Joe 173 Cavanaugh, Carole 150–1
206 Index
Chan, Dean 151 Doyle, Arthur Conan 54
Chen, Adrian 76 Dyer-Witheford, Nick 91, 144, 181
Chen, Jenova 93 Dyson, Frances 119–20
Chess, Shira 57
Chun, Wendy Hui Kyong 4–5, 18, 34, ELIZA 119, 120, 123
47, 53, 62, 75, 77–9, 145, 146, 152 Elmer, Greg 179
Cobra Club 13, 52, 54–6, 58, 67–79; Enevold, Jessica 175
banned from Twitch 74–6; as Ensslin, Astrid 20
commentary on NSA surveillance Errington, Shelly 149–50
67–8, 72–3, 75; and conceptions
of privacy 54–6, 193; and sexual Facebook 3, 6, 42, 44, 45, 53, 74, 163,
identity 69–76, 102 192; and Redshirt 42–5, 56
Connor, Stephen 124 FarmVille 57, 182
Consalvo, Mia 7, 72, 73, 102, 166n3, Ferreday, Debra 40–1
173, 181 Fez 14, 141, 144, 145, 152–9, 160,
Cook, Daniel 95 162, 166
Cooper, Dennis 198–9 flow theory 87, 93–4, 96–7, 106, 107,
Crary, Jonathan 2, 104 108, 180
Creative Assembly 130, 131–3, 135 Fortunati, Leopoldina 196
Creed, Barbara 133 Foucault, Michel 101–2
Crogan, Patrick 91, 144, 195 Frank, Adam 127–8
Csikszentmihalyi, Mihaly 87, Franklin, Seb 4, 22, 29, 116, 127, 147–8
93–4, 106 Frasca, Gonzalo 10
Cubitt, Sean 44–5 free-to-play games 8, 14, 15n2, 42, 56,
cybernetics: and digital subjectivity 88, 191–4
3–4, 22, 92, 147–8; and game Freud, Sigmund 4, 12, 13, 54, 115,
design 95–6; and the gothic 115, 117–18, 121, 127, 133, 136; see
117; and the human-machine- also psychoanalysis
animal ‘cybernetic triangle’ 13, Friedberg, Anne 144
85–6, 88, 100, 102, 106; and the Fuller, Matthew 20, 35, 36
player-game circuit 93, 98; and
psychoanalysis 54–5, 126–9, 133–4 Gallagher, Rob 102, 109n1, 156, 179
Cybulski, Alexander Dean 65 Galloway, Alexander 3–4, 12, 54,
55–6, 78–9, 142, 172
Dead Space 41, 109n4 gamers 6–10, 74–6, 88, 166n3, 172–3,
Dean, Jodi 53, 58 187, 191–2, 195–6; and cynicism
Deleuze, Gilles 44 142–4, 154; as focus of anxieties
De Peuter, Greig 91, 144, 181 about addiction 13, 61, 93–6, 117,
Descartes, René 4, 12, 84, 86, 144, 157 123, 126, 198–9; and gamergate
Destiny: as counterpoint to Kim 9, 57–8, 143, 173; and nostalgia
Kardashian: Hollywood 14, 171, 155–8, 161–2; and Octodad 98–9,
173–4, 193–6; and gendered affect 102, 108; relationship with the
182–4, 186–9, 199; and temporal games industry 13, 56–8, 65–7,
flow 171–2, 175–8, 181, 185–6, 130, 132, 180–3
191–2 gamification 10, 172, 175, 178–81,
Deterding, Sebastian 175, 179, 194 183, 187, 193
Deus Ex series 109n4 Garretson, Oliver 74–5
De Villiers, Nicholas 78–9 gender: and affect 174–5, 182–4, 186–8,
Dibbell, Julian 172 195, 198–9; and artificial intelligence
Dix, Andrew 148 115, 121–2; and demographic
Dollimore, Jonathan 71 profiling 3, 30, 33, 37; and Destiny
Don’t Take It Personally, Babe, It Just 182–4, 186–8; and ‘gamer’ culture
Ain’t Your Story 76–8 7, 8–9, 56–8, 97, 102, 131–2,
Dovey, Jon 93, 123 143, 156–7, 172–6, 182–4, 187,
Index 207
195–6, 199; and Kim Kardashian: Instagram 68–9, 163
Hollywood 189–90, 192; and labour Irigaray, Luce 101
102, 122, 172, 176, 189, 192–3, 194;
in Octodad 87, 98–9, 100–2; and Jay, Martin 144
online self-presentation 67–73, 74–9; Jayemanne, Darshana 131–2,
and privacy 53, 68, 78–9; in Redshirt 133, 135
39–40; in Silent Hill 2 115, 121–2; Jenkins, Henry 141, 157
in Tokyo Jungle 98; in Valkyria Jentsch, Ernst 117, 125, 128, 136
Chronicles 24–6 Jones, Steven E. 20, 51–2
Georgakopoulou, Alexandra 69, 70 Jordan, Tim 19, 52–3, 67
Gibbs, Anna 95 Jørgensen, Kristine 55–6, 63
Ginzburg, Carlo 54 Juul, Jesper 8, 20, 33, 51, 56–7,
God Jr. 198–9 152–3, 173, 192
‘Godwin’s Law of Nazi Analogies’ 164
Goffey, Andrew 20, 35, 36 Kalata, Kurt 148, 149, 150
Golding, Dan 9, 57 Karlsen, Faltin 179, 181, 185
Google 3, 5, 18, 74, 114, 136, 159, 160 Kelly, Peter 40
Grabham, Emily 37 Kennedy, Helen W. 93, 123
Gray, Kishonna L. 107 Keogh, Brendan 57, 131–2, 133, 135
Gray, Mary L. 69, 71–2 Kerne, Andruid 74, 75
Greer, Stephen 102 Khandaker-Kokoris, Mitu 19, 29, 38,
Grosser, Benjamin 42 39–40, 42–4
Grosz, Elizabeth 101 Killer 7 14, 141, 144, 145, 146–52,
166; and Japanese identity
Habermas, Jurgen 53 149, 150–2; and network logic
Halo series 7, 98, 114, 184–5 146–8, 152
Hamilton, William A. 74–5 Kim Kardashian: Hollywood 14, 171,
Hanafi, Zakiya 157–8 172, 173, 175–6, 188–98; as casual
Hansen, Mark B.N. 4, 27, 32–3, 36, game 191–6; and gender 173,
108, 137 188–90, 192, 194–6; and
Haraway, Donna 88, 105, 107–8 post-Fordism 177, 189–93, 194
Harvey, Auriea 57 Kinect 65–6, 89
Hatherley, Owen 164 Kirkland, Ewan 53–4, 59, 115,
Hayles, N. Katherine 32, 127, 134 121, 127
Heber, Nicole 89 Kirkpatrick, Graeme 5, 6–7, 8, 42, 85,
Hillis, Ken 70–1 90, 93, 99, 107, 108, 123, 126–9,
Hjorth, Larissa 161, 191, 193 142, 143, 173, 176–7, 195
Hochschild, Arlie Russell 122 Kirschenbaum, Matthew 91
Hocking, Clint 20 Kittler, Friedrich 116
Hofstadter, Douglas 119 Krapp, Peter 91
Holbein, Hans 166n1 Kristeva, Julia 101
Hopson, John 95, 96 Krzywinska, Tanya 130
Horse Master: The Game of Horse Kücklich, Julian 172
Mastery 13, 84, 86–7, 103–6, 108
Huber, William 183 Lahti, Martti 85, 86
Huizinga, Johan 55 Lash, Scott 12, 21–2, 23, 26, 29,
Hurst, Erik 171 45, 47
Lauteria, Evan 102
immersion 59, 61, 90, 94–5, 121, LGBTQ Game Archive 102
128–9, 180, 187, 191 Licklider, J.C.R. 39
independent games 8, 11, 20, 29, 76, Lippit, Akira Mizuta 85
87–8, 102, 179; relationship with Litvak, Joseph 156–7
triple A industry 8, 46, 56–7, 67; Liu, Lydia H. 116–18, 121, 125,
and retro aesthetics 33, 152–3, 158 128, 136
208 Index
Love, Christine 76–7 Nemorin, Selena 96, 97, 177
Lovecraft, H.P. 100, 197 Nieborg, David 189
Lovink, Geert 18 Nintendo 33, 159, 192, 198; and the
Luckhurst, Roger 115, 135 Mario series 153–5; and the Wii
Lury, Celia 47, 106, 159 console 7–8, 51–2, 56, 64–5, 79
Lyon, David 42, 44, 45, 53, 62, 66 Nitsche, Michael 149
‘notgames’ 8, 57, 58, 72, 88
Mainichi 156–7
Malsky, Bea 191, 192 Octodad series 13, 84, 86–8, 97–103,
Manovich, Lev 141 104, 106–9
Mario series 153–5, 156–8, 160 O’Donnell, Casey 66
Marwick, Alice E. 5 Oliver, Jon 67–8
Massanari, Andrea 173 Ossman, Susan 106
McAllister, Graham 95
McAllister, Ken 178–9 Paasonen, Susanna 69
McGrath, John Edward 66 Panzer Dragoon series 87
McHugh, Susan 103–4, 105 Papacharissi, Zizi 3, 53, 67, 70,
McRobbie, Angela 5, 43, 172, 176, 71, 158
188–90 Papers, Please 13, 19, 20, 22, 29–38,
Mendelson, Andrew 70, 71 40, 44–6, 104
Metal Gear Solid series 7, 87, 103 Parallax View, The 147–8
Microsoft 5, 7, 65–6, 89, 114, Peters, John Durham 119–20, 122,
180–1, 184 127, 129
Miéville, China 100, 101 Pettman, Dominic 13, 85–6, 100
Miller, D.A. 62–3 Phillips, Adam 194
Millington, Brad 160 Pokémon GO 6, 14, 61, 87, 141, 144,
Minotaur China Shop 87, 99–100 145, 158–66
Mirzoeff, Nicholas 144 Pope, Lucas 13, 19, 29–30, 32–7
Mitchell, William J.T. 125, 129, 137 Porpentine 14, 197–99
Montfort, Nick 7 Power, Nina 122, 189, 190
Montola, Markus 159, 161 privacy 13, 51–9, 67–9, 71–2, 74–9
Moon, Michael 75, 78 procedural caricature 19, 27, 33, 37,
Moriarty, Brian 94 44–6, 56, 68, 74, 79, 135
Morris, Dave 152 psychoanalysis 2, 52, 71–2, 133–4;
Moulthrop, Stuart 123 and the gothic 116–18; and survival
Mountain, Gwarred 63–4 horror 13, 53–4, 115–16, 126–7
Mubi Brighenti, Andrea 149–50, Puar, Jasbir 106–7
162, 165 Pugliese, Joseph 44
Murphie, Andrew 181 Pybus, Jennifer 73
Murray, Janet 42
quantified self 19, 27, 42, 51, 86,
Nacke, Lennart 95 92, 107
Nakamura, Jeanne 94 queerness see sexuality
Nakamura, Lisa 3, 18, 41
nationality 3, 19, 20, 30, 38, 61; in race and ethnicity 3, 18, 30, 33–4,
Killer 7 146, 149, 150–2; in Papers, 52–3, 86, 97, 106–7, 115, 164; and
Please 29–30, 34, 36; and the fantasies of a ‘postracial’ Internet
relationship between Japanese and 18, 40–1; and gamer identity
American gaming culture 7, 28–9, 6, 9, 173; in Papers, Please 34;
109n1, 149–51, 153, 156, 159, in Redshirt 38–40; in Valkyria
166n3; in Valkyria Chronicles Chronicles 24–5
24–6 Raessens, Joost 45, 172
Ndalianis, Angela 131, 135, 157 Redshirt 13, 20, 22, 26, 29, 38–47,
Nead, Lynda 116, 155 56, 191; as procedural caricature of
Index 209
Facebook 19, 38–9, 42–4, 56, 72, Silent Hill 3 61
79; and Star Trek 19, 39–40, 42, Silent Hill: Shattered Memories 13,
47n2 52, 53–6, 58–65, 67–8, 76, 77, 79,
Resident Evil series 60, 126, 129, 130–2 164; and depth psychology 53–4,
Rettberg, Jill Walker 42 67, 71–2, 115; player profiling
Rheingold, Howard 39 system 60, 63–5; and the Wii 58–9,
Richardson, Ingrid 193 64, 79
Ricoeur, Paul 30–1 Simon, Bart 66
Rollings, Andrew 152 Siren/Forbidden Siren series 13, 107–8,
Rozas-Krause, Valentina 163 115, 124–30, 133, 134–5, 137
Ruggill, Judd Ethan 178–9 Skulljhabit 197–9
Ryan, Marie-Laure 2, 20, 73–4 Sloterdijk, Peter 142
Snowden, Edward 58, 66, 67–8
Salen, Katie 93, 94 social media 4, 14, 18, 27, 45, 53,
Samyn, Michaël 57 56, 76–9, 132, 163–4; in Cobra
Schrape, Niklas 166, 179, 187 Club 68–72, 73–4; and gamergate
Schüll, Natasha Dow 94–5, 97, 179 9; integration into games 6, 8,
Sconce, Jeffrey 116, 124 64, 66, 178, 180, 182, 192–3;
Sedgwick, Eve Kosofsky 75, 78, 89, and Pokémon GO 161, 164–5; in
102, 127–8 Redshirt 20, 22, 38, 40–4
Selega Csikszentmihalyi, Isabella 94 Star Trek 19, 39, 40, 42, 47n2
selfies 3, 68, 70–1, 158, 163–4 Stenros, Jaakko 55, 73, 159
Senft, Theresa M. 70 Steyerl, Hito 76
Sennett, Richard 171, 176 Stiegler, Bernard 160
Serres, Michel 107 Stone, Kara 176
sexuality: and ‘antieffeminacy’ 182, Stuart, Matt 162
184; in Cobra Club 68–72, 74–5; Surman, David 126, 127, 151
and gamer identity 7, 9, 58, 74–5, surveillance 18, 36, 44, 58, 62–3, 136,
156–7, 172–3; in Kim Kardashian: 149, 166; in Cobra Club 67–8,
Hollywood 190–1; and masculinity 76–7, 193; of gamers 65–7, 95–6;
in Octodad 98, 101–2; and see also privacy
online communities 68–72, 76–9, survival horror genre 13, 58, 59; and
163–4; and queer representation ‘deep’ subjectivity 54, 60, 126–7,
in games 39, 102–3, 106, 182; 135–7; and gothic tradition 115–20,
and Redshirt’s romance system 121, 124, 126–7, 130; history of
39–40; and the sexualization of 130–3
female characters 121, 182, 195; Swink, Steve 85, 90, 93, 98, 99,
in Silent Hill 2 121–2; and Silent 102, 195
Hill: Shattered Memories’ profiling
system 64–5, 67; and subjectivity Tale of Tales 57, 58
52–3, 86; and Tokyo Jungle’s Taylor, Robert W. 39
breeding system 92, 98; and Taylor, T.L. 172
Twitch’s banned games list 74–5; Thacker, Eugene 78–9
in Valkyria Chronicles 24–6 Thiruvathukal, George 51–2
Shapira, Shahak 163–4 Thomas, Keith 62
Shaviro, Steven 182 Thon, Jan-Noël 2, 20
Shaw, Adrienne 6, 9, 57, 173 Thornham, Helen 6, 96–7, 143, 156,
Shukin, Nicole 85 175, 187, 196
Sicart, Miguel 10 Thrift, Nigel 118
Sigl, Rainer 57 Tiqqun collective 188–90
Silent Hill 58, 59, 61, 124 Tobin, Samuel 193–4
Silent Hill 2 13, 61, 115, 116, 119, Tokyo Jungle 13, 84, 86–7, 89–95,
120–4, 125; and survival horror 97–8, 103, 104, 106, 108
130, 135, 136 Tormey, Jane 162
210 Index
Tumblr 73, 74 Watt, Ian 2
Turpin, Nick 162 Weizenbaum, Joseph 119, 120, 123
Twitch 74–5, 90 We Love Katamari 151
Whitson, Jennifer 66
Valkyria Chronicles 13, 19, 20, 23–9, Williams, Raymond 2
38, 46–7, 102 Wolf, Mark J.P. 146
van Deventer, Leena 9, 57 World of Warcraft 185
Velasquez, Diego 125
Villiers de l’Isle-Adam, Auguste 137n1 Yang, Robert 13, 52, 54, 58, 67–9,
Vora, Kalindi 87 72–6
Yolocaust project 163–4
Walker, Austin 35 Young Horses 84, 98–102, 109n3
Wardrip-Fruin, Noah 25, 119, 123 YouTube 75–6, 88, 99, 107
Ware, Nicholas 40
Warhol, Robyn 2, 14, 174–6, 182–3, Zappavigna, Michele 69
185–6, 188, 199 Zimmerman, Eric 93, 94
Wark, McKenzie 142 Zuboff, Shoshana 18

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Videogames, Identity and Digital

This book argues that videogames offer a means of coming to terms

Rob Gallagher is a Postdoctoral Researcher based at King’s College

3 Gender, Age, and Digital Games in the Domestic Context

4 The Dark Side of Game Play

5 Understanding Counterplay in Video Games

6 Video Game Policy

7 Digital Games as History

8 New Perspectives on the Social Aspects of Digital Gaming

9 Fans and Videogames

10 Identity and Play in Interactive Digital Media

11 Videogames, Identity and Digital Subjectivity

1 Digital Subjects: Videogames, Technology and Identity 1

2 Datafied Subjects: Profiling and Personal Data 18

3 Private Subjects: Secrecy, Scandal and Surveillance 51

4 Beastly Subjects: Bodies and Interfaces 84

5 Synthetic Subjects: Horror and Artificial Intelligence 114

6 Mobile Subjects: Framing Selves and Spaces 141

7 Productive Subjects: Time, Value and

2.1 Screenshot from Papers, Please. 31

This book is part of Ego-Media, a research project addressing the

1 Digital subjects belong to a culture of data collection and demo­

Ludo Ergo Sum

Studying Games Today

there is something truly radical here, something significantly novel,

Such statements are a reminder of another thing that ludologists and

Contemporary digital culture is born of two catastrophic collapses. This,

Ethics and Informatics

if popular narrative forms that observe the spatially constituted

The Sorrows of Young Gunther

reflective experience and memory … what gets stored by today’s me-

Data mining techniques identify patterns of choice and action char-

Figure 2.1 Screenshot from Papers, Please.

Within an idem-identity paradigm, identification is understood in ‘the

Grey Areas, Dark Matters and Resolution

On Spacebook Everyone Can Watch You Network

Misery Loves Company

draws on our deeply ingrained ‘desire for more’, compelling us to

secrecy draws and marks, as it were, the boundary of privacy –

If privacy is in crisis, Bauman proposes, it is because we have ‘lost the

Gaming Going Public

utiliz[ing] a polyphony of surveillant systems as forms of governmen-

ban-opticon [which] guards the entrances to the parts of the world

Beyond coercion and cost–benefit analysis, though, Whitson insists that

Figure 3.1 S creenshot from Cobra Club.

extent to which notionally personal, spontaneous and creative forms of

A Twist in the Cobra’s Tale

a reserve force of information always maintained in readiness to

But if the knowing homophobia on display in these videos is depressing

Classrooms, Closets and Black Boxes

You are an octopus, disguised as an adult human male. It is i­mperative

Animals and Interfaces

Incorporating the Interface

Animalizing the Player

Real Men Have Backbone

Boys Will Be Boys

Even Cyberpunks Get the Blues

‘Talk to Siri as you would to a person’. So ran the promotional material

Breakdown and Bathos

1 Digital subjects belong to a culture of data collection and demo

Figure 3.1 S creenshot from Cobra Club.

You are an octopus, disguised as an adult human male. It is imperative

Figure 6.1 S creenshot from Killer 7.

In a September 2016 Washington Post article, Anna Swanson h ighlights