Parables of the Posthuman: Digital Realities, Gaming, and the Player Experience 0814334881, 9780814334881

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Parables of the Posthuman

ContemPorary aPProaChes to film and media series A complete listing of the books in this series can be found online at wsupress.wayne.edu.

General Editor Barry Keith Grant, Brock University Advisory Editors Robert J. Burgoyne, University of St. Andrews Caren J. Deming, University of Arizona Patricia B. Erens, School of the Art Institute of Chicago Peter X. Feng, University of Delaware Lucy Fischer, University of Pittsburgh Frances Gateward, California State University, Northridge Tom Gunning, University of Chicago Thomas Leitch, University of Delaware Walter Metz, Southern Illinois University

Wayne State University Press Detroit

© 2015 by Wayne State University Press, Detroit, Michigan 48201. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced without formal permission. Manufactured in the United States of America. 19 18 17 16 15   5 4 3 2 1 Library of Cataloging Control Number: 2015933201 ISBN 978-0-8143-3488-1 (paperback) ISBN 978-0-8143-4144-5 (ebook)

Designed and typeset by Bryce Schimanski Composed in Chapparal Pro and Trade Gothic

Play fulfills its purpose only if the player loses himself in play. Gadamer, Truth and Method

Contents

ix  Acknowledgments 1  Introduction 17  Preamable: The Birth into the Posthuman 25  Posthuman Subjects 99  Posthuman Melancholy 111  Postscript: Play and the Archive 123  Conclusion

129  Notes 139  Works Cited 145  Index

Acknowledgments

For Mitra Foroutan. My thanks to: Annie Martin at Wayne State University Press, for her patience and guidance. Barry Grant, for suggesting that I write this book. Sherryl Vint, for support both practical and intellectual. Denis Dyack and Silicon Knights, for kindly inviting me to speak about posthumanism and gaming. Students, former and current, from whom I have learned a great deal about gaming. Chad Peck, a true gaming companion.

ix

Introduction Nothing is gained without loss. Virilio, Politics of the Very Worst

Parables of the Posthuman grows out of a sense that the digital game has yet to receive the kind of critical attention it deserves. Certainly there is a burgeoning academic industry surrounding gaming, but I am yet to be convinced that these approaches ever fully come to grips with the philosophical importance of gaming. And indeed, in brief, this is what this book will be proposing: that we take gaming seriously, philosophically. I mean to approach gaming asking some key philosophical questions, all in an attempt to make sense both of the experience of gaming and the nature of the player-game/console/narrative experience: In what ways does gaming alter our perception of the human subject? What is happening to consciousness when one plays? How does the experience of the virtual come to be translated by the player into real, phenomenal experience? Can we talk, sensibly, philosophically, about categories such as temporality and subjectivity, within the parameters of the experience of gaming? In a large sense my primary assumption here, my philosophical beginning point, is that gaming is a radically strange experience, an uncanny experience, completely unlike any other experience of play. It is the intimate conjoining of self and machine, of human and other, that requires some sustained thinking because, as I will argue, this conjunction

1

Introduction

radically alters a traditional view of what it means to be human. Gaming, the practical event of gaming, works to extend the human and its conception of itself; gaming enacts—and this term is crucial—a practical realization that the human is a fluid, dynamic, unstable, discontinuous entity. The digital game thus, in its radical critique of the idea of a transparent, unified self, becomes a site of interrogation and sustained philosophical analysis. We need to be clear about this: what other form of play, of entertainment, effects this kind of extension of the self? We need, to speak simply, to think about what it means to enter a relationship with the game machine, to think, that is, about what it means to assume (or to have conferred upon you) a machinic, posthuman identity. Gaming is an event that radically calls into question the nature of experience and self; it is an event that may in fact be creating an entirely new kind of experience of the self. Surely we need to give this event some serious thought. Posthuman Subjects

My purpose here is ultimately to demonstrate my general thesis, that games realize a practical, material demonstration—instantiation is the stronger term—of the philosophical notion of the posthuman. The game locates the player within a complex network of exchanges, all mediated by technology: player-console/computer, player-avatar, player-narrative. This economy of technological exchange initiates a practical experience of what I term the “posthuman”: the game enacts the fantasy of extending past the limits and limitations of the human. Ultimately I am interested in exploring the philosophical implications of digital play because it is here, in these sites of cultural imagination, that new ways of conceiving the self occur. I argue that the digital game is a site where hypotheses and questions about the nature of what constitutes the human as such are raised and worked out. That is to say, the digital game—and I am here interested in games involving practical role-playing elements involving modifying the body (BioShock, Mass Effect, and Fallout 3, to name only a few)—poses challenges to ideas like the fully integrated, singular, stable self, a constituted interiority without flux. The game invites the player to create a self—a version of the self, a version that carries with it an extended version of the self in the real world—as fluid and open to the possibility of prosthetic and cyborgian extension. The digital game, as it makes a structural 2

Introduction

necessity of prosthetic extension (adding machines to the body), stands as a parable for the posthuman: the game becomes a fantasy site—fantasy because fundamentally unreal, but also because fundamentally limited (one cannot sustain play indefinitely)—where one’s avatar plays out the central posthuman fantasy of extending the human subject beyond itself. I am using the term parable here in a variety of senses. In the first, and most prosaic, a parable is simply a story. The digital game, as I am envisioning things here, is telling a story of what it means, or might mean, to enter into the posthuman condition. Like all parables, however, the game-asparable has a kernel of resistance to it. We may recall how Frank Kermode characterizes the parables in The Genesis of Secrecy. He suggests that one of the enduring seductions of Christ’s parables is their resistance to full understanding: those “in the know” may understand the parable while those not part of the elect will not. But even for those elite readers (or hearers) the parable may be elusive: “Insiders can hope to achieve correct interpretation, though their hopes may be frequently, perhaps always, disappointed; whereas those outside cannot. There is seeing and hearing, which are what naïve listeners and readers do; and there is perceiving and understanding, which are in principle reserved to an elect” (3). A parable thus is a story that essentially hides itself from those who do not have the capacity to see. A parable, in other words, has something essentially secret about it. I am attracted to this idea in its relation to the digital game because, as I will show in my readings of specific games, the game is not consistent in either its fetishization of the posthuman fantasy or its critique of this same fantasy. This is to say that some canonical games about the entry into the posthuman condition do not tell their stories straight: we need to attend carefully to how the game, as narrative, and as a confluence of player and console/ machine, is, perhaps, at odds with itself, unable fully to come to terms with the lineaments of its own fetishistic desire. I am also using the term “parable” for a specific reason having to do with the term’s relation to temporality, specifically to futurity. As I will detail in my Conclusion, the parable always sets up a narrative of a world to come. Christ’s parables again are exemplary; as J. Hillis Miller argues in Tropes, Parables, Performatives, the parable posits a utopian world to come and as such sets itself up as a story of present impossibility. This is to say that the parable always has something of the economy of desire to it: it 3

Introduction

sets up expectations for something that has not yet been instantiated, may never be instantiated. It is in this sense that I read the digital game as having a fundamentally spectral quality to it: it sets up a vision of what the posthuman might be, not what it is. The digital game, insofar as it instantiates, thematically, the narrative of becoming posthuman (I think here of games likes Crysis 2 or Deus Ex: Human Revolution) and as it instantiates the player’s own coming-into-being as the posthuman (as he plays, that is), holds out the state of being posthuman only as a state of possibility, which is always to say, an impossibility. Another way of putting this, and Deleuze and Guattari will be my point of inspiration here, is to suggest that the posthuman, the state of being the posthuman, is a state of becoming: we enter into the cyborged relation with the game console in order to alter what out present reality is. This entry into a temporary posthumanism (play must end if it is to be understood as play) articulates the player always in a structure of loss and return: we lose the sense of posthuman extension and power when we break off from the game, but we can always return. It is here, in the dialectic of loss and return, in the repeated dialectic of loss and return, that the posthuman state of becoming comes into being. And, finally, in this sense, of positing the posthuman thematically as a state that is always already to come, the game comes to reflect the very structure of cyborged being that occurs when I, as a player in the real world, enter into play. Hence the game, as a story of what it might mean to be posthuman, and as a story of what can only occur at some point, not now, becomes a parable. As I play, as I enact the game’s very thematization of being the posthuman, I become that parable of possible futural being. The game, I argue, puts into specific practice the theories of the posthuman found in writers as various as Donna Haraway, N. Katherine Hayles, Paul Virilio, and Maurice Blanchot. A dominant image in this first section thus will be the cyborg. In the games I will analyze over the course of this study, it is often the case that one’s avatar is, for the purposes of the game’s narrative, a cyborg. A confluence of human flesh and machine, the central figure of the game serves as a phantasmatic realization of the desire to be cyborg. As crucial, however, is the idea that the gamer herself is articulated as a cyborg in her entry into the gameworld, in her entry into play. The player-game relationship instantiates the gamer as cyborg insofar as she must conjoin with the machinic materiality of the console 4

Introduction

(or computer) in order to enter the space of play: the console thus operates as a practical prosthetic device, extending the player’s limited physicality (one can do anything within the economy of the game’s design) and subjectivity (one can become anything within the economy of the game’s design). Indeed, the idea of the prosthetic is crucial and central here for a number of reasons. I am fascinated by the specular effect of the gamergame relationship when read along the thematic of cyborgian extension: the game, with its thematization of the self becoming more than human (think here of games that thematize the acquisition and application of biomodifications [BioShock] or nanotechnological enhancements [Deus Ex: Human Revolution]), in some sense becomes an allegory of the gamerconsole relation. Certain ethical questions thus become important here: if a game offers itself as a critique of the idea of prosthetic extension (Deus Ex operates in this way) can we see this critique extending (in an almost Brechtian sense) to the real experience of the gamer-console relationship? Can games in fact operate—in classic postmodern style—as a critique of the conditions of play itself? Of the fantasy of play? Of the implications of play?1 It is important, however, to see how these ethical questions only reveal themselves after we enter into a consideration of the cyborg, the posthuman. It is only after we begin seeing how the game operates to bring about a practical demonstration of the extended, posthuman self, that the questions about the implications of agency under erasure, of the implications of extended, violent subjectivity, become clear. Thus, before we enter the space of ethics, we must first answer questions of a more practical, philosophical, nature: What happens to the player as a subject as she games? What does the console as prosthesis do to our understanding of what it means to be “human”? The Posthuman: Pathology or Utopia?

In my conception of the posthuman, I will keep a variety of theories in suspension, all of which help me think about what is occurring within the game experience itself. Theories of the posthuman, of the cyborg, help me think about what is happening in terms of a game’s plot, about what is happening when a game asks me to modify and build characters. But these theories also help me to think about the nature of my own phenomenal, real, affective relationship to gaming itself, to my relationship with my 5

Introduction

controller, my console, my screen. It is here—as we begin to think about the complex relation between the real player and her avatar, the way these two entities become extensions of each other—that we really enter into what I would call posthuman play. Although it is not my purpose here to offer a genealogy of posthumanism as such, it is important to trace the modern/postmodern conceptualization of the posthuman-as-cyborg back to its ultimate origins, which I suggest must be found in Nietzsche and Freud. In various writings these two practitioners of what philosopher Paul Ricoeur calls the “hermeneutics of suspicion” turn their withering gazes on the notion of the human subject as such, arguing that the self—essentially the Renaissance Humanist conception of the self as rationally transparent to itself—is not self-producing but is a product of the culture, the history, the drives that precede and exceed it. Nietzsche will speak of the “posthumous man” (Anti-Christ; Twilight of the Idols) and of the human as “artificial, arbitrary . . . a recent abortion” (The Will to Power 214); Freud, especially in the seminal Beyond the Pleasure Principle, will argue that the human is not self-producing, transparent to itself, but is rather a complete mystery to itself insofar as s/he is controlled by the compulsion toward achieving an end to the self, an end to subjectivity as such: if there is a subject, in other words, the subject is defined by its desire to vanish. The human, the humanist subject, for Freud and Nietzsche, is a myth: the idea that there is an essential core subject—a subject that persists in the face of culture and history, persists to define itself as the sole agent—is only ever a construct of culture (“artificial, arbitrary”), of an idea what constitutes the human as such. In some deeply ironic ways, the posthuman fantasies of the digital game—the way you choose to become more than human, extend yourself through biomodifications—is really a nostalgic return to the (illusory) idea that the self is fully in control of herself, constructing her identity as she will.2 We need, however, to keep in mind how often these games make clear that these biomodifications are produced for the subject to use: in Deus Ex: Invisible War, biomodifications proceed directly from a capitalist system that manipulates the subject to its will, all the while providing only the illusion of agency and choice.3 We should also bear in mind that even the real experience of playing, which sees me extended into space—thus becoming in some senses a cyborg—is one authorized beyond me: that is, game designers place limitations on what I 6

Introduction

can do. These limitations in fact authorize my experience; I construct myself based on what is given to me. More recent theoretical conceptualizations of the posthuman are fully dependent on the insights into the human offered by Nietzsche and Freud. In other disciplines, sites, and cultural zones—sf-inflected film and narrative— the posthuman emerges out of similar speculation about the ontological nature of the self, about what constitutes, what could constitute it, as such. Sfthemed narratives, from Frankenstein to Blade Runner, from H. G. Wells’s The Island of Doctor Moreau to Battlestar Galactica, look at the idea that the human, the body, can be modified, constructed, extended, and manipulated, all to the point where the question of what constitutes identity as such becomes problematic, becomes the point of fetishistic departure and interest. What does the idea of downloaded consciousness suggest about human identity and memory? Is a replicant with implanted memory human? Is a Cylon who does not know it is a Cylon, human? Is memory, perhaps itself always open to construction, interpretation, and manipulation, really the site of what makes the human human? Is a body, altered, manipulated—cyborged—to the point where its fleshy essence is on the point of being refined out of existence, still human? Is the human mind or body? Technology’s involvement and investment in these central questions of the posthuman is obvious. Prosthetic devices—pacemakers, artificial limbs, the Internet, computers, digital games, teletechnologies—all work to extend the human, its life, its affective boundaries, and its range; all work to make the idea of the human more complex. We live now in the age of action at a distance, assumed personalities, and multiple subjectivities and interiorities. All of these extensions are made possible by the reality of technology. And for some this is a positive development of the human. In the academic community, for instance, Donna Haraway’s ecstatic celebration of the figure of the cyborg in “A Manifesto for Cyborgs” is canonical. Haraway speaks of how the cyborg (which seems to oscillate between some kind of ideal, almost Platonic conception, and a real-world entity) is “a creature of social reality as well as a creature of fiction” (149), which is, of course, a perfect way of thinking about the gaming avatar. The avatar is real in the sense that it works within my reality, the reality of others against whom, with whom, I am playing; but it is clearly articulated within the logics and protocols of fiction. Baldur, from Too Human, is a complex 7

Introduction

fictional construct (he is a postmodern version of an ancient Norse mythological figure as well as being, of course, ontologically “fictional” in that he exists only within and for the purposes and spaces of the game); he is also real within my sense of reality, real in the sense that I can, within real time, manipulate him, control him. The cyborg thus serves to break down the boundaries between human and technology, between organism and machine, to the point that something new, and liberating, emerges. The cyborg, according to Haraway, because it is not a creature with a conventional origin—it is not born like the human or animal; it is a construct—escapes, she claims, all potentially limiting myths of origins; that is, stories that threaten to fix the subject into a preconceived ideological framework or network. As it stands apart, uncannily and perhaps threateningly, the cyborg, that entity exemplifying “transgressed boundaries, potent fusions, and dangerous possibilities” (154), is the precondition for the emergence of the game as a utopian space. I am deeply attracted to the idea of the game as posthuman utopia because in some sense the experience of gaming is just that, utopian, cyborgian: the space of play is no-where (u-topia). Online gaming makes this patently obvious: I may be in Canada playing against a person in Chile but the game, the play, takes place entirely elsewhere. Even when I am alone with my game console, when I assume the role, the identity of the avatar, some utopian displacement occurs: I am Gordon Freeman, I am myself: I am in City 17, I am in London, Ontario. The avatar thus extends my identity and my space and initiates the very Nietzschean idea that the self is, and exists within, a “multiplicity” (The Will to Power 270).4 But we need also to acknowledge other not-so-sanguine, or utopian, readings of the posthuman because, as we will see, some crucial games offer explicit critiques of the idea of the utopian posthuman. Media critics Marshall McLuhan and Paul Virilio both theorize the prosthetic enhancement of the human as signaling a pathologized view of the modern subject: the body is (becoming) pathologized and increasingly disabled by technology. In Understanding Media, McLuhan argues that the threatening stimuli of modern life compels the human subject to fashion prostheses as a bodily response to those very stimuli. The subject extends itself, via technology, in an effort to mitigate the negative effects of the external world. McLuhan’s discussion of the subject’s relation to modern technology is 8

Introduction

uncannily prophetic; his discussion of electronic media certainly does call to mind the Internet and various gaming technologies: “With the arrival of electric technology, man extended, or set outside himself, a live model of the central nervous system itself. To the degree that this is so, it is a development that suggests a desperate and suicidal autoamputation, as if the central nervous system could no longer depend on the physical organs to be protective buffers against the slings and arrows of outrageous mechanism” (43). McLuhan’s analysis is essentially a diagnosis of the various ways in which modern technology alters a traditional conception of the human. His central metaphors—extension; self-amputation—certainly, if only at a figural level, suggest that we must seek out new discursive regimes for coming to know what it means to be human, or indeed posthuman, in the contemporary period: “Physiologically, man in the normal use of technology (or his variously extended body) is perpetually modified by it and in turn finds ever new ways of modifying his technology. Man becomes, as it were, the sex organs of the machine world” (46).5 In Open Sky, Paul Virilio offers a hyperbolically charged reading of the way modern technologies damage the subject. Virilio, like McLuhan, figures the modern human as subject to the damaging forces of contemporary culture and technology and here makes an explicit link between technological prosthetic enhancements and disability. Modern technology, he suggests, disables the modern subject. His central image, or figure, is of the body of the city dweller, this citizen-terminal soon to be decked out to the eyeballs with interactive prostheses based on the pathological model of the “spastic,” wired to control his/her environment without having physically to stir: the catastrophic figure of an individual who has lost the capacity for immediate intervention along with natural motoricity and who abandons himself, for want of anything between, to the capacities of captors, sensors and other remote control scanners that turn him into a being controlled by the machine with which, they say, he talks. (20) I will return to Virilio’s central image of the “spastic” citizen—and certainly we must at least draw attention to the way Virilio begs the question of the reality of this model—but his negatively polemical reading of the subject 9

Introduction

as framed by technology (just as the subject frames his own reading of the world through technology) does gives us, at least as a point of departure, a possible model of the posthuman, cyborged citizen. For Virilio, the technological fantasies of gaming, for instance, and the critique of these fantasies begin and end with the image of the body as site of pathological weakness. Virilio’s notion of the “body terminal” (11), the body as site of technological interface and as “end,” calls to mind Bernard Stiegler’s reading of the prosthesis: “the prosthesis is not a mere extension of the human body; it is the constitution of this body qua ‘human.’” It is not a “means” for the human but its end, and we know the essential equivocity of this expression: “the end of the human” (152–53). Stiegler’s ideas here echo McLuhan’s notion of the inevitability of the prosthesis, the fact that various technological media are shaping and “modifying” the subject, constituting him/her as “human”; Stiegler’s ambivalence about technology also clearly echoes Virilio’s deep concerns that technology, by colonizing the subject—thus simultaneously creating and effacing a material boundary between human and machine— signals that the ends of technology are the end of the human. Indeed, in Politics of the Very Worst Paul Virilio argues that that the benefits of technology are far outweighed by their costs. Virilio posits that advances in teletechnical and biomedical research come only at the expense of reducing the scope of our perspective of both the planet and the human body: the planet is reduced in size as teletechnologies, working at the speed of light, instantiate the global village with a vengeance; the human body, now colonized by nano (and other) technologies, becomes a space entirely commodifiable. While Virilio does not deny the medical benefits of technologies such as pacemakers, he does warn that “nothing is gained without loss” (54). But perhaps there is a way of mitigating Virilio’s real concerns about the ends of the human if we place his analysis in dialogue with the actual experience of gaming (he never gives a sustained reading of the phenomenology of gaming: no serious philosopher I am aware of is doing this, yet). I need thus to give some consideration to what I will call “posthuman play” because the theoretical model of the posthuman posited by Haraway, McLuhan, and Virilio, utopian on one hand, alarmist on the other, finds a practical realization “in” digital play; and this practical realization of the posthuman may offer a way of critiquing equally both positions. 10

Introduction

In my conception of posthuman play, I am drawing primarily on phenomenologist Hans-Georg Gadamer. In Part I of Truth and Method, Gadamer is concerned about the phenomenal responses to the artwork, asking questions about what occurs when one interacts with and responds, the artwork, the text. He posits that one enters a kind of “dialogue” with the text, a conversation which for him resembles, or takes on some of the characteristics of, playing, or play itself: “In playing, all those purposive relations that determine active and caring existence have not simply disappeared, but are curiously suspended. The player himself knows that play is only play and that it exists in a world determined by the seriousness of purpose. But he does not know this in such a way that, as a player, he actually intends this relation to seriousness. Play fulfills its purpose only if the player loses himself in play” (102).6 We should attend carefully to the implication of these ideas; that the game itself has an agency that seems to precede and exceed the subject (it is play that fulfills its purpose, not the player); that in some ways the game’s success, the success of play and playing, is fully dependent on the player’s loss of himself. Gadamer’s thoughts here allow me to theorize the loss of self in play as another “way” of being posthuman, to suggest that, perhaps, the human is always already posthuman when it plays. The great contribution of Gadamer is the idea that the human, given its obvious addiction to many forms of play, is deeply involved always in leaving itself behind, becoming something other than a fully self-aware, self-present entity. My real question for Gadamer and the player thus is this: what are you—and I am aware that this question has an uncanny resonance—when you lose yourself “in” play? Play is fulfilling its purpose when you lose yourself; play needs you to lose yourself: but where are you? What are you? We may also wish to consider that if the player at some level disappears, the game itself—its protocols and rules, its gameness—too must lose something.7 We may say that in play the game plays us, but I think it is more accurate to say that a third space opens in play, something between player and game; we need, thus, to think about the relation between the posthuman and the space of the postgame. That is, we need to begin theorizing experience—the experience of play—that leaves behind the grounds or base of that experience. It will be my purpose to work towards answers to these questions— What are you? Where are you when you play?—but at the outset I do 11

Introduction

know this: when I play a game and my sense of self is extended into an avatar or indeed a first-person view of an arm, weapon, or portal-creating device, I am both lost to my real self and found within that extension on screen. My consciousness is guided—but of course I too am doing some work—by that entity on screen, and the protocols of game design behind the avatar. In some ways thus the real questions become: how do we conceive of a subject that is both present and absent to itself? An avatar that is both me and not me? Some theorists and philosophers have, in a variety of ways, attempted to think about this entity/experience. N. Katherine Hayles, for instance, in How We Became Posthuman, speaks about what she terms the “distributed cognition” (4) and how this replaces “autonomous will” (288): the cyborg-self is one that finds its thoughts scattered—distributed—into a variety of locations by the protocols and economies of the user-screen interface. The self thus is both here, in the real, and onscreen, in the game. As she suggests, subjectivity—that sense of the self’s sense of itself—becomes only its point-of-view: the self is reduced to a limited viewpoint, itself dictated by the protocols of game design and rules. Hayles is surely right about how the self is distributed by her relation to the virtual. Her analysis is useful for detailing the structure of the player-game interface but it lacks, I think, the philosophical nuance to make sense of the precise uncanniness of the experience of gaming. Here we need to turn to philosophy, as I will throughout my analysis. It may be useful, for instance, to consider briefly an idea from philosopher Maurice Blanchot. Blanchot is surely not thinking about gaming, cybernetics, or prosthetic enhancement in his work, but his post-phenomenology is useful for its rigorous (if at times elusive) analysis of subjectivity. Blanchot is fascinated by how subjectivity is transformed when placed under specific conditions. In The Writing of the Disaster, for instance, Blanchot spends a great deal of time thinking through what it means for the self to perceive (of) itself within the logic or economy of trauma, loss, the disaster. The shock of trauma, itself inassimilable to experience, unavailable to us as it occurs, produces some shift in the self, some alteration in the self’s sense of itself. Blanchot speaks therefore about “subjectivity without any subject” (30), what he terms the “boundless dispersion [of the self] within bounds” (30). Surely this idea, subjectivity without subject, the boundless yet bounded experience, is one way into beginning to comprehend the 12

Introduction

uncanny self that is the player. Because some consciousness—or subjectivity, or representation/image/simulacrum of consciousness—is being directed and is directing action in the game; but this consciousness is not (entirely or only) me or (entirely or only) the game avatar, or its programming. This thing that plays is rather a hybrid of avatar (game design, game designer’s will) and the player who is allowed to operate within certain parameters and protocols: we have here evidence of mind(s) at work without that trace of mind being locatable within a single or singular consciousness. This complex, this structure of distributed, dispersed, and displaced wills, is a philosophical node worth thinking about because this is a radical reconfiguration of the self, one that gaming reproduces obsessively, fetishistically, repeatedly. A final note on Blanchot. I am unaware of any scholar who has linked Blanchot’s idea of “subjectivity without any subject” to the experience of gaming. And, at first glance, it may be obvious as to why this linking has not occurred. Blanchot is speaking specifically about how the economy of trauma compromises the self’s integrity and thus a question naturally follows: Am I arguing that gaming has an element of trauma? Is gaming traumatic? Clearly, we may think, the answer here should be no: trauma is a sudden, forceful shock to the system, a shock that prevents the self from comprehending even the event of shock as such; and, as Freud and his commentators have argued, because the event of trauma essentially defines the present moment (for the traumatized self her pain is all that matters), and given that the self cannot understand the precipitating event—the event that defines her as subject—trauma renders the self opaque to itself.8 Clearly, gaming does not have this structure or economy. But trauma and gaming do share a crucial similarity: both experiences do something to the self. Both essentially place the subject in a (temporary) state of erasure. I am, thus, comfortable in asserting that if gaming is not traumatic, the effect of losing the self within gaming can possibly rise to the condition of trauma. Because at one level any experience of radical loss—however pleasurable, however temporary—can, at least potentially, produce the economy of the uncanny, that sense of the avatar being a part of me, and yet apart from me, familiar and yet strange: and the uncanny is where radical anxiety—about self, about the self’s integrity—occurs. This is all perhaps to say that gaming allows me to think philosophi13

Introduction

cally about subjectivity, radically transformed subjectivity, as such. Blanchot, for instance, will lead me into ways of thinking about the strange, uncanny relation between me and avatar in a practical sense. Gaming, to return to my opening comments, stages actual instantiations of the posthuman; ultimately, therefore, gaming allows me to think philosophically, and practically, about material instantiations of the posthuman not just (utopian or other) theories of the posthuman. Genre, Game Choice, and the Model of the Playing-Subject

The claims I make about games in what follows emerge out of readings of what are essentially canonical games. In part one of my study the games I analyze tend to be variations of the shooter game (first person or third) with role-playing elements: Half-Life 2, BioShock, Mass Effect, Halo 3, Crysis 2, and Metal Gear Solid 4. The claims I am making here about the video game standing as a site wherein the subject may realize a temporary instantiation of the posthuman (s/he may become, through the avatar, something other than what s/he is in the real world) are generically applicable to all games that have the player-avatar structure. It is important to note, however, just how many games that explicitly are “about” extending the human into other possibilities (I think here of Crysis 2, BioShock, or Mass Effect) tend to be science fiction games, if loosely understood. This has, more than likely, to do with the fact that the physical possibilities for cybernetic extension do not exist in our present time and thus the games are explicitly inflected precisely as futural fantasy: the posthuman desire, temporarily realized for the player in real time, thus takes on an added dimension of fantasy and desire. Perhaps, the games suggest, this will be what the posthuman will look like, but only in the future. It is my argument here that we must attend carefully to the implications, ethical and existential, of both types of posthuman extension: what becomes of the human in real space, inhabiting an ontology within this real world, when s/he extends into the fantasy space of the game? What does it mean philosophically, to become other in other spaces? My choice of games to analyze here is thus determined by my sense that the games illustrate, in various ways, what becoming the posthuman, thematically, looks like; that is, the games thematize the entry into 14

Introduction

the posthuman condition; becoming the posthuman is the theme of these games’ narratives. This is to say that the games are all, in themselves, instantiations of the posthuman. As thematizations of the entry into posthumanity, the games stand as parables of the posthuman condition in the sense that they begin, in a specular fashion, to mirror the player’s own entry into the posthuman condition as s/he plays: the games move thus from merely thematizing the posthuman to instantiating that condition. One may, of course, ask: does not any game with an avatar who negotiates space do this? Is it not true that any game is in some sense a parable of the posthuman? In a limited sense the answer is yes. But my analysis is grounded on a reading of games that have become canonical: games like BioShock, Halo, Half-Life 2, Crysis 2, Fallout 3, or Shadow of the Colossus have introduced new ways of imagining the player-avatar relationship, have shaped, through developments in graphics and physics engines, the way subsequent games must imagine the articulation of movement, space, and theme. That is, these games articulate the grounds for an understanding of the posthuman gaming subject now, and to come. In phenomenological-hermeneutical terms, these games, these canonical games, have all in various ways constructed the horizon of expectation for what the posthuman gamer must find as s/ he enters into the playing world. But perhaps more to the point my choice of games here allows me to construct an image of the playing subject through which to understand, in a more or less synthetic manner, what it means to become the posthuman as one plays. That is to say, I am working on a model of the playing subject that speaks to a kind of universality of experience. My analysis of the playing subject in Parables of the Posthuman is by choice and, I believe, by necessity an idiosyncratic and, in a philosophical sense of the term, limited one. My approach to the various games here is explicitly inflected through the phenomenological models offered by Heidegger and MerleauPonty; as such the player whose experience I analyze emerges as what can be called a “universal ideal” model of the playing subject. That is to say, I am imagining here a model of the playing subject that is not defined by any particular grounding in gender, race, or (explicitly) political context or background. Husserl, in his grounding work in phenomenology, speaks of the necessity to get back “to the things themselves” (zu den Sachen selbst), as the subject submits his or her experience of the world to 15

Introduction

critical scrutiny; this process of getting back to the things themselves, the ground of experience, by necessity involves what Husserl calls bracketing or reduction, a process by which a limited, ideal model of the interpreting subject emerges. In The Address of the Eye, Vivian Sobchack decribes the emergence of the ideal interpreting consciousness, what she terms, after Husserl, “intentionality”: “Belonging to no particular existence, indeed bracketed outside particular existence, intentionality is thus located by Husserl in what is a transcendental ego, that is, in a subjectivity made universal and objectively available to any existence. In sum, for Husserl, the transcendental reduction attempts an essential description of the phenomena of consciousness in all their possibilities for any existence” (37). It should be clear that there are obvious critical problems with the phenomenological process of reduction and limitation; the words themselves speak of an arbitrary decision to ground interpretive analysis through a quite narrow, ideal focus. But it strikes me that this process does have the merits of being a critically honest one: the Husserlian model does not claim to speak for all modes of experience because the phenomenological subject is by definition—ontologically and epistemologically—a singularity, one subject. The major problem, of course with this singularity is the way in which claims are made that singularity becomes universal (as in the phrase “universal ideal”). I do not employ the term “universal” here as a way of suggesting that my analysis speaks to every person’s experience of the games (this is, as far as I am concerned, a philosophical impossibility). What I am hoping for instead, is that my phenomenological description of my gaming experience will be recognized as being true—if only in a limited sense—by others who may have experienced games in a similar way. That is perhaps all to say that the phenomenological approach, one that involves reduction and bracketing, is not merely a complex disguise by which I mask one limited and idiosyncratic experience in the veil of theory; rather, what I hope emerges in my description of my playing is some (limited) standard of recognizability. In other words, my experience of the game will by necessity, given the always already limited nature of gameplay itself, speak to the game experience of a wider constituency. This, at least, is my firm hope as it is the firm hope of all phenomenological theory and practice.

16

Preamble The Birth into the Posthuman Fallout 3, Heavy Rain, Half-Life 2

If you get rid of distances you must also get rid of borders. Virilio, A Landscape of Events

to come to consciousness within a game? What happens, to me, to my avatar, to my sense of subjectivity (with all this entails: my identity, my perception of the world), when I enter into the game? At one level the experience of beginning a game is always like a birth in the sense that the player is thrust into a world not his own; a world the rules of which are, as yet, unfamiliar; a world that is potentially threatening; a world that is uncanny. Beginnings of games are always fascinating because they are charged with a grave responsibility: seduction. A game that begins badly—dully—will likely not catch the attention of the gamer and thus runs the risk of not being played. But by this point in the historical development of digital games, game makers—and players— are familiar with the conventions of beginnings and are always attentive to how the transition from the real to the virtual will be articulated and instantiated. I wish, in this opening preamble, to consider the beginnings of some canonical games, to take note of how the game designers signal What does it mean

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an awareness of the importance of beginnings, of the importance of the idea of seducing the gamer into a world beyond him. I am, in other words, interested here in examining how the player is born into the posthuman. In Being and Time, Martin Heidegger considers what it means to be, the existential condition of coming to consciousness in the world, this world. He describes the condition of being human as grounded by and on its “thrownness” (Geworfenheit). Heidegger means that the human is simply thrown into the world, in birth, with no obvious guidance, having no ready-made protection against the world, having no ready-made philosophical or religious systems with which to make sense of experience. Being, as such, exists without any “whence” or “wither” (174) as he puts it; being is simply “delivered over” (174) to existence, cast into the world and forced to make its way. The human must learn to navigate the world: to be is to learn how to be; to be is, in some radical sense, to learn the unavoidable, ineluctable rules of the world, ideological, cultural, scientific, and phenomenological. Heidegger uses the word Dasein to designate the human’s sense of being-in-the-world, that sense of being conditioned by the limits and parameters of possibility: “An entity of the character of Dasein is its ‘there’ in such a way that, whether explicitly or not, it finds itself [sich befindet] in its thrownness” (174). That is, the subject finds out who she is by virtue of the fact that she has been thrown into the world. There is, of course, something tautological about Heidegger’s formulation—thrownness defines the subject; the subject finds herself in her condition of thrownness—but his idea makes a kind of complex sense of the condition of being in the game, does it not? Consider, for instance, the openings of some recent, and important, digital games. Bethesda’s Fallout 3 (2008) begins in a manner I have never seen before: after an introduction that gives the backstory to the game (a thermonuclear war has devastated North America; certain groups have taken permanent refuge in underground bomb shelters, called “vaults”; the character you assume has been born into Vault 101), the narrative proper begins for the player who initially sees nothing but a black screen. Gradually, some bright light appears, we hear a heart monitor, and (what we assume is) a doctor’s face materializes out of the dark. It becomes apparent that the player is experiencing his/her own birth: the onscreen darkness represents the dark of the birth canal; the bright lights are those of the 18

Preamble: The Birth into the Posthuman

Fallout 3: The birth of the player. operating room; the first voice you hear is that of the doctor, who, it turns out, is your own father. Your father asks you to choose your gender, your name (you enter a name for your avatar), and then he employs a “gene projector” to “see what you’ll look like when you’re all grown up.” It is here that in some sense the fantasy nature of the entry into the posthuman not only truly begins but in some sense is perfectly realized. You are given the opportunity to pick your “race” (African American, Asian, Caucasian, Hispanic) and are allowed to modify the shape of your face and choose from any number of hairstyles (and hair colors). Other games will allow more choices in the modification of your avatar, but Fallout 3 distills the fantasy of what I term “becoming other” to its essentials. Because this is a crucial, and not merely playful, moment of liberation. Unlike the experience of reading a novel, or watching a film, here I become the central character—in terms of movement and “being” the line of sight—even as I create her, not merely ideally (in the sense that I create an image of Madame Bovary in my mind), but in a sense, really.1 But clearly there is more here; this is a concrete instantiation of what Haraway might call becoming cyborg, in terms of liberation from the singular subject position of the player and, crucially, from the confines of the liberal Humanist subject position. Because I, as a white male, can become, if only in fantasy, if only temporarily, an Asian woman, or an 19

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African American man, or an Hispanic girl, as I play. That is to say I can step past the singularity of my subject position into the space of being other (albeit perhaps a fantasy space created by other singularly limited Humanist subjects). I do not wish to figure this moment of avatar creation as utopian necessarily, but I can testify to the strange, uncanny experience of playing as other in games like Fallout 3. If I choose a white, male avatar, my relation to him is already uncanny; but if I choose to play as an African American woman, the specular relation to my avatar becomes more complicated, more resonant; it is as if the game can temporarily, and on a miniscule level, invite me to step into the space of what Heidegger would call the other’s “world picture.” Here I can imagine myself experiencing the world through another set of cultural and societal regimes and protocols. If ethics can be defined, as indeed poet Shelley does in the Defense of Poetry, as an act of imagining what the other experiences, then the digital game here instantiates, again in a minor key, an event of ethics.2 During the opening minutes of the game, a year passes and we quickly are taught (through onscreen prompts) the rudiments of motion and action; we are soon given a history of our family (our mother died during our birth) and taught how to socialize (we attend our tenth birthday party and have to learn how to handle a bully). During this extended, and quite brilliant, tutorial (it includes attending a school of sorts, being given our first weapon, a BB Gun, and our own Pip Boy 3000, a device that allows the player to modify the avatar’s various skills, alter his clothing, map his environment, monitor his health, among other things) the deep background of the story’s narrative is further revealed (the Overseer of Vault 101 is something of a tyrant; there is a political struggle between the Overseer and our Father). After passing through some fifteen to twenty minutes of playing time, nineteen years of our avatar’s life have passed and he, after various plot events, is thrust into the world beyond the shelter. This exit is figured as an explicit echo of the avatar’s birth scene: we escape the vault through a darkened tunnel to merge into the blinding light of the atomic wasteland. As our eyes adjust to the harsh light of the wasteland and as we take in the sublimely devastated vista, we realize we are, once again, condemned to a kind of freedom; we now must navigate our way through this world, learning the rules of motion, action, and engagement, learning, that is, how to be.3 20

Preamble: The Birth into the Posthuman

In a sense, all tutorial sessions in games are allegories of the gamergame relationship: as the avatar learns the rules of his world, so the player learns the rules of the game. Fallout 3’s tutorial session is fascinating because it explicitly allegorizes the idea that to begin a game is to be born into a new world. And it is as we acknowledge this explicit allegory that some questions arise: Is Fallout 3 not alerting us to the fact that gaming is about a radical, and sometime jarring, introduction to a new way of being? Is the entry into a gameworld not disruptive to our understanding of ourselves as singular, integrated, and entire? Of course not all games begin by literalizing the birth metaphor. Some, like Quantic Dream’s Heavy Rain (2010), stages the player’s entry into the game as a literal awakening. Heavy Rain is an experimental digital game that essentially tasks the player with directing the actions of four characters as they unfold a murder mystery. The player alternates between assuming the role of Ethan Mars (a bereaved father whose son may be a victim of a serial killer); Norman Jayden, an FBI profiler; Madison Paige, a journalist; and Scott Shelby, a private investigator. The game takes place, it seems, in something like the present day, but Norman Jayden employs technologies that do not exist in our modern times: he employs what is called the Added Reality Interface (ARI), a virtual reality device that allows him to see traces of crimes (through visual enhancements), or to alter his present physical space (he can virtually alter his environment so that it, for instance, resembles the surface of Mars). Jayden’s ARI unit, in other words, instantiates another kind of posthuman fantasy, one curiously at generic odds with the mundane realities of the game’s world. Our first view of the avatar in Heavy Rain sees him sleeping on a bed; our first task as player is to awaken him and then guide him through a series of rather mundane tasks: shaving, showering, dressing. The game’s tutorial session essentially stages the entry into the posthuman—our entry that is (the avatar, Ethan Mars, is not figured explicitly as having the potential for any posthuman enhancements, bodily modifications, and the like)—as an entry into the utterly banal (at least until the tragic and troubling events of the game proper unfold). And yet, the very banality of this game’s beginning is ultimately seductive, perhaps even more so than the overtly fantastic opening of Fallout 3. Heavy Rain, and perhaps this is true of all games, makes the banal details of everyday life curiously fascinating: never has taking a shower 21

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been this interesting, never has drinking from a container of orange juice felt so compelling. Of course my locution here, “the details of everyday life,” is misleading: these are not my actions—this shower is not mine, and I am not drinking orange juice. But in some sense I am involved in those actions. It is precisely this level of responsibility for action that is at stake here. Ethan Mars is clearly not me, and yet his actions are entirely dependent on my own. Heavy Rain’s tutorial session—in its remorseless festishization of the mundane—makes it clear that games are asking philosophically acute questions: what does it mean to play? What does it mean to animate the actions of a character? What precisely is the relation between player and avatar? Whose story is this anyway? Heavy Rain signals a meta-textual awareness of the idea of the playeravatar relationship in a clever and subtle way. One of Ethan Mars’s sons is watching television at one point: the player can, if he chooses, watch the cartoons on the screen. One of the cartoons depicts the adventures of three characters in what appears to be some South American locale. Unbeknownst to the protagonists (who search for treasure), their actions are being manipulated by a malevolent priest who has voodoo dolls of the three characters (the cartoon is called “Voodoo”). The priest manipulates the dolls—violently jerking their legs—and the characters find themselves being moved about against their will: the priest then manipulates the dolls into a running over a cliff to their deaths. The priest is clearly a representation of the player with his PlayStation controller: this raises interesting questions about the intentions, and capacities, ethical or otherwise, of the player who is busy manipulating the actions of Ethan Mars and others. Some entries into games are more abrupt and jarring than that found in Heavy Rain. When we come to consciousness in Valve’s HalfLife 2 (2004), for instance, we find ourselves on a train having once again assumed the subjective viewpoint of Gordon Freeman, a research scientist actively resisting the totalitarian rule of an invading alien force (called the Combine). Freeman has no memory of boarding this train: he has simply come to consciousness at the will of forces controlling him (a mysterious character called the G-Man, who may serve the Combine and does seem to be manipulating the events of Freeman’s life, speaks to Freeman in a kind of vision4). A short cutscene briefly recapitulates the story of the 22

Preamble: The Birth into the Posthuman

original Half-Life which unfolded the events surrounding the opening of a multidimensional wormhole allowing the Combine to invade and devastate the earth and its human population. But even to gamers aware of the events of the previous game, the admonition by the game’s mysterious antagonist, the G-Man, to “wake up and smell the ashes” is disquieting. The beginnings of Heavy Rain and Half-Life 2 could not be more distinct in terms of tone: Heavy Rain sees the avatar awakening in a sun-drenched, modernist bedroom in a clearly expensive (and architecturally sophisticated) home: the banal tasks facing the player may in fact strike us, at first blush, as rather dull. Half-Life 2 thrusts the player into an immediately anxiety-ridden context. As we arrive in totalitarian City 17 and are forced to endure the petty and dehumanizing bureaucratic whims of the Combine, we are only ever trying to find the means to survive: indeed within a few minutes we are literally on the run, fleeing from the Combine. And yet despite the differences in tone between these games’ openings—Fallout 3’s birthing scene, Heavy Rains’s (deceptively) placid awakening, Half-Life 2’s entry into totalitarian anxiety—all serve as allegories of gaming, as such. More precisely, through the various tutorial sessions, all serve to remind us what is at stake in the entry into play: we are compelled into subjective positions that both are and are not our own; we are entering worlds, more precisely, spaces, that both are and are not our own. In what is to follow I wish to analyze the consequences, philosophical, psychoanalytical, of this entry, this uncanny entry into other ways of being. To do so I would like to keep firmly in mind Heidegger’s notion that the character of Dasein—a concept that I am here going to use to designate the being of the player-avatar—“finds itself in its thrownness.” To come to terms with the ontology of the player-avatar means that we must keeps its radical uncanniness in mind. I am using the term in Freud’s sense of the term (that thing which is both familiar and unfamiliar, simultaneously); but I am also here acknowledging Heidegger’s own indebtedness to the term. Heidegger uses the German term unheimlich in its literal sense: unhomeliness. This is a sense of not being at home, of being dislocated (think of Gordon Freeman wakening to find himself on a train he does not remember boarding). Heidegger is, thus, clear that coming to consciousness in the world, coming to an awareness of one’s own essential thrownness, involves an a priori awareness of a condition of dis23

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location, both subjectively (in terms of the subject’s coming to grips with who or what she is) and spatially (in terms of the subject’s coming to grips with the idea of the space of the world): “Uncanniness is the basic kind of Being-in-the-World” (322), Heidegger writes. Coming to consciousness in the game involves precisely this kind of dislocation as we are forced to be in worlds that are not our own; forced to assume—and inhabit—the subjective viewpoint (and being) of subjects and subjectivities not our own. But this dislocation is a seductive one, is it not? This coming to terms with other spaces, other subjectivities, is not immediately a cause of anxiety but functions as a kind of playful freedom: we engage in the game, perhaps, precisely to experience this kind of dislocation; we assume the space of the other in order to experience a world that is not our own. It is here— in our awareness of the game’s manifest seduction and charisma—that we are perhaps compelled to modify and adjust Heidegger and Freud: both take uncanniness as being inextricably linked to anxiety, to the anxiety of repetition (Freud), the anxiety of being (Heidegger). The posthuman uncanny, we may say here, by way of a theoretical entry point, is not about anxiety (necessarily) but is about the liberation of multiple planes of being, multiple lines of flight. It is our task, thus, to consider what uncanny being separated from anxiety looks like and feels like. And thus, we enter into the posthuman condition.

24

posthuman subjects

Man has, as it were, become a kind of prosthetic God. Freud, Civilization and Its Discontents Mankind, which in Homer’s time was an object of contemplation for the Olympian gods, now is one for itself. Its self-alienation has reached such a degree that it can experience its own destruction as an aesthetic pleasure of the first order. Benjamin, “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction”

Posthumanism It is my intention here to begin speculating, in more or less a theoretical manner, on the nature of the player-avatar relationship. There are of course many kinds of avatars, inhabiting many kinds of games, so let me clarify my trajectory. I wish to offer some thoughts on the relationship between player and avatar for the most part in games that allow for only a single avatar: that is, games in which you control only one character throughout the narrative. I am here thinking of games such as Fallout 3, Half-Life 2, and Shadow of the Colossus. Of course even between these games there are differences: Shadow of the Colossus, unlike Fallout 3 or Half-Life 2, is not a science fiction game fetishizing the idea of the enhanced human; moreover, Shadow is a third-person game while both Fallout 3 and Half-Life 2 25

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are first-person games that explicitly use the idea of bodily enhancement as a point of departure.1 But all three games are useful as points of departure for thinking about the uncanny nature of the player-avatar relationship, not least because of the ruthlessly fixed viewpoint the games compel the player to assume. I am here concerned with exploring the possible implications of shifting subjectivities within games asking if perhaps these games should be seen as instantiations of Blanchot’s idea of subjectivity without any subject. In other words, I am wondering if the entry into the posthuman is an instantiation of a critique of the idea of the integrated, singular self. The single avatar game does this a priori of course (in the sense that the player is asked to inhabit another space, another subjectivity), but games such as Heavy Rain, and Modern Warfare, may double, triple, or even quadruple the philosophical stakes by compelling the player into multiple, and perhaps multiply divergent, subjectivities. Let me just, briefly, recapitulate my central point of departure. The digital game is an instantiation of a series of fundamental fantasies, fantasies I am calling posthuman: the fantasy of enhancing the body beyond its limitations and boundaries; the fantasy of inhabiting other subjectivities; the fantasy of (temporarily) leaving this subjectivity behind; the fantasy of exploring other spaces; and the fantasy thus of being other in other spaces. The fantasy the game offers is a kind of virtual tourism, where tourism means not simply being in another space, but being in another subjectivity altogether. The idea that the aesthetic object offers itself as a means of putting this world behind us is not of course new. Hegel puts the matter thus in his Aesthetics, something of a cornerstone of modern thought on art: “what we enjoy in the beauty of art is precisely the freedom of its productive and plastic energy. In its origination, as in the contemplation, of its creations we appear to escape wholly from the fetters of rule and regularity” (7). Hegel’s word “appear” is crucial given its sense that this escape may be illusory (an idea to which I will return), but for now we should acknowledge that the game, as a species of the aesthetic, offers the seduction of freedom and this freedom is precisely a freedom from singularity, the singularity of a limited and static subjectivity. I am not (necessarily) arguing that art’s capacity to liberate the subject from his limited subjectivity makes all art a species of the posthuman or, more precisely, that all art instantiates the posthuman condition (though this 26

Posthuman Subjects

idea may lead in fascinating directions where the aesthetic object, as such, becomes an implicit critique of subjective consciousness and thus has as its primary function a melancholy representation of the human’s absolute and radical limitation). I am arguing that gaming, in the way it obliges the player actively, bodily, phenomenally, to participate in the unfolding of narrative, in the way it radicalizes the aesthetic object’s liberation of the subject, is a practical realization of an idea of the posthuman: gaming is posthuman aesthetic theory put into practice, in other words. In How We Became Posthuman, N. Katherine Hayles defines the posthuman as a “point of view” characterized by a series of “assumptions” (2). These assumptions form what is essentially a Foucaultian discourse on the posthuman, a discourse deriving from pioneering work in cybernetics (Norbert Weiner) and computer science (Alan Turing). Hayles is decidedly not celebrating these assumptions as markers of either some kind of utopian liberation (we can thus contrast Hayles with Donna Haraway and her [albeit ironic] celebratory “A Manifesto for Cyborgs”) or even of good philosophical thought. Indeed, as she explains, if one of the guiding fantasies of the posthuman is the idea of translating and transferring consciousness (that is to say, information) from one material entity (a human body) to another (a computer)—and this is the guiding fantasy of Hans Moravec’s novel Mind Children, the fantasy that is a primal scene of “nightmare” ([1] for Hayles)— Hayles will ask us to notice how easily the materiality of the human body is elided, ignored, and effaced, in that process. For Hayles the facticity of the body—its material, ethical, cultural, and social claims—must not be forgotten in this translation of information. Having said this, and having pointed to the potential ethical traps in the lure of the posthuman, Hayles proceeds to offer her reading of what constitutes the posthuman. I quote at length given that the list is crucial to what will follow: First, the posthuman view privileges informational pattern over material instantiation, so that embodiment in a biological substrate is seen as an accident of history rather than an inevitability of life. Second, the posthuman view considers consciousness, regarded as the seat of human identity in the Western tradition long before Descartes thought he was a mind thinking, as an epiphenomenon, as an evolutionary upstart 27

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trying to claim that it is the whole show when in actuality it is only a minor sideshow. Third, the posthuman view thinks of the body as the original prosthesis we all learn to manipulate, so that extending or replacing the body with other prostheses becomes a continuation of a process that began before we were born. Fourth, and most important, by these and other means, the posthuman view configures human being so that it can be seamlessly articulated with intelligent machines. In the posthuman, there are no essential differences or absolute demarcations between bodily existence and computer simulation, cybernetic mechanism and biological organism, robot teleology and human goals. (2–3) It is not difficult to see how these assumptions form the philosophical (and narrative) bedrock of a great number of contemporary digital games; indeed, it is not difficult to see how these games, contra Hayles, celebrate these assumptions, fetishize these assumptions, and put them to (playful) work. It may, in fact, be possible to argue that digital games form a discursive episteme in which the evolutionary fantasies of the human (which is in this process the transhuman) are instantiated as a kind of prophecy. The human body in games is often seen merely as prosthesis to be extended in a continual process of transgressing physical limits; in fact, the human body is seen as a liability in its current evolutionary form, one to be effaced, transferred, and translated into higher expressions of power and fantasy.2 It is crucial here to highlight an aspect of my thinking about the entry into the posthuman. I have, above, used the word “fantasy” several times to indicate my sense that becoming the posthuman in the specific interaction with the digital game is, and can only ever be, something like an imaginative, temporary escape from the claims of the material world, the world of real bodies, inscribed materially within social, political, and cultural discourses. As I outlined in the postscript to my Introduction, it is not my intention to theorize the player in relation to these political and social realities; I am not, for instance, able here to speak to the various ways games can be read within, or against, the political and cultural pressure of race and gender, beyond suggesting that various games—I think here of Fallout 3 or 28

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Dark Souls—will allow the player to assume an identity, racial or gendered, different from her material, real identity. As suggested in my Introduction I am offering a phenomenological model of the gamer that is, by definition and necessity, limited to what I am calling an “ideal.” That said, and to return to my use of the term “fantasy,” I cannot pretend that the assumption of an identity other than one’s own, in the (structurally and temporally) limited experience of the game, offers any significant, that is, long-lasting liberation from the material realities of the gamer’s real world. Indeed, as I will argue, this fact—that gaming is only ever a fantasy, is only ever a temporary liberation from the real world—creates the experience of gaming as precisely a melancholic one: the gaming experience is defined, I will suggest, by its offer of a limited suspension of the real. The becoming posthuman that a digital game can offer can only ever be temporary and it cannot alter the material, cultural, political, conditions of the player. And this of course is precisely part of Hayles’s crucial critique of various theories and practices of posthumanism: the entry into the posthuman is always based, she argues, on the idea that the material, real body is something to be left behind, to be effaced (and this, as I have just suggested, can never happen). Hayles states her position with eloquence: If my nightmare is a culture inhabited by posthumans who regard their bodies as fashion accessories rather than the ground of being, my dream is a version of the posthuman that embraces the possibilities of information technologies without being seduced by fantasies of unlimited power and disembodied immortality, that recognizes and celebrates finitude as a condition of human being, and that understands human life is embedded in a material world of great complexity, one on which we depend for our continual survival. (5) My question for Hayles would have to be: how can we square this desire for the celebration of finitude in specific relation to digital games that, structurally, thematically, and practically (phenomenologically), celebrate the desire to transcend finitude? That is, how can we balance a need to recognize the material claims of the body (circumscribed within politics, race, and gender) with the experience of the gameworld where these claims are 29

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precisely denied within the operational fantasy of becoming posthuman? My sense here, and I return to this point more fully below, is that we cannot: the game, at least those canonical games that define the protocols of becoming the player-avatar posthuman, works assiduously to allow the player a fantasy space within which to leave behind the body defined and constrained within the particular and material. Thus while I admire Hayes’s thinking about the need to recognize the material claims of the living body as it negotiates with some version of the posthuman, I do not think, in specific relation to the experience of becoming posthuman while gaming, that a celebration of finitude is philosophically possible. Instead of a celebration of finitude—an awareness of the constraints of the material—the experience of returning to the world of the player’s material, cultural, political reality is only ever a melancholic one. But this is precisely gaming’s allure: for brief moments, I can imagine other ways of being, ways of being within spaces and worlds other than my own. What is crucial for our purposes here, at this point in our argument, is that Hayles offers a way into thinking about what an avatar in a game, as such, may offer the player: for certainly the avatar instantiates the seamless integration of the human and the intelligent machine. Surely when one activates the game console one is entering into the logic and general computational economy of a machine whose promise is one of extension and of a certain kind of seamless commingling of subjectivities.3 But Hayles will critique the general philosophical assumptions behind these desires (as will we) and will thus move to offset any naïve celebration of the posthuman. Thus, before we move into a specific examination of how games instantiate the posthuman, perhaps we should consider a more utopian view of the posthuman, cyborged subject, if only because the game’s fetishization of posthuman extension is always (at least initially) celebratory. Our first entry into other selves in other spaces is always figured in terms of delight; the rush of power coming from having newfound powers and abilities speaks to the fact that the initial entry into the posthuman is an entry into profound pleasure. Donna Haraway’s “A Manifesto for Cyborgs” is an (ironically) ecstatic expression of the utopian lure of the figure of the posthuman, and while the essay is perhaps somewhat dated, it still is an important expression of the (perhaps pathological, certainly symptomatic) desire for the figure of the cyborg. It is crucial of course to 30

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keep in mind that Haraway is offering a manifesto; these documents are always deliberately provocative, perhaps idealistic, and always challenging. What I do find compelling about Haraway’s work, and not merely because it conforms with my own qualified celebration of the digital game as the site of posthuman extension, is the way the latent ironies in her work point explicitly to the fact that the manifesto is just that: a manifesto, generically it seems to me, contains a critique of its own view. On the one hand, Haraway is offering a blueprint for a potential liberatory possibility (an escape from gendered regimens of normative cultural behaviors) and yet it is clear that the cyborg is, as she posits, “unfaithful” to the proffered technological sublime the manifesto would seem to be advancing. This is perhaps to say that Haraway’s essay should be read as precisely utopian: the cyborg exists in no place or space, and in no time—it cannot yet come into existence. My own reading of the various possibilities of the digital game—its ability to extend the human subject into other subjectivities and other spaces—is similarly nuanced: I maintain that the game is utopian in an almost literal sense—it does not exist in space (or a single locatable space) and the fantasies it offers (of spatial and existential ontological extension) can only be temporary. Thus, while at some level my reading of Haraway here is critical, I do think her ironic view of the cyborg stands as a critical, and useful, model for any analysis of the posthuman project. It is not my purpose here to deconstruct the latent ironies of Haraway’s text and unfold any potential contradictions that may exist in the text for the simple reason that, as I have been suggesting, the ecstatic utopianism of the document, whether ironic or not, finds a kind of unproblematized objective correlative in the fantasies unfolded in any number of games. That is to say, our initial step into a consideration of the figure of the posthuman, cyborged avatar, should be one that sees the figure as precisely the figure of celebration rather than as critique. (It should be said here, however, that certain games—not all—do bear a latent critique of the fantasy of the posthuman [Deus Ex: Invisible War being one; Too Human, another]). Haraway’s essay, it should be noted first, is an expression of what may be termed utopian feminism; that is, the figure of the cyborg that is celebrated here is offered as figure of liberation from a dominantly patriarchal culture: “A cyborg is a cybernetic organism, a hybrid of machine and organism, a creature of social reality as well as a creature of 31

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fiction. Social reality is lived social relations, our most important political construction, a world-changing fiction” (149).4 In some ways these are the most important lines in the essay: for Haraway the cyborg is at once real and ideal, a creature of social reality—a social reality that includes an understanding of oppressive discourses—and the imagination; that is to say the cyborg is both real and ideal, real and unreal, there and not there, or always already existing in a kind of possible utopian imaginary space.5 Because my concern is to speak about the player-avatar relation as being an uncanny one—and Haraway does herself read the cyborg as an uncanny subject—it is crucial to highlight aspects of Freud’s thought here. Freud will argue that the uncanny is an experience of anxiety that arises as an encounter with something that is both familiar and unfamiliar. He arrives at this thought initially through his examination of the German heimlich (homely) which, he says, is not an “unambiguous” word: it “belongs to two sets of ideas, which, without being contradictory, are yet very different: on the one hand it means what is familiar and agreeable, and on the other, what is concealed and kept out of sight” (345). Further, he adds: “linguistic usage has extended das Heimliche into its opposite, das Unheimliche; for this uncanny is in reality nothing new or alien, but something which is familiar and old-established in the mind and which has become alienated from it only through the process of repression” (363–64). Freud’s essay, of course, is an attempt to understand how the experience of the uncanny—which is essentially an experience of anxiety that arises when we encounter that which is familiar and unfamiliar (or can we add: same and not-same?) simultaneously—gives rise to an almost existential crisis. For Freud, the most resonant form of the uncanny is the double, or doppelganger; his reading of Hoffmann’s story “The Sand-Man” leads Freud unhappily to conclude, however, that while it is possible to understand how the double functions, we cannot really fully understand why the figure of the double arouses such feelings of unease: “When all is said and done, the quality of uncanniness can only come from the fact of the ‘double’ being a creation dating back to a very early mental stage, long since surmounted—a stage, incidentally, at which it wore a more friendly aspect. The ‘double’ has become a thing of terror, just as, after the collapse of their religion, the gods turn into demons” (358). It is perhaps because he cannot fully understand the effect of the uncanny in the literary realm 32

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that, immediately following his reading of Hoffmann, Freud turns to a personal anecdote. He recounts how he began examining the uncanny when he became lost in a section of a city, a red-light district, in fact: after becoming uncomfortable being there, Freud leaves, only to find that he has returned to the same district by another route. After leaving once more, he returns, unwittingly, a third time: “Now, however, a feeling overcame me which I can only describe as uncanny, and I was glad enough to find myself back at the piazza I had left a short while before, without any further voyages of discovery” (359). From this personal experience Freud decides that all experiences of repetition and doubling (he thinks of the doppelganger as a species of repetition) are woven out of the same fabric of uncanny anxiety. And it is here that Freud makes what for my purposes is a crucial link between the uncanny and the ideas of doubling and the compulsion to repeat. For the purposes of game analysis this is crucial of course given that, at least in the games I will analyze, experiences of uncanny doubling (the avatar is of course a kind of doppelganger of the player) and repetition (often compulsive, as anyone who has long-labored to defeat a stubborn boss will attest) play critical roles: For it is possible to recognize the dominance in the unconscious mind of a “compulsion to repeat” proceeding from the instinctual impulses and probably inherent in the very nature of the instincts—a compulsion powerful enough to overrule the pleasure principle, lending to certain aspects of the mind their demonic character. . . . All these considerations prepare us for the discovery that whatever reminds us of the inner “compulsion to repeat” is perceived as uncanny. (360–61) I will return to Freud’s essay throughout this analysis but for now what I need to extract from his work is the idea that the uncanny is a species of anxiety that arises when one is confronted with something that is both familiar and unfamiliar; that the uncanny arises through repetition (of varying kinds).6 And thus we may return briefly to Haraway: the cyborg, because it first is both a lived reality and an imaginary thing, seems to fit perfectly this category of the uncanny. The cyborg is both at home in the real world and at home in a world that does not (properly speaking) exist.7 33

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Haraway of course does not figure the cyborg in terms of anxiety—quite the contrary—but we can suggest that one of the implicit arguments of her manifesto is that for certain constituencies the emergence of the cyborg will be cause of great, even foundational, anxiety precisely as the cyborg begins to threaten clearly demarcated gender, cultural, and ideological boundaries: “Liberation rests on the construction of the consciousness, the imaginative apprehension, of oppression, and so of possibility. The cyborg is a matter of fiction and lived experience and that changes what counts as women’s experience in the late twentieth century” (149). I am probably exceeding the boundaries of possibility here, but it is my suggestion that the figure of the cyborg offered by Haraway is one that opens itself as a possibility not simply for women but for all who wish to enter into the position of the posthuman. The digital game, in its utopian aspect, offers itself as a site where all may (temporarily) move past cultural, gender, and ideological boundaries. But there are of course limits to this liberation. The player is subject to rules guiding his extension into cyberspace; he is limited by the narrative parameters of the game; he is limited by, most importantly, time itself: one cannot be in the game forever. And it is here that the digital game works as a reification of the idea of ideological limits, and thus as an implicit critique of Haraways’s utopianism. Thus, while for Haraway the cyborg is a creature of a “post-gender world” (150) and the argument for the cyborg is an argument working to imagine “a world without gender which is also a world without genesis” (150), we are forced, as we take note of how the practical posthumanism of the game imposes limits precisely as it offers the possibilities of liberation, to temper any utopianism we may wish to imagine. And thus, while Haraways’s manifesto remains a crucial expression of desire—the desire for transgressing various limits—it can, perhaps, only be that. Given our discussion of the posthuman, the uncanny, and the limits of utopian desire, what then is the avatar? More precisely, what can an avatar come to mean?8 How can we begin to theorize its place, effect (even affect), and ontology? What claims does the avatar have on the human player? What claims does the player have on the avatar? When we begin, for instance, a role-playing game (say, Demon’s Souls or Fallout 3) and we choose our name, gender, facial structure, hair style, and fighting style; and as we enter the world of the game and begin negotiating the various 34

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events the game presents to us, I ask a simple question, one I initially posed above in my preamble: whose story is this? This may in fact sound like a naïve question, but it does reveal some of the (perhaps hidden) complexities and implications of entering the world of the game. Because the story is not our own, but it is experienced as such by us. In the phenomenological sense the story only exists insofar as I activate it9; moreover, as I, for instance, walk in the game, that is, move my avatar, I am taking some measure of control over things. But my grammar here is revealing; when I walk in the game; when I move my avatar: already there is a split thought, is there not? I am not moving in the game: a digital representation of some entity not me (but chosen by me, looking like I want her to look [thus perhaps like me], calling herself by my name) is moving; the avatar is my avatar; it is not me. And yet, there is a strange link, if not loop, binding me to myself, a link that suggests that this onscreen entity, if not being my simulacrum exactly, is at least an echo, if not of my real self (I do not obviously have the ability to use a wand to shoot flame, or shoot ice from my fingertips) then of my desires: the avatar echoes my desires to be more than I am, to experience more than I can, to inhabit spaces I cannot. But of course the player-avatar relation is more than simply one between a single human and an onscreen digital entity. The avatar is a commingling of a variety of subjectivities: mine, the avatar’s (I will hallucinate that there is a subjectivity at work in the avatar). But to think this commingling begins or ends with only this dyad is to ignore a crucial element of the avatar’s being, or coming into being, more precisely. Because, obviously, the avatar is always already a collective, even before the player encounters it. The avatar is a construction of a game company: Hieronymus, (my chosen avatar name in most games I play) in Fallout 3 or Demon’s Souls, only exists because Bethesda or FromSoftware studios created him, or his possibility.10 Moreover, because games are created as a collective effort—one part of the team builds one aspect of the game, another part of the team builds another—the avatar as such—from design decisions to, for instance, moral systems—is always already pluralized, always already bears the traces of a variety of subjectivities. In this way an avatar, even in its blank slate version before I encounter and inscribe my own identity and desires on him, is much different from a character we encounter in a novel (he is closer, perhaps, to a film character, given that films also are the result of collective efforts): he is essentially a 35

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network (even produced by networks of game designers), a plurality, a multiplicity. He is, as Deleuze and Guattari might say, a rhizome. In A Thousand Plateaus Deleuze and Guattari famously propose the related ideas of the rhizome, deterritorialization, and the body without organs. These are, of course, well-rehearsed concepts, and I will not belabor my analysis with an extended outline of their thinking. But we should note several salient features of these concepts and how they seem almost uncannily to prefigure the ontology of the avatar and the relations—material, ideological—between player, avatar, and game company. We need to keep in mind, initially, that Deleuze and Guattari offer the figure of the rhizome as a way of moving past the binary structures of Western philosophical thought; that is, they wish to begin thinking about the possibilities of being beyond (or before, or above) the restricted and prescriptive economies of traditionally conceived ontologies, subjectivities, human relations, and human power. The rhizome, essentially an image of a root structure without specific center, is a trope for the idea of a decentered organization: it is an entity, a being, a way of being with no allegiance to an a priori beginning or authorizing prime mover.11 The rhizome, in other words, is a network without center, without origin: It has no beginning or end, but always a middle, from which it grows and which it overspills. It constitutes linear multiplicities with n dimensions having neither subject nor object, which can be laid out on a plane of consistency, and from which the One is always subtracted (n-1). . . . Unlike a structure, which is defined by a set of points and positions, with binary relations between the points and biunivocal relationships between the positions, the rhizome is made only of lines: lines of segmentarity and stratification as its dimensions, and the line of flight or deterritorialization as the maximum dimension after which the multiplicity undergoes metamorphosis, changes in nature . . . in contrast to centered (even polycentric) systems with hierarchical modes of communication and preestablished paths, the rhizome is an acentered, nonhierarchical, nonsignifying system without a general and without an organizing memory or central automaton, defined solely by a circulation of states. (21) 36

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Several ideas—or positions—need to be observed here. First, the rhizome is a multiplicity without subject or object; the rhizome enacts what they call deterritorialization, a metaphor for the idea of something—a subject, an object, an idea—existing without any particular location, map, or region; that it is, the deterritorialized subject is the subject without ground, without home. It is perhaps unfair to Deleuze and Guattari’s antiFreudianism to link their work to Freud’s, but the deterritorialized subject’s homelessness, is, almost by definition, uncanny (unhomely).12 The deterritorialized subject, because he cannot be located, cannot be fixed to a specific geographical site or philosophical ground, floats free of categorization; the deterritorialized subject thus finds his equivalent in what Emmanuel Levinas calls the stranger, the “absolutely foreign,” the other, who is “refractory to every typology, to every genus, to every characterology, to every classification” (73). The rhizome, last, is without a general, without, that is, an engine dictating its action, without an authority ordering the direction and trajectory the subject must take. The rhizome in some crucial way is a theorization of a possibility: there is, as we notice, a massive strain of avant-garde utopianism in this section of A Thousand Plateaus. The rhizome is a call to political freedom, just as Haraway’s manifesto attempts to call into being a possibility for the post-gendered subject. And perhaps the most utopian image Deleuze and Guattari offer, yet never really define, is the idea of the body without organs. The image comes originally from Antonin Artaud, and is a way of thinking purely about the flow, path, and trajectory of desire. Artaud and Deleuze and Guattari all give serious thought to the idea of desire and all wished to conceive of desire as being free of restraints (religious, ideological, political). The image of the body without organs is a way of thinking about pure desire—the body—without any link to possibly repressive structures of thought: the organs in this case being an image or metaphor of restraint, direction, control. One imagines here how the brain is traditionally (scientifically) conceived, as the seat of thought, as the center of motor and respiratory control, where, possibly, the unconscious resides, where, therefore, the Superego may organize, after the manner of the General, a repressive economy of desire. The body without organs, thus, is a pure metaphor, a purely speculative metaphor, almost a science-fictional attempt to envisage a purely embodied desire: embodied, that is, without 37

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interference from mind, and external (or internally metabolized) ideological structures: “The body without organs is permeated by unformed, unstable matters, by flows in all directions, by free intensities or nomadic singularities, by mad or transitory particles” (40). When the subject eludes the domination of ideology, it can claim to be a body without organs and become “destratified, decoded, deterritorialized” (40).13 I would like here briefly to return to Blanchot’s notion of subjectivity without any subject as a way to add another layer to Deleuze and Guattari’s idea of the body without organs. Blanchot comes to his idea through his reading of Levinas who, as Blanchot notes, spent a career thinking through the idea of an ethically grounded subjectivity. For Levinas, subjectivity—that sense of what and who the self is—only emerges through a phenomenal encounter with the uncanny Other. Levinas, especially in Totality and Infinity, is clear that the encounter with the other, from which every question of ethics arises, is a physical, even bodily encounter: the self is present to the other self in the flesh. Blanchot’s notion of subjectivity without any subject does seem to arise out of questioning the phenomenality of the body, as such; that is, his idea begins by questioning, if only gently, the idea that the other is, or needs to be, present in the flesh. Further, he seems to be asking, what happens if the self or the Other are not quite there to their own selves? “Levinas speaks of the subjectivity of the subject. If one wishes to use this word—why? but why not?—one ought perhaps to speak of a subjectivity without any subject: the wounded space, the hurt of the dying, the already dead body which no one could ever own, or ever say of it, I , my body” (30). Is not this idea, this concept, of subjectivity without any subject, not a perfect metaphor for the instantiated avatar? Perhaps we need to elaborate Blanchot’s metaphor: the avatar is a subjectivity without a single subject, and because without a single subject is factically without any subject. Because we cannot locate who or what the avatar is at any particular moment (he is me, he is the limits of the game, he is the law of the game design) he escapes the law of singularity. But he still maintains the lure of subjectivity; he still, that is, gives the impression of identity, of self: subjectivity without any subject. Blanchot’s idea, to return to Deleuze and Guattari, is perhaps another way of conceptualizing the breaking free from dominating discourses or ideological structures (notice, however, that it takes trauma, or a traumatic incident to do this: 38

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we shall return to this idea in our reading of the prosthetic sublime). The subject that is not a subjectivity is equivalent in many ways to the deterritorialized subject, the body without organs. Blanchot and Deleuze and Guattari have given us ways of thinking about a different kind of being: if this is not yet precisely posthumanism, if the idea of subjectivity without any subject, or the body without organs, remain only theoretical models, then the game experience will be the fulfillment of the theory, putting the possible posthuman into real practice. My suggestion here is that we should think about the avatar, the player-avatar relationship, in terms of the rhizome (and its related theoretical models, the deterritorialized subject, the body without organs) because it, the rhizome, comes close to offering a workable, yet still theoretical, model of the intricate network of connections that exist between player and game. The avatar is decentered; it has no allegiance to any particular point of origin; it exists only in relation to desires that flow from many directions (the game designers, my own, perhaps even the avatar’s own); it is, like the body without organs, merely a receptacle for the projected desires of others. We can say, perhaps with only slight hyperbole, that the avatar in a way realizes the utopian project of Deleuze and Guattari: it is a material instantiation of the idea of the rhizome, in an almost perfect sense. Does this mean, however, that the avatar should be read as being part of larger ideological, political critique? Deleuze and Guattari—along with Haraway—conceive of the rhizome as standing against predominant modes of thinking about subjectivity, about the subject as resistant to reductive networks of power. Am I suggesting that the avatar, in say, Halo, because he stands as a workable model of plurality and deterritorialization, is a critique of dominant philosophical thinking? My short answer here—and I will meditate on this further—is not precisely: Master Chief, in terms of his narrative function, is not the site of a critique of philosophically reactionary thought; but structurally, as an instantiation of a particular model of posthuman being involving the multiple constituencies of player, avatar, game maker, the avatar—any avatar—can easily be read as at least an implicit critique of certain traditional conceptions of the human, as such. I will simply mention one conception here, by way in fact of repetition, and again only briefly. If one of the central ideas that we have inherited from Renaissance Humanism is the idea of the human 39

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subject as transparent to itself, entire to itself, responsible for its own mind and actions; if one of the logical concomitants of the Renaissance Human model of the subject are the ideas of singularity, self-identity, and unity, the avatar, as rhizome, as cyborg, as an entity woven out of a network of various subjectivities, is a model of being otherwise than Humanist. I have argued elsewhere that we encounter models of being otherwise in certain experimental and avant-gardist literature, and that these models also serve to call into question what we assume to be the constituent elements of the human, but even the most radical literature cannot instantiate the physical, bodily, kinetic enactment of the rhizome; only gaming, perhaps, can offer an experiential model of being the posthuman.14 In what follows I offer brief analyses of Valve’s Half-Life 2 (2004) and 2K Games’ BioShock (2007) and an extended reading of Hideo Kojima’s Metal Gear Solid series, with a specific emphasis on Metal Gear Solid 4: Guns of the Patriots (2008). My hope here is to read these games parabolically, that is, as offering practical instantiations of the idea of the posthuman. I have chosen these games strategically. They illustrate quite brilliantly the event of becoming posthuman, but they also, I suggest, offer various and complex critiques of the fantasy of becoming the posthuman. In this way the games perfectly echo the theoretical models of posthuman utopia found, for instance, in Haraway and Deleuze and Guattari; the games also, as they unfold an exposure of the fantasy of the posthuman, echo and anticipate the complex negative critiques of what I will call the prosthetic sublime. These games, in other words, are semiotically—and philosophically—resonant texts: this semiological thickness is one reason why I will circulate back to these games over the course of this analysis. Half-Life 2: Allegories of Interpellation

In some ways the opening scenes of Half-Life 2 (2004) form an allegory of the political process of interpellation (or the resistance to same). In “Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses,” Louis Althusser suggests that interpellation is the manner in which an ideological structure—say the police force—“hails” or calls the subject into its network of power relations. The pre-ideological subject, he who has not heard the call of ideology, is produced by this call, produced, more precisely, as a full subject. Althusser’s formula is thus: “all ideology hails or interpellates concrete individuals as 40

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concrete subjects” (117). The individual, in other words, is not a subject—in the political-philosophical sense of the term—until he is interpellated into ideology: “I shall then suggest that ideology ‘acts’ or ‘functions’ in such a way that it ‘recruits’ subjects among the individuals (it recruits them all), or ‘transforms’ the individuals into subjects (it transforms them all) by that very precise operation which I have called interpellation or hailing, and which can be imagined along the lines of the most commonplace everyday police (or other) hailing: ‘Hey, you there!’” (118). In some ways the protagonist Gordon Freeman is precisely this blank slate of a subject thrown into a totalitarian ideology that immediately works to mark him as dominated subject. Gordon Freeman, for the player, is only ever a viewpoint. That is, we never hear Freeman speak, we are never given a third-person view of his body (we are only vouchsafed a sight of his hands and forearms as he grips a weapon). Freeman’s entire character thus comes from external sources: he is addressed by the mysterious G-Man at the outset of the game (where he is told that he has some undisclosed role to play in this totalitarian culture); he is addressed by various NPCs on the train that brings him to City 17 (“Didn’t see you get on,” says one). As Freeman makes his (your) way through the train station, a flying droid takes his picture (you are blinded by the flash). Moreover, you are confronted by the video-projected image of the (traitorous) human administrator of City 17, Dr. Wallace Breen, who says: “Welcome. Welcome to City 17. You have chosen or been chosen to relocate to one of our finest remaining urban centers. I thought so much of City 17 that I elected to establish my administration here in the Citadel so thoughtfully provided by our benefactors. I’ve been proud to call City 17 my home. And so whether you are here to stay or passing through on your way to parts unknown, welcome to City 17. It’s safer here.” Of course the particular brilliance of this opening scene is that Freeman’s experience is the player’s experience; your uncanny double Freeman undergoes a process of political interpellation into this culture in precisely the same way as the player. As he moves into the train station, Freeman must pass though various checkpoints and barriers. He has no choice but to be casually brutalized by the anonymous Combine guards, and he is compelled to witness the misery of the humans enduring the Combine’s harsh rule. As Freeman, as character, enters the narrative, the player too gets to know the story, but he does more. Freeman’s interpellation—on a diegetic level—is matched and mirrored by 41

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Half-Life 2: Play as interpellation. the player’s interpellation into the logics of the game’s mechanics, physics, and game rules. I am interested to note that there is perhaps a wry commentary (or at least allegory) at work here, one that suggests a homology between the totalitarian rule of the Combine and the “totalitarian” and arbitrary15 rules of the game: that is, I have no choice but to follow this linear path, this narrative, this character. I have no choice to “be” any other player than Freeman, whose name now begins to sound distinctly ironic. A question thus follows from these observations of the opening scene of Half-Life 2: If interpellation, in for instance, Althusser’s theory, is about producing the subject as ideological, who or what is being interpellated in this game? As I have suggested, the avatar is more than simply a diegetic subject; more, that is, than simply a subject in a story. Freeman is a rhizomatic subject, created by Valve, mobilized by me. Or is this opening scene, with its clever mapping of diegetic totalitarianism onto structural game-mechanical “totalitarianism,” in fact intended to indicate that this mobilization—my ability to control Freeman—is only ever an illusion (again, Freeman’s name begins to resonate)? Am I, the player, not in fact the one being fully interpellated within the structure and ideology of the game? This sense that a doubling of interpellations occurs (Freeman’s, my own) perhaps accounts for the uncanniness of the opening of Half-Life 2: precisely as Freeman is interpellated into the diegetic logic of this world, we are interpellated into 42

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the structural economy of play. This structural economy involves a growing sense of identification with Freeman, a sense that unfolds because all we know is what he knows. And surely this grammatical construction—we/ he—indicates the philosophical stakes here: what is the proper grammatical structure to be used when speaking of the avatar? I? He? We? I return to the question I posed in my preamble: Whose story is this anyway? Is Half-Life 2 “about” Freeman’s struggle against the Combine? Is Half-Life 2 “about” the player coming to realize his essential passivity in the face of the game’s inexorable law? I suggested in my introduction that a parable is a story that does not communicate directly: it cannot tell its story “straight.” A parable, in other words, always holds its listener, perhaps even those who are “in the know,” at a kind of distance from its fully realized truth. The questions I have just posed about Half-Life 2, specifically in its relation to the player’s relation, grammatical and thus ontological (“whose story is this?”) to the avatar, suggest precisely this structure of ambiguity. The game, at one level, seems immediately to have interpellated the player into the position of Freeman; and yet, crucially, a distance rises when we begin to realize that this interpellated position speaks not only to the experience of playing this game, Half-Life 2, but allegorically to the player’s relation to both the governing laws of the game’s theme (the player now subject to the tyranny of the Combine) and to the larger structures of game discourse generally: Half-Life 2, in this sense, is both allegory and parable of the player’s relation to gaming itself. Becoming posthuman thus, insofar as this condition is thematized in Half-Life 2, must now involve the player’s awareness that posthumanism, as instantiated within the world of the digital game, is a conferred position as much as it is a voluntary, and desired, position of extension and possibility. BioShock: The Illusion of Freedom

After loading BioShock (2007) and arriving at the Start screen, the player is shown an extended cutscene which essentially offers a preview of the gameplay and narrative to come. BioShock takes place in an underwater city, called Rapture, built by Andrew Ryan and modeled on Objectivist philosophical grounds (Andrew Ryan’s name is obviously meant to invoke that of Ayn Rand). Ryan has envisioned a perfect society where humanity’s physical limitations could be ameliorated through bioengineering and other psycho-genetic operations. The city apparently flourished for a 43

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period but was, in the end, “betrayed by the weak,” as Ryan says in his opening monologue. In BioShock you play as Jack (again, what an odd phrase, to play as) whose plane has crashed into the mid-Atlantic and who has found himself in Rapture desperately trying to survive against an onslaught of surgically mutilated inhabitants and biogenetically enhanced Big Daddies (psychologically damaged yet physically enhanced men in diving suits). Part of the appeal of the game is its attempt to introduce a morality system into the gameplay: you can choose, at points in the game, to kill innocent children to extract a mutagen that enhances your abilities (you are able to control electricity through your hands; shoot bees from your limbs; freeze or burn the environment, again with your hands), or you can choose to let the children live (and be given a smaller amount of the same mutagen). The game, thus, is attempting to instill the idea of choice. This theme of choice, in fact, is sounded even before the game proper begins. In Ryan’s opening monologue we hear: “A man has a choice. I chose the impossible. I built a city where the artist would not fear the censor and the great would not be constrained by the small. Where the scientist would not be bound by petty morality. I chose to build Rapture. But my city was betrayed by the weak. So I ask you, my friend, if your life was prized would you kill the innocent? Would you sacrifice your humanity? We all make choices, but in the end our choices make us.” Ryan is of course Jack’s main antagonist in the game (Ryan believes Jack has come from the surface to further disrupt his utopia) and throughout the game Ryan will address Jack with similar pronouncements (or Jack will come across voice recordings of Ryan’s propaganda). I am interested in this opening monologue because it stands, again, as a complex moment of player-avatar interpellation. The game skillfully, one might almost say insidiously, conflates the player’s and the avatar’s subject positions: Jack’s major moral “choices” in the game—to kill the children or to let them live—are of course my own; moreover, when Ryan variously addresses Jack, he is also of course addressing me. When, for instance, in the opening monologue, Ryan uses the phrase, “my friend,” he is addressing Jack diegetically (that is, within the narrative of the game), but he is also hailing, interpellating, the player as he prepares to venture into this world. There are of course some complications that follow from Ryan’s—and the game’s—figuration of “choice” as the choice between killing a child and not killing a child: is this really the extent of the possibility of ethics? Moreover, 44

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the choice either to kill or not kill is not a real one given that the narrative has inevitably, inexorably, led the player to this point: there is no way of avoiding the event of choice as such. Half-Life 2 is, I would argue, explicitly about the totalitarian nature of gaming: its opening scene makes it quite clear that as you enter the game, as Freeman enters City 17, there is no possibility of choice at all. BioShock, at first glance, would seem to be operating in a kind of philosophical bad faith even as it interpellates the player into a world he knows needs to be resisted. That is, it is clear that Ryan’s world is a corrupt and corrupting one, and the real ethical choice in the game is to annihilate him. But, of course, this being an unavoidable scripted event it is not a real choice at all. The way the game ethically disavows Ryan’s utopian vision—of genetically enhancing humans—and yet fetishes that very process by making posthuman extensions and powers the precise condition of the player’s surviving the events of the game (for Jack, diegetically) and, in fact, beating the game (for me, as the player) is crucial and complicated. To win this game means that the player needs to master the very technologies the game, ethically, is disavowing. Thus to assume the role of Jack is to step into a space of deep contradiction. Diegetically BioShock disavows the idea of the posthuman; indeed the horrific remainders of the medical experiments who make up the bulk of your enemies, the so-called “Splicers,” stand as acute, and discomfiting testimony to the terror of the entry into the posthuman. And yet the game mobilizes the player’s desire to become posthuman in order to critique that very desire. This contradiction—or is it a canny critique of our very desire?—gives the game its true ethical resonance (the idea of “choice” is merely a sophomoric lure). This contradiction also lends the game its peculiarly uncanny feeling: the player knows that the exhilarations he feels is ethically compromised and yet the drive of the game—the drive that instills the player’s own desire to continue—dictates that this ethical compromise be ignored, repressed, or effaced entirely. The avatar Jack, in other words, is a complex site of ethical questions, questions that are not merely intrinsic to the game’s own narrative: BioShock, like Half-Life 2, is a game that addresses the fundamental ethics behind the fantasy of assuming the posthuman position. This is all perhaps to say that part of the uncanniness of playing these games arises from the way in which the experience of gaming, as such, 45

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becomes a part of the thematics of the game: there is always a metatextual element in the experience of the game. I have been emphasizing that part of the uncanny effect of the avatar-player relation comes from our realization that the avatar is a rhizomatic confluence of sources. It is given to us by the game makers, yet we seem to have some control over the avatar, and the avatar itself seems to have, thus, a strange life of its own, the sense that it comes to us from elsewhere, and responds to our immediate control. This familiarity/unfamiliarity effect is already enough to mark the avatar-player relationship as uncanny. But as I have been trying to articulate in my readings of Half-Life 2 and BioShock, games often, intentionally or not, offer what appear to be metatextual commentary on the implications of gaming. One possible effect of this is to remove the player from the immediately immersive quality of play: if the game begins to reflect on itself after the manner of Brecht’s Verfremdungseffekt,16 the player is made to stand apart from the game, to see his relation to the game in an alienated fashion. The game, not only the player-avatar relationship, thus assumes another order of uncanniness, where ideology, politics, and intention, are all highlighted: the game becomes more than simply a game. It is at this moment of alienation that our strongest desires to become the posthuman are cast into a strange relief. BioShock thus stands, in my terms, as an explicit parable of the posthuman. It is, at one obvious level, a story of becoming the posthuman: it explicitly thematizes the transformation of an ordinary human into something quite extraordinary. And, of course, just as Jack becomes other than he was, so too does the player: as the player’s narrative point of view merges with that of Jack the condition of becoming extraordinary, the condition I call posthuman, is conferred onto him. A narrative becomes a parable, in the sense I am using the term here, when the narrative, in this case the story of Jack in Rapture, no longer is merely “about” itself: when the narrative points beyond itself to enfold the player in the identical condition of being as its character, a parabolic narrative emerges. And of course what is important in the case of the parable that emerges out of our play with BioShock is the critical way the parable critiques the desires of the player. As I suggested in my introduction, a parable, again in the sense I am using the term, is essentially a doubly-inflected story: it communicates an obvious message but the true message is a disguised, even a secret one. My question for a reading 46

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of BioShock is quite simple: what is the true narrative being told here? Is this simply the story of Jack, becoming posthuman, fighting and defeating evil, or is the game’s real, hidden narrative its implicit (but explicit for those who have eyes to see) critique of the desire to become more than simply human? From a theological point of view—that is, from an understanding of how, say, Christ’s parables are intended to function—the true narrative is the hidden one and thus the true narrative of BioShock emerges out of its critique of posthuman desire. But who is to decide what story to “play” here in our experience of BioShock? Is it true to suggest that the game’s radical critique of its own thematization of posthuman power is the true narrative? Or do we need to suggest that something like a third narrative emerges here, not merely the explicit story of Jack and not merely the game’s critique of the player’s desire but a narrative that encompasses both poles of fetishistic delight and critique? BioShock’s uncertainty about its own exploration of becoming posthuman—it both fetishizes and disavows the desire to become other—must be seen, I would suggest, as the true parabolic narrative here. This ambivalence, perhaps like the ambivalence that attends the apprehension of any parable, charges the game with a precise sense of unreadability: we cannot, finally, decide how to read the game because the game itself, in its metatextual commentary, cannot decide how it stands towards it own major theme. A parable, as I suggest, is ultimately a narrative that is structured around an unknowability and this unknowability—we can call this a narrative’s secrecy to itself—is in no small measure accountable for the game’s uncanny lure. Metal Gear Solid: Alienation and the Interior Life of the Avatar

I will, in what follows, offer meditations on the possible implications of the digital game’s commentary on itself, but we should first examine perhaps the most explicit instance of uncanny metatextual commentary on the player-game relationship: Hideo Kojima’s Metal Gear Solid series. If, to ask a question by way of entry, our identification with the avatar is compromised by a game’s self-awareness, how precisely is the player interpellated and situated within the game experience? If, to be more precise, a game is explicitly offering itself as a (possibly negative) commentary on the desire of the gamer, how is she to play? What kind of game intentionally alienates its player? 47

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My suggestion that the opening of Half-Life 2 may contain a conscious political meditation on the link between political interpellation and game interpellation begins in a fairly basic observation about the digital game generally: all digital games, in one way or another, are meditations on or allegories of gaming as such. Many important games are explicit about this: Deus Ex: Invisible War, as I have suggested elsewhere, is a complex meditation on the player’s desire to extend himself in a prosthetic, posthuman way (the player’s desires are mapped onto and mirrored by the fantasies of the avatar who, in his turn, extends his human capacity “into” the posthuman condition).17 The Metal Gear Solid series, to which I now turn, has famously offered multiple—and memorable—scenes which explicitly function in a Brechtian manner, drawing the player’s attention to the fact that he is only ever playing a game. But Hideo Kojima is not simply playing extra-diegetic, cleverly “postmodern,” games with the player. The Metal Gear Solid series is a sustained meditation on the transformation of the human into the (real or virtual) warrior; it has always asked about the relation between the military machine and the political subject who plays games “about” the military machine. The analysis in what follows is my attempt to suggest, again, that the player-avatar relationship can become doubly uncanny when the game begins to reflect not only on its own conditions as game, but folds back and begins to reflect the real world the player himself inhabits while gaming. The Metal Gear Solid series is a third-person action, stealth game: the player controls the actions of an on-screen character, a variant on a character named Solid Snake. The story of the Metal Gear Solid series—and the five canonical games released to this point comprise one massive narrative arc taking place in an alternate (yet uncannily similar) version of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries—is perhaps the most complicated and convoluted in gaming history. The overarching narrative, one that comes to a tentative, ambivalent conclusion in Metal Gear Solid 4, concerns vast worldwide conspiracies controlling and implementing what the game calls the “war economy.” At the start of the series, representatives of the major world powers—the United States, China, and Russia—acting without official sanction from their governments, came together to form a shadowy group called The Philosophers (this takes place in 1900). The group created a vast store of wealth called The Philosopher’s Legacy, the sole purpose of 48

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which was to fund the prevention of war. Of course this (perhaps) noble ideal was perverted as various factions within (and without) the group seize control of The Philosopher’s Legacy. All the games in the series feature a character attempting to prevent some global catastrophe, catastrophes relating tangentially or directly from the actions of a splinter group of The Philosophers, The Patriots, that has wrested control of this initial monetary—and philosophical—legacy. Over the course of the series it is revealed that behind every major world event, indeed every conspiracy behind every world event, stand The Patriots, manipulating and directing all the action. In Metal Gear,18 which takes place in 1995, your character, Solid Snake,19 works to infiltrate a military installation (Outer Heaven) in South Africa to prevent the threat posed by a new military weapon, the titular Metal Gear. Metal Gear 2: Solid Snake,20 which takes place in 1999, sees Solid Snake attempting, again, to infiltrate a military base (somewhere in Central Asia) to rescue a scientist whose discovery (a form of cheaply produced petroleum-based hydrocarbon) poses a threat to the world war economy. In Metal Gear Solid,21 which takes place in 2005, Solid Snake must infiltrate another military base (this time on a remote island off the coast of Alaska) to prevent a rebel group—led by Solid Snake’s clone, Liquid Snake—from seizing control of nuclear weaponry. Metal Gear Solid 2: Sons of Liberty22 takes place two years after Metal Gear Solid and sees Solid, teamed with another operative, Raiden, attempting to prevent the implementation of another Metal Gear weapon on a ship off Manhattan. Metal Gear Solid 3: Snake Eater23 takes place in 1964 and sees a new character, Naked Snake (the source from whom Solid Snake and Liquid are cloned), attempting to prevent agents working for the Soviet Union (under the mastery of one Colonel Volgin, who is in possession of The Philosopher’s Legacy) from unleashing a nuclear war: Volgin’s actions threaten the doctrine of Mutually Assured Destruction and thus he must be stopped. Metal Gear Solid: Peacewalker24 continues the narrative of Naked Snake—soon to be called Big Boss—as he consolidates and constructs his own mercenary force. Metal Gear Solid 4: Guns of the Patriots25 takes place in 2014 and sees Solid Snake, now severely aged26 and called “Old Snake,” revisiting some of the major geographical locations of the previous games—the game in fact reproduces these locations at times identically, and thus uncannily, to those depicted in the previous games—in order to prevent his nemesis, 49

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Liquid Ocelot from gaining control of an Artificial Intelligence system that, through nanotechnology, controls the actions of all soldiers working for the world’s five major Private Military Companies. Ocelot has also, it seems, gained access to the genetic code and biometric data (and perhaps consciousness) of Solid Snake’s clone father, Naked Snake, now named Big Boss. If Ocelot is allowed to combine his control of all PMCs with his control of the consciousness of the world’s greatest warrior—Big Boss—then all will be lost. Solid Snake, needless to say, works to prevent this from happening and succeeds, eventually, in defeating his clone. The Metal Gear Solid series is at once deeply engrossing and deeply alienating, in the Brechtian sense: we pursue the game for its narrative, its semiotic density—and quixoticness—but the player can never fully claim to be immersed in the game as such. Part of the essential semiotic structure of the games is the consistent self-awareness of the game. There are several methods by which Kojima pursues this self-referentiality. A central method is the foregrounding of the game camera’s role.27 In Metal Gear Solid 4, Kojima does this in a number of ways: first, we never forget that a camera—precisely, a simulacrum of a camera—is firmly in place, tracking Snake’s progress though the game; the camera is as much a character in this game as Snake. At various points in the game, and in various environments, the camera will be foregrounded as such: water will spray onto the “lens” as vehicles roar through rainy streets; snow will adhere to the “lens” as Snake tracks through Alaskan wilderness; dirt and dust will obscure the “lens” as Snake moves through a Middle Eastern town. If the player shifts the camera to the sun, the lens will flare as a real camera would do28; as explosives detonate around Snake, the camera will shake, reflecting the kineticism of the event. At one particularly exciting moment in Metal Gear Solid 4—as Snake is a passenger on a motorcycle escaping from numerous armed foes—the camera moves into slow motion as Snake aims and fires. These examples work similarly to Kojima’s laying clear the fabricated nature of his game: indeed, this self-consciousness functions as another kind of Brechtian alienation effect, distancing the player from the action, alerting him to the fabricated nature of this experience. It is at some level a convention in gaming for the camera’s presence to be signaled, but 50

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Metal Gear Solid 4: Self-conscious play. Kojima makes a concerted effort never to allow the player to forget what is occurring before her, that her experience is not some kind of seamless rendering of the real, some perfect and perfectly immersive experience in another world: we are continually reminded—and intentionally so—that we are always playing. My sense is that Kojima’s remediation of what are essentially filmic techniques here is simply another strategy by which to keep the artifice of the experience foregrounded, a means of controlling the discourse of the experience.29 Our question now becomes: why is Kojima foregrounding gameplay as gameplay? What is the effect of remediating a prior form in order to distance our immersion in the game? Two examples from the Metal Gear canon will illustrate Kojima’s purpose here. Both of these examples occur in cutscenes and both are part of extended dialogues between a character (Raiden in the first, Snake in the second) and some figure of authority. My first example comes from Metal Gear Solid 2: Sons of Liberty. In this game the player plays for the most part as Raiden, a young, mysterious recruit sent to infiltrate what appears to be an environmental cleanup rig in order to rescue hostages (including the President of the United States) being held by a terrorist organization. At one point in the game, Raiden encounters a character named Iroquois Pliskin (Pliskin turns out to be Snake who was thought to have died two years previously).30 Pliskin, a 51

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Metal Gear Solid: Play as critique of play. rough and clearly experienced military figure, questions Raiden’s experience in battle. The following dialogue ensures: Raiden: I was part of the Army’s Force XX1 trails.

Snake: Force XXI? That’s about tactical IT deployment, right? Any field experience? R: No . . . not really. S: So this is your first. R: I’ve had extensive training, the kind that’s indistinguishable

from the real thing. S: Like what? R: Sneaking Mission 60. Weapons 80. Advanced. S: VR, huh? R: But realistic in every way. S: A virtual grunt of the digital age. That’s just great. R: That’s far more effective than live exercises. S: You don’t get injured in VR, do you? Every year a few soldiers die in field exercises.

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R: There’s pain sensation in VR and even a sense of reality and

urgency. The only difference is that it isn’t actually happening. S: That’s the way they want you to think, to remove you from the fear that goes with battle situations. War as a video game. What better way to raise the ultimate soldier.

This exchange plays out under images of what we first presume is a flashback to Raiden’s VR training. But we soon notice something rather more interesting: the VR training is represented as a video game, a game whose graphics and gameplay mirror that of Metal Gear Solid 2: Sons of Liberty. And as we watch carefully, we notice that the figure onscreen playing out the VR missions is not Raiden, but Snake. Snake’s wry commentary ends with a representation of hundreds of virtual soldiers—all resembling Snake himself—marching, as it were, to war. Kojima’s commentary, selfreflexive, perhaps in some ways typically postmodern, is clear: the medium he exploits to offer commentary on the negative militarism inherent in global politics is the same medium creating that militarism in the first place. In some ways, Kojima seems to suggest, this game is training his fans to become the very thing he critiques. What appears to be a similar critique of the medium of gaming occurs in Metal Gear Solid 4. At this point in the game Snake meets up with Big Mama (it turns out that she is the surrogate mother of the clone Snake: she thus is his Mother in some sense even if he was not created from her egg31). Big Mama, in a cutscene, has explained a great deal about the nature of the global military context, including the reasons why PMCs have risen to such prominence in modern warfare. She then moves to offer this commentary on these PMC soldiers: All of these children were orphans. They work in arms factories. And when they grow up they want to join a PMC. They seek revenge on other companies. PMCs that killed their parents and use their earnings to support their younger siblings. There are countless child soldiers like these in the PMCs. Nowadays, anyone with a computer can get combat training. The FPS games these children love are distributed for free by these companies. Of course it’s all just virtual training. It’s so easy 53

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for them to get absorbed by these war games. And before they know it they’re in the PMCs holding real guns. These kids end up fighting in proxy wars that have nothing to do with their own lives. They think it’s cool to fight like this. They think that combat is life. They don’t need a reason to fight. After all for them it’s only a game. At first this commentary appears to be identical to that of Snake: gaming is blamed for seducing and training the young for warfare. But we need to pay careful attention here because there are differences. First, this scene does not, in contrast to that in MGS2, play out under images of Metal Gear games. Indeed, Big Mama is explicit about what kind of game provides the perfect training for the young soldiers: the First-Person Shooter (FPS). The Metal Gear Solid series is not an FPS series (though you can click the camera into first-person view at times): it is, as mentioned in my introduction, a third-person stealth game. Indeed, as Big Mama mentions the FPS, an icon for the X button appears: if this button is pressed, a brief flash of a typical FPS game appears. To my eyes this flash appears to be a reproduction of gameplay from the latest iteration of the Call of Duty series, Call of Duty 4, a game renowned for its intense simulation of modern warfare. Now, I do not wish to propose that Kojima is suggesting that only an FPS game provides the training necessary for the young soldier; indeed this idea would negate his own commentary from MGS2. But it is clear that Kojima is offering a critique of the FPS as being primarily a war simulator, as indeed it is. What I am more interested in thinking about is the fact that Kojima’s commentary plays out against a cutscene that works to imitate film, rather than gameplay, as in his previous game. It seems to me that Kojima’s remediation of film speaks to his desire for that prior medium, film, to be the naturalized—non-contradictory—space for offering his overt political commentary. While Big Mama is speaking, Kojima does nothing to alert us to the fact that we are watching: there are no postmodern distancing effects here. Her commentary is serious, her critique naturalized. Kojima here finds a space—the remediated space of film— in which to offer his commentary, a space, unlike that of MGS2, which does not collapse under the weight of its own investment in the political reality of the world. That is to say, film is not, MGS4 seems to suggest, 54

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the space where young soldiers are trained. Hence, perhaps, the predominance of filmic convention throughout all aspects of this game. Hybridity becomes a political means by which Kojima prevents his medium from being folded into the geo-politics of the day; hybridity is a means, more strongly, by which to prevent his players from being interpellated into the political machinery of war. In this sense this crucial scene (and MGS4 as a whole) works as a retroactive commentary on all the previous Metal Gear games: here, in this fourth installment, Kojima has succeeded in moving his game, despite its obvious fetishization of war, of the weaponry and machinery of war, away from being a root cause of war and into being a full—and ethically alienated, distanced—commentary upon war. And yet, for all Kojima’s attempts to remediate filmic techniques and thus allow his game to become something more than simply a digital game, the cutscene with Big Mama is in fact a repudiation of the gaming industry’s most profitable game genre, the FPS. Despite his attempt to allow his games to function metacritically as commentaries on the desire to game, the desire for violence, his game series as a whole is perhaps the most complex, semiotically dense, fetishization of violence in the gaming canon. And this fetishization is accomplished, in no small part, precisely by compelling the player to identify and sympathize with the very character, Snake, from whom the game’s self-referential gestures consistently attempt to alienate the player. It is a very curious effect indeed: the game tries consistently, repeatedly, to alienate the player and yet we still feel— perhaps I should admit that I feel—that Snake is one of the most perfectly realized, convincing characters in gaming history. Indeed, and I run the risk of sentimentalizing here, the Metal Gear Solid series is the only game series that I can claim has moved me on a purely emotional level. There is a moment at the end of Metal Gear Solid 4 when all the major characters are gathered for a wedding celebration, when Snake’s closest friend, Otacon, is asked by a young girl, Sunny, as to Snake’s whereabouts (we at this point do not know what has happened to him; he may have committed suicide), Otacon prevaricates (not wanting to disturb Sunny) and suggests he is recuperating elsewhere: Otacon then adds, “Snake had a hard life.” This moment, for reasons to do with my own massive emotional investment in the series, struck me (and continues to strike me) as terribly sad and at that moment I realized that Snake had achieved for me something truly 55

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compelling: he had become as real a character as, for instance, Leopold Bloom or Clarissa Dalloway. My analysis of this gaming moment is intended to suggest that Kojima’s attempts to render his games uncanny by alienating the viewer from full identification seems simply not to have worked. It may be that we learn to accommodate the various techniques of viewer distancing: they become conventions that we ignore in our desire to return to the narrative or the gameplay. But I wonder if in fact Kojima’s wonderfully byzantine narrative—one that spans decades, one that sees our hero undergo massive hardship (including torture) and deeply compromised triumph— despite its being consistently alienated, succeeds in convincing the player, despite its own best attempts, of his or her essential connection to the character-avatar, Snake. And, as such, precisely as we identify and sympathize with Snake, and despite the fact that the series seems to wish to disavow the logic and economy of war, the game, like BioShock, winds up fetishizing the very things it seems to wish to disavow: violence, weaponry, and destruction. Because, as is true for our playing of BioShock, for us to complete Snake’s narrative, to discover the narrative minutiae that lends the game series its densely semiotic frisson, we must learn to master the techniques of violence, must learn to distinguish between enemy types and weapon capability: we must, in other words, allow ourselves to be fully interpellated by a pacifistic, yet uncommonly violent, ideology. I have meditated at some length on the Metal Gear Solid series because it does demonstrate, in complex yet quite stark ways, the nature of the player-avatar relationship, and, more precisely, the uncanniness that grounds that relationship. The avatar, Snake, is one of the most densely mediated avatars in game history: he has a fully fleshed-out backstory; his motivations are clear (this is even to say: he has motivations); his desires are clear; his traumas and his own psychology are fully articulated. The gamer is given this information—or will know of this information—prior to the game proper (we come to Metal Gear Solid 4, for instance, seeing the visible effects of Snake’s past marked on his body: he is drastically aged and survival has become acutely difficult for him). Snake thus is not simply a blank slate upon which we project our desires (as, for instance, we can do in Half-Life 2, where Freeman says not a word and whose psychology is a manifest mystery). Snake is, in other words, decidedly not 56

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me, and yet, as I have been saying, he is me in that he responds to my controls, my directions, and so on. This is all to say that Snake is perhaps the best example of the rhizomatic nature of the avatar given the strong links to his creator proper, given the game’s consistent attempts to remind us of its essential constructedness, that is, that it comes to us from other sources.32 Snake exists in a densely liminal space between the game company, its creator and director (Kojima), and the player: and yet we identify and sympathize with him. And this is a curious subject position for the gamer to inhabit, is it not? Both to identify and sympathize with: Snake is both us and yet distant enough that we can have emotional responses to his sufferings (witness my reaction to his having had a “hard life”). It is in this space of identification and sympathy that the game truly enacts and instantiates its uncanniness. When I identify with Snake as he moves through the jungle in an extended boss battle, for instance, I am at home in this world: in the guise of the avatar, I become accustomed to this world’s logics, to the way the world affects me (indeed, if I did not, I would be quickly killed). And yet, at various alienated moments, or moments of emotional sympathy, the game succeeds in distancing me enough to feel as if this is “only” a story occurring to another, but a story real enough to evoke a response. This may sound like a contradiction: that sympathy with a character distances me from the game; but in the case of the gaming character, this sympathy, which convinces me of Snake’s having achieved something like an interior life—that he is human enough to have and evoke emotional responses—is uncanny enough to provoke critical thus distancing effects. Because to ascribe an interiority to a digital creation, to suggest that Snake, for instance, has achieved something like a subject position, seems patently absurd in the face of things. Clearly the avatar is only a digital representation—it cannot rise to the status of the human (or indeed the posthuman)—but, as I have been at some pains to suggest, the avatar is a curious site where, we can at least say, traces of subjectivities are found, where traces of subjectivities meet and, for a moment, within the limits and boundaries of imposed narrative and technology, commingle. And precisely because I have some measure of control (which may always already simply be an illusion of control) I seem to have instantiated something of myself elsewhere: in gaming, in other words, action at a distance becomes something like inscribing subjectivity at a distance. 57

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This idea—subjectivity at a distance—of course evokes the idea and resonant image of the prosthesis: and thus, I turn now to a consideration of gaming as an instantiation of what I call the prosthetic sublime. The Prosthetic Sublime

Perhaps the experience of gaming is always already a bodily one. By this I mean to suggest that we enter the world, as we enter the game, as a body, as the avatar. But here, in the real world, as it were, we are still embodied, we still see what is before us, and we still receive sensory impressions from sight, hearing, and touch (if our controller has a rumble function). Our body, of course, is the way we make sense of the world. It is the seat of being-in-the-world, as Merleau-Ponty has it: “I cannot understand the function of the living body except by enacting it myself, and except in so far as I am a body which rises towards the world” (75). I do not, of course, mean to suggest that gaming is a way of coming to know the body (that is another book entirely), but I am concerned to explore the implications of the idea that gaming is a kind of enactment of a certain kind of bodily experience, one that I am calling the experience of the posthuman. But the question arises: what body is rising toward the world here? I asked a question about narrative in my exploration of the avatar as such: whose story is this? A related question now must be, whose body is this? Can we speak of the avatar as a body? Should we speak of the player-avatar as a dyad comprising a single bodily experience? I am, in what follows, going to take this second tack and assume, as a kind of extended thought experiment, that the dyadic player-avatar relationship comprises a bodily experience that involves me, here, in the real, and me, there, in the virtual. This is perhaps simply to say that gaming involves a sense of the gaming body as a radically dialectical one; we shift from there to here in perhaps imperceptible ways, but the shifting does occur. Merleau-Ponty in fact speaks of the body, as such, as being dyadic or dialectical: “our body comprises as it were two distinct layers, that of the habit-body and that of the body at this moment” (82). Is it possible for us to use this idea, the habit-body and the body at this moment, as an emblem of the player-avatar relationship? Because surely when I am gaming—am truly in the game—I am not conscious of my body as such: my manipulations of buttons, for instance, are automatic. What is meaningful, as an experience, is not my body in 58

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the real, but my sense of extension into the body onscreen, what I will call, after Merleau-Ponty, the “body at this moment.” I like Merleau-Ponty’s phrase because it does raise an issue to which I will return, but needs re-emphasizing now: this posthuman experience of bodily extension is a temporal experience as much as it is spatial. And while the sense of space is crucial to my definition of what it means to be posthuman, it is critical to notice that extension into the sublime posthuman is a temporally limited one. The phrase “at this moment” implies differing shades of experience within differing temporal moments; it also implies that the experience of the body may involve differing experiences of the body as such, does it not? The body at this moment is, perhaps, not quite the same thing (or experience) as the body at that moment, or the moment to come. This is all to say that Merleau-Ponty’s sense of the dialectical body is a useful model for understanding not only what it means to be in the real phenomenal world, but also for the relationship between the real and the virtual, which involves differing stages of becoming: the dialectical relationship between player and avatar—one that involves exchanges of states of subjectivity— is one that, materially, initiates the exchange of states of perception. The question I wish to begin exploring now is how this dyadic relationship is instantiated, how the body at this moment comes into being. We might, to begin, take Merleau-Ponty’s notion of the body at this moment and place it in dialogue with Marshall McLuhan’s idea of the extended body. In the fourth chapter of Understanding Media, McLuhan posits that humankind devised—and continues to devise—technological advancements as a way of overcoming the stresses or irritants that continually threaten our equanimity. Prosthetic extension, in other words, is a way of overcoming our inherent physical limitations and, precisely, protecting these very same limitations. If we subject McLuhan’s reading of the development of technology, and the prosthesis, to a mild psychoanalytical reading, we could say that technology—as prosthesis—disavows its own fundamental premise. Technological extensions, moreover, tend to act as mirrors of the human: “With the arrival of electric technology man extended, or set outside of himself, a live model of the central nervous system” (43). All prosthetic extensions, thus, are essentially narcissistic projections, models, of the human body: “to listen to radio or to read the printed page is to accept these extensions of ourselves into our 59

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personal system and to undergo the ‘closure’ or displacement of perception that follows automatically” (46). This process of narcissistic extension is, for McLuhan, not necessarily a good thing (but it may simply be an inevitability); he speaks of the process as a kind of “auto-amputation” whereby the human sustains the threat of external stimuli by creating versions of itself outside of itself. McLuhan, here, is startlingly prescient: “Physiologically, man in the normal use of technology (or his variously extended body) is perpetually modified by it and in turn finds ever new ways of modifying his technology. Man becomes, as it were, the sex organs of the machine world, as the bee of the plant world, enabling it to fecundate and to evolve ever new forms” (46). I take McLuhan here as providing an early, and crucial, articulation of the posthuman position; because this idea of the technologically extended human, the narcissistically extended human, is one that suggests that a new order of being is instantiated even as the subject becomes this auto-amputated figure. Of course, I am choosing here to ignore the fact that for McLuhan the human, precisely as it has always manipulated technology for narcissistic means, has always already been an extension; to be human, for McLuhan, is precisely to extend ourselves in responses to external threat. But this idea does not mean that a new order of being comes about with, for instance, the invention of the wheel (one of his examples). I am taking McLuhan past where he, perhaps, would go by suggesting that his model of the extended human, as it plays out in the age of digital technologies, does instantiate a new kind of being. Because the avatar, which I have to this point been describing as uncanny, is, more precisely, a narcissistic projection of the player’s desires. In some ways the avatar is a live model of the central nervous system of the player insofar as it mirrors and mimics the physiological responses of the player; and while I would not figure the instantiation of the avatar as a kind of auto-amputation, I am willing to accept that a “displacement of perception” occurs precisely as I engage with the avatar, its limits, but also its sublime possibilities. We may here usefully recall Gadamer’s notion of being in play, as articulated in Truth and Method. Recall that for Gadamer play, one of the grounding features of what it means to be human, one of the grounding features thus, of being as such, only functions at and as the site of the disappearance of the human, his subjectivity, his sense of being in the 60

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world. In some ways the assumption of the avatar’s position, the fact of becoming the avatar, would seem to be the perfect instantiation of play. McLuhan may well figure the extensions of the human as a form of autoamputation; he may figure the displacement of perception that occurs in this extension as placing the human in a perversely passive position viz a viz the very technologies he has created (man becomes the sex organs of the world); but we might, perhaps equally perversely, simply—but what a word—call this play. But I am interested in what may appear to be something of a contradiction or at least a complication of the subject position of the gamer. For Gadamer, the real question about play is not necessarily the experience of the player; for Gadamer what is important in play is play itself: play plays, not the player: “The real subject of the game . . . is not the player but instead the game itself” (106); “[i]t is part of play that the movement is not without goal or purpose but also without effort. It happens, as it were, by itself” (105). If the player is cast back on himself, thrust out of the game—say by distraction or even deliberate mechanisms in the game’s structure (think here of Kojima’s use of various alienation effects)—play itself fails: “Play fulfills its purpose only if the player loses himself in play” (102, emphasis mine). Thus surely if one of the initial effects (and affects) of game play is the player’s sense of extension and power—and I will explore specific instances of games that provide this sense—either we must argue, if we follow the Gadamerian line, that digital gameplay (at times) fails (and thus is not, strictly speaking, play), or that gaming is not “about” play but is about the player: for his affective position, his subjective position, seems, at one level, to be the major focus of the digital game. A strict Gadamerian reading of digital play would not focus on the presence of the player, but precisely, its absence. And this perhaps is to lose sight of the manifest complexities of our major site of interest here: the player-avatar relationship. For surely the affect of power that arises in the player, in the experiential zones of the player’s body, also arises within a dialectic between his body and the onscreen body of the avatar. But I do think that Gadamer’s hermeneutics—if not, strictly speaking, his play theory—does provide a critical model of understanding what it means to play, what it means to extend oneself into play, what it means to experience the event of transformation that is play. And while we might 61

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appear here to be moving rather far afield from our discussion of posthuman extension, a detour into Gadamer’s phenomenological hermeneutics and his analysis of dialogue may provide the means by which to theorize the dialectical relationship between player and game I am suggesting is central to our understanding of the prosthetic sublime. Briefly, Gadamer argues that in the process of interpreting—and he does mean the event of interpretation that arises in the subject/text encounter or the conversational encounter between two people—is, precisely, dialectical. In the reader-text encounter meaning, as such, is not located “in” the book, or only “in” the reader’s critical engagement (that is, in his mind), but meaning emerges as an event between the text and reader; meaning emerges out of what Gadamer calls the hermeneutical encounter, the hermeneutical conversation: Thus it is perfectly legitimate to speak of a hermeneutical conversation. But from this it follows that hermeneutical conversation, like real conversation, finds a common language, and that finding a common language is not, any more than in real conversation, preparing a tool for the purpose of reaching understanding but, rather, coincides with the very act of understanding and reaching agreement. (388) Our first point is that language in which something comes to speak is not a possession at the disposal of one or the other of the interlocutors. Every conversation presupposes a common language, or better, creates a common language. Something is placed in the center, as the Greeks say, which the partners in dialogue both share, and concerning which they can exchange ideas with one another. (378, emphasis mine) I wish to suggest that Gadamer’s model of the event of meaning is one that can be transposed to the player-game relationship. It is especially the ideas of finding a common language and of something being placed in the center that intrigue me because, without doing too much damage to the Gadamerian model of understanding, we can quite easily imagine that the avatar stands in the center of the rhizomatic web that imbricates both 62

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player and game, as a whole. It is the avatar that is the common language of the game and the player, its lingua franca; it is the avatar that is initially placed in the center and with which the player joins in forming the various meaning that emerge in the game experience. The player-avatar relationship is what we might call a local, discrete site of the emergence of meaning: it is a mis-en-abyme of the player-game relationship as a whole. And perhaps after all in some senses Gadamer’s model of successful play will still function here: because the meaning of the game—which in some ways is always “about” the event of bodily extension, is always already thus offering itself as a parable of the posthuman—does not simply occur in my body, but is an event that emerges out of my body’s responses to the possibilities given to me by the avatar, who emerges from the various subjectivities that have called it into being. If, for Gadamer, the hermeneutical encounter offers the possibility of meaning emerging between person and person, between reader and text, if that is, meaning is not here or there but between interlocutors, surely this idea applies to the event of meaning that emerges in gaming: the avatar is the medial point between the subjectivity of the player and that of the game, as it were. And this event of the between involves some sense of loss on the player’s part, loss of stability, loss of subjectivity, loss of this world as he enters the world of play. The play world, and Gadamer is correct here, represents something of a (pleasurable) threat to the player’s own identity: “This point shows the importance of defining play as a process that takes place ‘in between.’ We have seen that play does not have its being in the player’s consciousness or attitude, but on the contrary play draws him into its dominion and fills him with its spirit. The player experiences the game as a reality that surpasses him” (109). Indeed, to add one more idea, we can easily imagine that in the experience of play the avatar (as much as the player) stands as an object of some hermeneutical contest between the game proper and the player: my desire to control the avatar is matched by the game’s own (possibly totalitarian) control over the very same entity. A true hermeneutical encounter, as Gadamer does remind us, is always one in which something is contested: “It must be emphasized that language has its true being only in dialogue, in coming to an understanding . . . but human language must be thought of as a special and unique life process since, in linguistic communication, ‘world’ is disclosed. Reaching an understanding 63

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in language places a subject matter before those communicating like a disputed object between them” (446). If we translate Gadamer’s ideas of language and linguistic communication into the syntax, rules, and grammar of the game and posit that all games, as hermeneutical events, are about the emergence of some kind of meaning, some coming to an understanding, and if, as I will explore more fully in my second section, it is possible to suggest that games do unfold “world” in the true philosophical sense, then it is possible to imagine that part of the emergence of meaning in the game experience is in our understanding of what our relationship to the avatar, as an extension both of the player and the game, is.33 It is my suggestion that this relation is governed by an overarching sense, at once unconscious and overt, of what I am calling the prosthetic sublime. The game system as such—not simply the avatar, not simply the individual game—stands as a kind of prosthesis inasmuch as it works to extend my sense of my own bodily limits, even as individual games being played may thematize this extension in the narrative. My sense of bodily extension, and the power that unfolds from this, is mirrored and matched by the very narrative of the game (I think here, for instance, of BioShock, Crysis 2, and Deus Ex: Invisible War). And it is here, in this uncanny mirroring, that some sense of the sublime emerges. My discussion of the sublime looks back to Longinus’s Peri Lupsous where he draws our attention to the effect of the sublime on the subject. He argues that the primary effect—and this is crucial for an understanding of the gamer’s prosthetic experience—is one of “transport”: that is, the subject is transported out of himself. The Greek term for this is ekstasis, ecstasy: to stand outside of oneself. This term is very useful for us here because it allows us to theorize the effect of having one’s subjectivity extended into the gamespace, into other subjectivities. The posthuman player is a sublime creature in the sense that s/he—as a cyborg, and our relationship to the prosthetic technologies of the game system is precisely cyborgian—is taken out of herself, transported out of, if only temporarily, her limited subject position. It is worth emphasizing here that for Longinus the sublime does involve some imminent sense of danger: the ecstasy produced by the sublime (Longinus here is thinking of the sublime effect of the orator’s words) is dangerous precisely because in some sense it is out of the subject’s control (and again we have returned to the idea of control): “For sublimity produces ecstasy rather than persuasion 64

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in the hearer; and the combination of wonder and astonishment always proves superior to the merely persuasive and pleasant. This is because persuasion is on the whole something we can control, whereas amazement and wonder exert invisible power and force and get the better of every hearer” (138). I return, and in some ways this is the critical refrain in this book, to a question I have posed before: In gaming, whose story is being played out? I may now add this: who is playing? Who is being played? As we move into a close examination of the prosthetic sublime, we should keep these questions firmly in mind because an answer, a true answer, does immediately return us to the idea that in the sublime, something is exceeding our grasp. Something is playing us, Gadamer would say. And perhaps it is here that a brief detour into Heidegger and his essay “The Question Concerning Technology” is necessary because, as I wish to argue, the sense of the sublime that is achieved in playing, in being played, can only come about, does only come about, through the interaction with technology. The prosthetic sublime, in other words, is the technological sublime. But what, according to Heidegger, does technology do for the subject, to the subject? As he says, repeatedly throughout the essay, technology is about revealing. Technology is a way of revealing the world: “Technology is therefore no mere means. Technology is a way of revealing. If we give heed to this, then another whole realm for the essence of technology will open itself up to us” (12). But technology’s revealing has a curiously active role: technology, it seems, works to uncover what is hidden about the world: “It reveals whatever does not bring itself forth and does not yet lie here before us” (13). Technology uncovers hidden truths about the world: “technology comes to presence in the realm where revealing and unconcealment take place, where aletheia, truth, happens” (13). However, for Heidegger this truth may not be a positive truth; technology, in his reading, has a purely negative role to play in the world: technology, in its “monstrous” aspect, threatens to reveal the world as only a kind of resource to the human, a resource to be exploited and manipulated. Modern technology, in other words, set itself up in an antagonistic relation to the world. But we need to be more precise: it is not technology itself that is dangerous, but its “essence” (28); technology’s essence, that of revealing the world, is precisely what is dangerous inasmuch as it blinds the human to the real truth of the world, to what Heidegger calls “a more original revealing” (28). 65

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In what follows I simply wish to follow Heidegger’s lead and track a possible way of interpreting his reading of technology as it relates to the experience of gaming, as such. I am interested, specifically, in exploring the idea of technology’s relation to revealing in order to ask this question: what is being revealed in the gaming event? What necessary event of revealing is taking place as the subject begins his encounter with the game? First, and most obviously, this experience—and keep in mind I wish to figure this experience as being one of the sublime—is one mediated by technology. Here I mean the game system: the controller, the console, the screen. Gaming technology, as such, works as part of some revelation to the player. And so, what is being revealed? One response would be: something about play. The technology, one may suggest, works to reveal that to play means, in some radical fashion, to forget about the technology that enables play in the first place. As we play, in Gadamer’s sense, we are in a state of effacement: the subject has disappeared when real play takes place. It is only in those moments when self-consciousness returns, when we realize, “That was an exhilarating moment; this is completely fascinating,” that some kind of awareness of the sense of extension and power occurs. What are the implications of this idea? One is the idea that the return to consciousness instills what we may call a retrospective sense of extension and power: enjoyment, as such, is only there after the fact. When play truly occurs, there is no capacity to experience that enjoyment, to, we might say, enjoy that enjoyment: enjoyment can only come about after. Which is in some odd fashion to suggest that every true moment of gaming enjoyment can only ever be a nostalgic one: the revelation of the truth of gaming enjoyment is nostalgic. Or, in other words, sublime. It is only after the discrete moment of enjoyment that one becomes aware of the technological means by which that moment has occurred. Technology disappears, play occurs, and retrospectively we nostalgically experience that enjoyment. Technology’s truth is the revelation of enjoyment in the space after the event. What therefore is truly sublime about technology in relation to gaming is precisely the sense of ecstasy that Longinus asks us to consider: the disappearance of the subject—more precisely, the disappearance of subjectivity—via technological, prosthetic devices of the game system. The truth of gaming then, one that the truth of technology as such reveals, 66

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is the disappearance of the subject and its subsequent reappearance “in” enjoyment after the event of play. I have to this point been describing the prosthetic sublime in positive terms. The technologies of gaming allow a sense (albeit temporary, and perhaps even retrospective) of liberation from a solitary subjective viewpoint. The extension permitted by the technology of gaming allows, precisely, a sense of extension beyond limited subjectivity into what may be called a rhizomatic or collective subjectivity. I see the gaming system, the technologies of gaming, as instantiating a reformulation of the traditional humanist conception of the subject. In Chaosmosis, Felix Guattari, whose notion of the collective subject is a model for what follows, summarizes the traditional view of the subject he will dismantle in his reading of machinic subjectivity. He suggests that his task is to “decenter the question of the subject onto the question of subjectivity” (22); that is, he will move to critique the humanist view of the singular subject by means of unfolding a view of what he calls a “collective subjectivity,” one articulation of which emerges in the interaction between human and machine. As I say, this emergence of mechanic, pluralized, collective subjectivities is one I have figured thus far as positive inasmuch as the experience of the event of extension, in its sublime mode, seems, in some crucial way, to be a model of enjoyment, as such. In “Catastrophe and Apocalypse” (below) I will attempt to nuance the utopian sense of the sublime by attending to the idea of the game as event of catastrophe—and perhaps what I intend here is to suggest that the sublime always precedes the catastrophe—but for the moment let us examine how some games, some crucial and influential games, thematize the positive, seductive, aspects of the posthuman sublime. BioShock

In The Pervert’s Guide to Cinema, Slavoj ŽiŽek makes a brief comment on the fantasy element of the gaming experience; he suggests, with no reference to any specific game, that the common reading of gaming’s allure—the possibility of inhabiting different spaces of being, the possibility of violating common taboos—is in fact completely wrong. Instead he suggests that gaming’s appeal lies precisely in the fact that the gamespace allows the subject precisely to enter into his true psychic identity: in ŽiŽek’s terms, the subject really is a rapist, a sadist, whose true desires are held in check by a repressive culture. In the game, the subject is allowed to be what she really is: in other words the game 67

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is not some fantasy realization of possibility; the game is the space of the real. “You think it’s just a game?” he asks. “It’s reality.” At first glance ŽiŽek’s ideas might seem to be in direct opposition to my own: I have stated to this point that gaming allows a temporary liberation from the limitations of everyday being; the posthuman fantasy enacted by gaming is precisely that, a fantasy. ŽiŽek’s reading of the experience of gaming, at one level, makes perfect, if counterintuitive, sense: culture and ideology do indeed place restrictions on our behavior; we cannot enact all our desires. The fact that ŽiŽek, however, seems to think that we desire only to be sadists or rapists indicates several things: first, he has not played any games; two, he has not comprehended that gaming is not only about transgressing taboo. That is to say, ŽiŽek seems willfully (and curiously for a materialist) to ignore the role of the body, as such; he does not seem to consider the fact that the space of gaming cannot be the space within which I may realize my real potential as a posthuman subject, one that, to follow his analysis, is being repressed by culture. The fact remains that the human subject has not yet become the posthuman that we see figured in the game and it is precisely this failure to be the fantasy that drives us, melancholically, addictively, back into the space of the game (I will return to this idea at greater length below). But ŽiŽek is right about one thing: games do have an incredible allure, an allure that begins with the body, as such. Because where does the sublime aspect of gaming usually begin? At the level of the body. It is the body’s limitations—by gravity, by biology, physiology, even psychology—that are effaced (in a usually celebratory fashion) in the game. Consider, again, the opening movement of BioShock. You are the survivor of a plane crash in the mid-Atlantic. As you are given control over your avatar your character is quite literally in a position of some helplessness: you are surrounded by flames, the fuselage is sinking, and you must make your way to safety. As you enter a lighthouse (suspiciously located close to the crash site) you are confronted by an enormous bronze bust (this is a representation of Andrew Ryan, your nemesis) under which is a banner reading “No Gods or Kings. Only Man.” This slogan of Ryan’s Objectivist philosophy also stands as a marker of your own particular position here at the beginning of things. At this point in the game you have no special abilities: indeed you are marked by your all-too-human vulnerability. This vulnerability is strategically heightened and narratively exploited as you enter Rapture, the underwater city, via a bathysphere: as you arrive you are set upon by what we come to learn are the 68

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now genetically mutated and mutilated citizens of Rapture. Again your weakness is highlighted as you are compelled to withstand their obviously powerful attacks on the bathysphere; you are unable to act and the claustrophobic atmosphere of the bathysphere serves only to emphasize your isolation. But something curious has occurred during the journey to Rapture: as you travel in your bathysphere a film is shown to you, introduced by Ryan. He offers an overview of his philosophy, but immediately before he subjects you to his propaganda, you are briefly shown a poster, an advertisement for a “plasmid.” At this point in the game the (first-time) player will perhaps not know what these plasmids are, but we subsequently learn that these are genetic tonics (created by Ryan) that give the player the ability to use his body as a weapon. These plasmids will, for instance, allow the player to shoot fire, ice, electricity, or even bees from his hands. As you arrive in the city proper, you are again shown a quick glimpse of a variety of posters for various plasmids (including one for telekinetic ability). The rhetorical and narrative function of these posters is crucial, of course. They stand as the promise of posthuman extension, but at this point in the game these abilities have yet to be given to the player. Their promise only stands to mark the character’s/player’s radical weakness in the face of his attackers. But do they not also function as a generalized comment on the status of the real player in the real world? These posters offer a fantasmatic promise to the actual player who, by becoming the avatar, will experience a kind of temporary realization of the posthuman. But how wonderfully intelligent (or is it cynical?) the game designers are here: the plasmids first appear to your character only rhetorically, as a promise, marked by the fantasmatic rhetoric of the advertisement. Just as the promise of these abilities emphasizes the weakness of your avatar, so too the advertisements emphasize the real player’s all-too-human limitations in this real world. What is particularly brilliant about this opening scene in BioShock is the way the game conflates, narratively and philosophically, the positions of player and avatar: he is weak but will become strong; you are weak but will experience a kind of temporary strength within the fantasy space of the game. But we must keep foregrounded the fact that our first glimpse of the possibility of posthuman extension comes to us in the form of the advertisement (and we will have to pay, in currency, for these abilities); is this not a perfect metatextual comment on the ultimately fantasmatic nature of the posthuman desire as it is realized within gamespace? Moreover, it is crucial 69

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BioShock: Posthuman fantasy.

to note how this rather overt comment on the fantasy nature of posthuman desire is effaced by the practical experience of bodily extension in actual gameplay. That is to say, it is one thing for a game to offer a knowing comment on its own ideological formation; it is quite another to sustain this commentary as the experience of the sublime begins to hold sway. As we enter into the sublime space of the game, and the game experience begins to seduce us into an enjoyment of its prosthetic possibilities, the critique—or 70

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our awareness of the critique—is negated. That is to say, we need to ask about the relation between critique and experience within gameplay: can a game critique the very structural premise of its own fantasy? Within three minutes of arriving at Rapture the player is given the ability to enhance himself; you inject yourself with a plasmid that “rewrites your genetic code”: you now have the ability to shoot electricity from your hands. And, as perhaps is to be expected, you soon are given the opportunity to use this ability, first to charge a malfunctioning door control and, less prosaically, to kill several enemies by electrifying them and finishing them off with a blow from a wrench. Soon you will be presented the opportunity to kill several enemies at once by electrifying water within which a number are standing. This experience is obviously created to give the player the maximum effect of sublime enjoyment; you have just destroyed several people with a single (impossible) blast of electricity from your hand. Given that the opening movement of the game has to this point figured the player in a radically weakened, disoriented position, this moment is the primal scene of sublime enjoyment in the game: you have survived by extraordinary, posthuman means. But, to return to my discussion above, what has happened to the initial critique of the desire for the posthuman that BioShock seems to initiate in its opening? As we annihilate those enemies in the water, are we not in a position of absolute contradiction? We know that this is a fantasy, is in fact figured as fantasy by the logics of advertisements (initiated as we know by what we discover is our primary enemy, Ryan); that is, we know this desire to be posthuman is initially figured as being fantasmatic and that this ultimately serves as a perhaps cynical critique of the fantasy of the player himself, yet our enjoyment persists. And thus my question: is the fantasy of the posthuman one that games always simultaneously critique and fetishize? How can a game critique, sensibly, politically, philosophically, the very grounds of its enjoyment without devolving into incoherent aporia? Perhaps, to anticipate, it cannot avoid this aporia, and it is precisely the aporia of the posthuman— as a desire—that becomes the ultimate parable in the event of gaming. Mass Effect Consider now the opening scenes of BioWare’s Mass Effect (2007). You are John Shepard, Executive Officer in command of the SSV Normandy 71

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en route to Eden Prime, a planet colonized by humans. Humanity is in an uneasy alliance with several alien species after having discovered the means to travel far distances instantaneously; this technology, called “Mass Effect,” has opened the universe to immediate exploration and colonization, leading inevitably, to conflicts between species. Shepard is ordered to Eden Prime to initiate a covert retrieval of a mysterious beacon; this beacon, created by a long-vanished civilization, the Protheans, is thought to contain, or be a blueprint of, technologies that will rapidly advance humanity’s scientific knowledge. Immediately before arriving at Eden Prime a transmission is received showing an attack on the human colonists on Eden Prime: you are thus about to be thrust into an obviously hostile environment. It is worth noting that this information is conveyed to the player in interactive dialogue scenes. In your encounter with your superior office, for instance, the NPC Commander will say something; your character, depending on how you wish to play him, is given several dialogue choices. You can, for instance, reply to your orders with hostility or stoic acquiescence. In a dialogue with an ambiguous ally, Nihlus, you are given the opportunity to react within dialogue in ways that will affect how Nihlus will respond to you. This is all to say that you, the player, are placed within a fairly complicated space, a space, recalling Longinus, that easily can be read as sublime. If the sublime is about standing outside oneself—the sublime being a response to art that takes oneself outside of oneself—these dialogue trees allow a variety of experiences of the sublime. First, as you choose a response, you are essentially creating a dramatic situation: you are, in some limited sense, a creator of the event. Second, the dialogue you choose is spoken by your avatar who is both you and not you. But we need to be clear: this discussion of “choice” is obviously fallacious, or at least massively limited—you are only given a limited amount of choice and, moreover, your dialogue is written for you. Having said this, there is something vertiginously uncanny about this opening moment: you are asked to become a participant in the narrative in ways that, for instance, BioShock will not do. The question must of course become something like this: what is the effect of this moment of the sublime? What is, more precisely, the affect of this effect? 72

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This question, I think, is best answered as we move into the gameplay proper. Mass Effect is, importantly, a third-person RPG shooter. This generic fact needs to be emphasized: as a third-person game, the distance between player and avatar is, as opposed to the first-person shooter, somewhat distanced. You are not, for instance, asked to view the world “through” the avatar’s eyes as you do in Half-Life, or Quake, or Doom 3. You are placed in a position of some objective distance. And yet, for all that, you still are asked to identify with your avatar: you control his movement, his actions, his weaponry. Given, moreover, that this is an RPG, you are asked carefully to manage the economics of your player. You choose his class, his clothing, his armor, his physical appearance, even: you chose how to deploy the various biomodifications that will allow Shepard to, for instance, telekinetically mobilize objects (and enemies) or to create singularities that violently attract and destroy enemies. I think it is the particular achievement of a third-person game like Mass Effect (or Ico, Shadow of the Colossus, or Too Human) to have both distance and proximity as defining features of the relationship between player and avatar because, as we begin to “become” Shepard, all the while seeing him in front of our eyes as a distanced object, surely this is a sublime achievement: by collapsing and yet maintaining distance between myself and my avatar, the game has succeeded, uncannily, in placing me in a split subjective position. Mass Effect, critically, produces this effect through gameplay and its innovative dialogue tree system: in other words, actions and narrative both become markers and sites of the posthuman extension out of myself. Halo 3

What then of the first-person perspective in relation to the idea of the posthuman sublime? If, as I have been suggesting after Longinus, the real effect of the sublime is to take oneself out of oneself, is the first-person perspective afforded by games like Halo a compromised version of the sublime? Consider for instance the opening movement of Halo 3 (2007): as the game begins we are given a cutscene showing the crash landing in eastern Africa of the Master Chief, the protagonist of the game series. The crash and the subsequent recovery of the Master Chief by a group of compatriots is shown to us objectively, in a distanced third-person perspective (we see the Master Chief, for instance). As soon as the Master 73

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Halo: Fantasy screen. Chief’s recovery process is shown, however, the perspective shifts, and the player “becomes” the Master Chief: we now see through his eyes, employ his technologies, move with his body. Recall how Mass Effect, in its employment of the third-person perspective, uncannily places the player in a split subject position: you clearly see that Shepard is not you, but he has become you, or you have become him. Does something similar happen as Halo 3 conflates the third person and the first? Is the Master Chief an emblem of agency without agency, subjectivity without a single subject? As we play through the Halo games the question must arise: who is playing here? Who is being played? The question should be inflected philosophically, phenomenologically: what consciousness is operational in the moment when I take over the perspective of the Master Chief? I will again remind us that of course the Master Chief, as a character created by Bungie, is always defined a priori: he comes to us bearing the traces of his creators. But as I manipulate the controls, and thus “him,” I am asserting my own agency; moreover, given that the Master Chief is notoriously faceless (we are never given a view of his face in the game series: he is always helmeted), the Master Chief becomes something like a blank slate upon which my own desires are etched. We might pause here to consider the Master Chief’s facelessness and contrast it with, for instance, the possibilities of crafting the feature of your avatar in games like Mass Effect or 74

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Fallout 3. We may argue that the ability to create the features of the avatar enfolds the player more fully into the posthuman experience: we create our extensions, are responsible for its physical appearance in this world. And if, as some players do, we create the avatar to resemble ourselves, surely this narcissism works to mark the game as purely an extension of our desires, our written, realized desires. The Master Chief’s face, on the other hand, is never shown to us; moreover, we are never given a chance to shape his features. And yet we become him as we assume control. Is this not, in fact, a more perfect realization of the narcissistic posthuman than Fallout 3 or Mass Effect? Those games, with their limited possibilities for crafting features or hairstyles or skin color, actually set up barriers to a full identification with the game avatar: the created avatar never fully matches our own desires, never quite resembles us in the way we want (this is my experience at any rate). A first-person game like Halo— or indeed the Half-Life series with its faceless and voiceless protagonist Gordon Freeman—a game that withholds the face in order to allow you to project your own subjectivity, succeeds in placing the player in the closest psychological proximity to the agency of the avatar. The posthuman sublime here is achieved at the very moment the perspective shifts from third to first person; as you become what you are not, you are fully enmeshed in the posthuman sublime. Crysis 2

Consider, for example, Crysis 2 (2011). Perhaps on the surface of things Crysis 2 looks like a fairly standard first-person shooter. It deploys most of the common tropes of the genre. You have a variety of weapons to use against the enemy: machine guns, pistols. The enemies, both human and alien, are implacably hostile, demanding increasingly violent responses on your part. The game’s central weapon feature, however, is the socalled Nanosuit, a cybernetically enhanced armor that binds to the subject on a molecular/genetic level. The suit allows your avatar, Alcatraz, to, for instance, withstand gunshots, to leap high or far distances, to render himself practically invisible. It is of course this Nanosuit that signals the game’s interest in the posthuman because this particular technology allows Alcatraz precisely to become the posthuman. Indeed, and this is a central point to which I will return in my discussion of 75

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Crysis 2: Creating the posthuman. the catastrophic posthuman, Alcatraz, at the point of being given the Nanosuit, is so damaged physically as to be on the point of death. The Nanosuit, in other words, keeps him alive: alive enough to become the posthuman, human enough to be the posthuman. And Alcatraz’s acquiring of the Nanosuit in the opening of the game is curious enough to be mentioned here. Alcatraz, along with an elite unit of marines, is deployed into New York in order to extract a scientist, Gould, who may have information on how to combat the aliens who have been plaguing humanity. The extraction goes terribly wrong, of course, and the aliens destroy Alcatraz’s unit’s submarine and kill his companions. Alcatraz is rescued, however, by Laurence “Prophet” Barnes, the protagonist from the first Crysis game. Barnes, who at this point is wearing the Nanosuit, has been tasked with giving the suit to Alcatraz: in order to do so, however, he must kill himself. As the game proper commences—that is, as you assume control of the avatar—you have acquired the suit and you now perceive the world through its first-person perspective: the suit’s Heads Up Display (HUD) becomes the player’s own as he becomes Alcatraz. Alcatraz soon discovers the Prophet’s body and a recording he has left. In it Prophet suggests that Alcatraz now has to take on the responsibility for finding and protecting Gould; more important, however, are Prophet’s words here: 76

Posthuman Subjects Alcatraz: This is all I can do. It’s all I can do for any of us. You’re my last shot here. Gould’s last chance. Last chance for all of us. I’m used up. I’m a dead man walking. I’m . . . I’m terminated. But you, you can finish this thing. You have to. Welcome to the future, son, welcome to the war. Oh yeah, one last wish. They won’t let me go that easily. Symbiosis. Gotta break the link. I gave you the suit. I gave you my life. Promise me: find Gould. It’s all I can do now. You are all I can do. They used to call me Prophet. Remember me.

I am interested in this moment because it is rather complicated in terms of its psychology and in terms of its figuring the entry into the posthuman. For what is this moment of acquiring posthuman technology if not a moment of haunting precisely by the human? I will return to this idea as I conclude this section of my analysis, but it is necessary to note how Crysis 2 figures the entry into the posthuman in terms both of catastrophe and haunting. Prophet’s death signals his divestment of the posthuman and a regaining of his humanity: Alcatraz’s acquiring of the suit signals his entry into the posthuman but note that he is charged, tasked, with the responsibility to remember. He is, in other words, always to be required to keep the very human ethical origins of his posthumanity in mind as he continues his journey. This for me is a finely wrought moment. At one level, in terms of the game’s diegesis, Prophet’s enjoinder to remember tasks Alcatraz, like Hamlet, with the debt of history and memory; at another, at the level of the game’s parable of posthumanity, surely Prophet’s injunction to remember signals both the costs (and burdens) of entering the posthuman and also the impossibility of forgetting the human within the posthuman machine. We recall that a parable essentially functions as a doubly inflected narrative: at one level a story is given that critically functions to disguise the true narrative; those who have eyes to see and ears to hear are able, according to the logic of the parable, to perceive the true message of the parable. In my analysis of BioShock, I suggested that that game allowed itself to be read—perhaps demanded to be read—through this double-narrative structure: at once the game seems to fetishize the desire to exceed the limits of the mere human and to critique that very desire. As I argued, perhaps a third narrative, or message, 77

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emerges in our reading of BioShock: a radical ambivalence about the tension between fetishized posthuman extension and the critique of that fetishized desire. Crysis 2 would seem to operating at this level of parabolic complexity as well. Surely the game’s hyperrealistic immersive qualities signal all the fetishistic delights of extending beyond normal human limitations: the Nanosuit here becomes the means by which the posthuman event is realized. And yet, at the very same moment, the Nanosuit only preserves the very delicate, all-too-human material weakness of the posthuman subject. Parabolically, in other words, the Nanosuit functions to signal extratextually (extraludically) that there is always a very human remainder within the posthuman, both in terms of the game’s narrative proper and within the player-game relationship. Surely the Nanosuit signals metatexually to the player that he can never leave the human trace behind. Moreover, and as we will explore further below, entering into the posthuman condition comes at a very real cost, for Alcatraz, and perhaps even for the player. At a crucial level, at any rate, the narrative function of the Nanosuit is precisely parabolic: it points beyond the limits of the game’s discrete narrative to signal beyond the game to the player who may (I hesitate to say “must”) now be aware that the game offers a critical warning about what it means to have become posthuman. This game’s relentless foregrounding of the humanity of the avatar as the game progresses is critical: he is only kept alive by the machinic interference of the Nanosuit, as we are repeatedly made aware. His humanity, in other words, is preserved by the very technology that allows him to transcend his humanity. I wonder if this image—the eternally wounded all-too-human subject within the posthuman technology of the Nanosuit—is not another allegory of the player-game relationship, for surely Alcatraz’s power and strength is as illusory, or only purely supplemental, as our own sense of power and strength as we play. Crysis 2 is somewhat unusual in this sense: it continually foregrounds the fact that the avatar is essentially weak even as his strength is conspicuously and sublimely on display (Metal Gear Solid 4 will do the same, featuring a prematurely aged, decrepit Snake). And it is precisely this term, of course, that requires some further elaboration here, for does the game’s relentless reminder of its character’s (and player’s) essential humanity not work against the transport of the sublime? That is, are we not reminded of our own all-too-human real world as the game foregrounds its character’s humanity and thus is the sense of the sublime not threatened? The answer 78

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to this question is a complicated yes and no. Yes, at the philosophical level, Crysis 2 seems to work against the posthuman sublime; that is, it turns the player, metanarratively—metaludically?—back on himself, forces him to be aware that there is a remaindered humanity behind the posthumanity, a radically weak subject marked by his essential finitude. And yet the seductions of gameplay here are strong: Crysis 2, powered by the remarkable technology of the Crytek engine, is an astonishing game, both in terms of gameplay and in terms of the graphical rendering of the world. Within only a few minutes of the game, the player is given the ability to render himself invisible, to leap far and tall distances, to kill quickly and powerfully. Moreover the world within which these actions take place— a brightly, hyperrealistically, and convincingly rendered environment— makes it very easy to lose oneself in the real of this game. Crysis 2, in other words, is one of the most seductive games: the desire to become Alcatraz, this posthuman figure of absolute—yet compromised—power, is matched only by the massively convincing reality of the world you seem to be inhabiting. This is all to say that the game sets up a tension at the very outset of the game that never resolves: you are reminded of your essential finitude, the very fact of being a player in the real world, at the very moment that you are seduced utterly into this other reality. This, not to put too fine point on it, is a very complicated moment of the sublime, indeed. But it does sharply illustrate what has been my central point here. The posthuman sublime is an event of entry into a deeply multiple subject position: regardless of the game being first or third person, regardless of whether the game signals its metanarrative awareness of its own status as a game, regardless of the game’s fetishistic disavowal of the posthuman—at once demonizing the posthuman and yet seducing us into its pleasures—the fact remains that when one enters into this uncanny space, one is divided from oneself even as one may be returned to oneself, returned to the real that is this world. And it is, I think, precisely this dialectic—inhabiting the space of the other that is not me, becoming what I am not, recalling the remaindered human within the posthuman: seduction and return—that marks and defines what I mean by the posthuman sublime. To this point, however, I have only touched briefly on what may be called the preconditions of entry into the posthuman. If the sublime is an effect achieved by the entry into the posthuman condition—and here 79

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I am speaking of the gamer’s experience of assuming the role of the avatar who has, in her turn, assumed the role of the posthuman—surely we must notice that this entry comes at some radical cost. In the games I am interested in examining—games that explicitly thematize the posthuman—the achievement of the posthuman is predicated, simply, on catastrophe: invasion, warfare, ecological disaster, physical and psychological trauma, betrayal. As catastrophe is, as I argue, the grounds for the posthuman, the preconditions for the entry into the posthuman, we need to examine how catastrophe is figured in these various games. We need to understand, that is, how the posthuman subject comes to be defined as a catastrophic subject. Catastrophe and Apocalypse: Nostalgia, Loss, and the Posthuman Subject

I am interested here in exploring what is best described as a series of linked ideas, all of which revolve around the central notion of the catastrophe. I am interested in analyzing the links between the game’s thematization of the catastrophe—its point of narrative departure—and the player’s own position as what I am calling, after Virilio, the catastrophic subject. The almost fetishistic obsession with catastrophe in many important games— an initial disaster that is the pretext of the game’s narrative—becomes an almost sublime event in complicated and telling ways. I can think of any number of important games that have catastrophe as a point of departure: the Half-Life series revolves around an alien invasion of earth, as does Crysis 2, Halo 3, and the Resistance series. Deus Ex: Invisible War and Deus Ex: Human Revolution follow a protagonist who must respond to catastrophe both at the bodily and subjective levels: Alex D in Invisible War discovers he is a clone during the course of his game; Adam Jensen in Human Revolution is massively traumatized by a violent attack at the outset of his game and is heavily biomodified as a result (he is essentially a machine). What is important for me about this thematization of the catastrophe is the implication for subjectivity, both within the game (that is, for the character) and without (that is, for the player). Because what inevitably happens as the full implications of the catastrophe arise is that a savior figure appears—the main character; the player’s avatar—who in his turn must become a catastrophic, posthuman subject in order to defeat the 80

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enemy and cancel the catastrophe as such. What does this mean? Think here of the characters who must do battle against the various invasion or conspiratorial forces in the above mentioned games: Gordon Freeman, Alcatraz, Master Chief, Alex D, or Adam Jensen. All of these characters are altered in some fundamental, biological, or genetic manner in order to defeat the enemy: they become, in other words, the posthuman in order to vanquish the enemy, itself often figured in some sense as being posthuman. This, in itself, is interesting. But what becomes most intriguing for me here is the way in which catastrophe, as theme, seems to have, by necessity, bred the catastrophic subject who does battle against the very conditions that have, in a fundamental sense, defined him as a subject. These games, in other words, see the posthuman subject essentially at war with his own origin, source, or ground. But our interest does not end here, obviously: because even as the avatar becomes the catastrophe—even, shall we say, catastrophe becomes him—we become aware that our position as player of the digital game is precisely that of the avatar. This is to say that to play is to enter into a catastrophic subject position. And it is precisely this catastrophic subject position that I will analyze here: the subject defined by catastrophe and loss. Because catastrophe is essentially the precondition for loss, is it not? Catastrophic trauma, disaster: these are the grounds for the formation of what I call, will call, the melancholic subject, the subject defined by loss, the subject continually in search of the grinds of that loss, through revenge fantasies or obsessive, fetishistic attachment to his loss. This is to say that our characters here—Freeman, Alcatraz, Jensen—are all defined by loss and indebted to that loss: their subjectivity, as such, is entirely given over to catastrophe just as catastrophe has essentially made them what they are: the posthuman. And of course we must ask how the thematization of melancholy transfers, translates, to the gamer. Is the gamer—essentially, sublimely, connected to his avatar— in any way defined by loss? Is the gamer, too, a melancholic subject? As I will suggest, the true, perhaps ineluctable, unavoidable position of the true gamer, is the position of an almost pure melancholy. And this, finally, is what leads me to my main point: melancholy defines the gamer as the posthuman. That is to say, posthumanism is essentially a melancholic position: defined by loss, continually seeking that which has been lost. The human may have undergone radical technological changes—and I am here thinking 81

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of both avatar and player—but he is still, always, perhaps terribly, human: let us never forget that the “human” in “posthuman” is never eradicated by his step into the cyborgian sublime: the human haunts the posthuman, just as loss haunts and defines the catastrophic subject. Let us return to Virilio and his pathologizing of the human-machine relation in Open Sky. Virilio’s reading of the potentialities human-machine interaction are crucial if only because its resolutely negative inflection of what I have been calling the technological and prosthetic sublime.34 If I have, to this point, figured the prosthetic capabilities of gaming technologies in terms of liberation and extension, Virilio will remind us that prostheses exist only in fundamental relation to disability. I wish to return to his remarks in Open Sky, where he speaks of the citizen-terminal soon to be decked out to the eyeballs with interactive prostheses based on the pathological model of the “spastic,” wired to control his/her environment without having physically to stir: the catastrophic figure of an individual who has lost the capacity for immediate intervention along with natural motoricity and who abandons himself, for want of anything between, to the capacities of captors, sensors and other remote control scanners that turn him into a being controlled by the machine with which, they say, he talks. (20) Virilio is a critical thinker for me inasmuch as he provides a necessary tonic to the temptations of a too-easy utopian thinking; that is, it is easy to forget, as one engages in the various ecstasies of the game experience, that the prosthetic model of the posthuman may come to us at some cost. As Virilio will put it elsewhere, “nothing is gained without loss” (Politics of the Very Worst 54). Our gain of the sublime experience, Virilio’s argument seems to run, may come at the cost of forgetting that the very model of the technological sublime is, to use a word of some importance, catastrophic. I am intrigued by Virilio’s mobilization of the figure of catastrophe because at first blush it seems to be radically opposed to my vision of the ecstatic technological sublime. Virilio’s catastrophic subject is created in two ways: first, the technologically supplemented citizen-terminal (I take this as an apt image of the player interfacing with his game system), is, Virilio 82

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argues, “based” on the pathological model of the spastic; that is, the model of disability precedes the technological sublime and provides its ground (this, it strikes me, is an entirely debatable point, one for which Virilio— as is perhaps to be expected given his aphoristic writing style—provides no evidence); second, Virilio suggests that this model places the subject under direct control of technology. What emerges from these two ideas is a clear indication that Virilio gives no credit to the idea of agency, historical or individual, in relation to the subject’s interaction with technology. The model of the “spastic” (and is Virilio ironizing the use of this antediluvian term?) precedes and perhaps exceeds the user of technology, providing it seems, an unavoidable, ineluctable—and perhaps the only—model for the user of technology; second, technology unequivocally controls the subject turning him into a model of catastrophe or, perhaps to inflect this in a Heideggerian manner, reveals him to be a catastrophic subject. It strikes me that Virilio somewhat overstates the matter here; his work, while crucial in terms of providing some balance to the temptations of overstating the gains of the technological sublime, does seem to fetishize modern technology to the point where a disavowal of the idea that the human may have always been in some sort of relation to technology becomes necessary for his argument. In this way, Virilio’s work seems to a degree reactionary; or, perhaps more accurately, his work is deeply, radically nostalgic. But, to return to my point above, what is most revealing about Virilio is the manner in which agency is overwritten in this pathologizing of technology: surely the human has some sort of choice of entering, or not entering, a relation to technology? While modern technologies are unavoidable, there are, surely, degrees of involvement possible: we are not all hobbled, prosthetically addicted “spastics.” Moreover, and more importantly here, is there not some kind of critical tension in Virilio’s work, a tension that emerges precisely in the degree to which he pathologizes technology? There is something curious about the energy with which Virilio demonizes the prosthetic possibilities of the human-machine interface, an energy that does speak symptomatically to an unavoidable fascination with the very object that is demonized. This is all perhaps to say that the very fact that Virilio subjects technology to such an energetic critique speaks of its power, its possibilities for an experience of extension and sublimity that, for whatever reason, Virilio choses 83

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violently to critique. Perhaps the simplest way thus to characterize Virilio’s reading of the prosthetic impulse is to suggest that he mobilizes a view of what may be called the negative sublime. According to my model of the prosthetic sublime, technology allows for extension past bodily limitations and, ultimately, allows the subject to enter into a dialogue with a multiplicity of subject positions. Technology instantiates a plural subject: this, in some fundamental way, is what I mean by the posthuman. Virilio’s model is similar, but he inflects the possibilities of technology in a negative way. Note that in his model of the pathological subject there are agencies that precede and exceed the subject; and while he seems to disavow the idea that some kind of interaction, discursive or otherwise, occurs between subject and her machines (“with which they say, he talks”) there is at least a negative model of the rhizome in place here. The subject is controlled by technologies crated by subjectivities that precede and exceed him, that place him within a negative version of what Guattari calls a collective subjectivity. In other words, Virilio inflects the technological sublime negatively, but in doing so does not negate the sublime.35 In the readings that follow, I wish not to ignore Virilio’s negative sublime; this is not simply because his thinking provides a necessary tonic (his thought thus functions here as a kind of crucial partner in a Gadamerian hermeneutical conversation). Virilio is important because his image of the catastrophic subject is precisely one that is perfectly, perhaps unavoidably, apt for a reading of the game experience. I will simply inflect the model of catastrophe in a different way than Virilio. The figure of catastrophe—the gamer and the avatar are both figures of catastrophe—is a model of possibility, rather than disability; or, if we cannot avoid Virilio’s model of disability, the figure of catastrophe is one that compels us to read disability in a positive way. I wish to suggest here a link to another major trope in gaming— in the narrative of some major games—that will allow me to speak of the possibilities of catastrophe. Because catastrophe, as a term, as a reality, can only be inflected in a negative manner: destruction, desolation, loss. But what if we link the idea of the catastrophic subject to the notion of apocalypse? Because surely games like Crysis 2, Fallout 3, or Deus Ex: Human Revolution have, even at a determinedly secular level, something apocalyptic about them. I am, to be clear, using the term apocalypse to signify two major ideas: end and revelation. Apocalypse means a thematization of the 84

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event of the end, the absolute end, or, more precisely, the figuration of the fantasy of the event of the absolute end. The apocalypse signals the end of a civilization, the end of humanity, the turn towards a new, oftentimes devolutionary status quo. We see this inflection of the idea of apocalypse in the major classics of apocalyptic, or post-apocalyptic literature, film, and games: the Mad Max films, Fallout 3, Cormac McCarthy’s The Road, David Mitchell’s Cloud Atlas, The Walking Dead, and Shaun of the Dead, to name only a very few. The post-apocalypse, as it is figured in these texts, always signals a turn to a new kind of barbarity, a barbarity that seems to have been released from its repressed state by the destruction of the super-egoic culture that, to this point, had contained it. And while it is not my task here to speculate as to why contemporary culture is seemingly so fascinated by the idea of the end of humanity, as such, we would do well to keep in mind what Benjamin writes at the close of “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction”; humankind’s “selfalienation has reached such a degree that it can experience its own destruction as an aesthetic pleasure of the first order” (242). And certainly one of disquieting effects of post-apocalyptic games like Fallout 3 and Crysis 2 is the sublimity with which the destruction of the world is displayed. The initial view of the wasteland in Fallout 3 (your avatar having emerged from the gloom of his vault into sunlight for the first time) remains one of the great “reveals” in gaming history: as the sun’s glare diminishes to reveal the utter destruction of the environs of Washington, it is indeed hard not to recall Benjamin, hard not to wonder about the aesthetics of apocalypse. There is a great, if disturbing, pleasure, to be taken in this sight of the destruction of Washington and it is clear that the game designers have consciously mobilized our perspective to maximize our (perhaps guilty) frisson.36 And of course this notion of the “reveal” leads me to the second inflection of the term apocalypse. The word does ultimately mean “unveiling” or “revelation.” And it is here that I need to offer some thoughts on the revelatory aspects of the term “apocalypse” as it plays out in these games. The first thing I would emphasize here, by a slight detour into Heidegger, is the sense that apocalypse as revelation (of, for instance, the truth) always comes at a cost (and here we should recall Virilio’s “nothing is gained without loss”). In Being and Time, Heidegger writes: “Truth (uncoveredness) is something that must always first be wrested from entities. Entities get 85

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snatched out of their hiddenness. The factical uncoveredness of anything is always, as it were, a kind of robbery” (265). Heidegger speaks, usefully for our analysis, of the relation between truth, its revelation, and violence; truth according to Heidegger, wants always to remain hidden, and it takes violence for it to be revealed. It is this second sentence—“entities get snatched from their hiddenness”—that I wish to keep foregrounded because it strikes me that what is being revealed in the violence of apocalyptic unveiling is a new way of seeing and reading entities. I mean to use this sentence as a direct entry point into thinking about the transformation of the subject within the space and time of the apocalypse. My suggestion here is that some “truth” of the human is revealed by and within the apocalyptic event. If games like Fallout 3, Crysis 2, and Deus Ex: Human Revolution are in some sense about the end of the human—at general and local levels—one of the revelations of the apocalypse is precisely what it means to be “after” the human, what it means, in other words, to be posthuman: the end of the human is revealed to be the posthuman event. But, and this is crucial, the posthuman subject—think here of Jensen in Deus Ex: Human Revolution—is always already figured as carrying the trace of the human, a nostalgic yearning for what has been lost. This is to say that the event of the apocalypse, often as it is thematized in games, serves what may seem to be a rather conservative function: it takes the apocalypse to reveal what is essentially human about the posthuman. And it is precisely here, in this thematization of the trace of the human within the posthuman subject, that the event of melancholy emerges in all its urgency. Metal Gear Solid 4

I wish here in this final section to return to a consideration of Hideo Kojima’s Metal Gear Solid series, with a particular view of offering a meditation on the final game in the series’ narrative, Metal Gear Solid 4: Guns of the Patriots (2008). It is my purpose here to offer a reading of these games through and against the notion of apocalypse to come to some understanding of how these games instantiate a crisis of the subject. But Kojima’s games are doing more than merely thematizing the passage into the posthuman as itself a catastrophe for a traditional understanding of what constitutes the human; the game, more specifically, focuses its transition into the posthuman through a trope that, in some sense, is the 86

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most resonant image of the posthuman as such: the clone. Thus, in what follows, I will analyze the game’s thematization of cloning in an attempt to suggest that posthuman melancholy always already is instantiated by what may be called the groundless repetition that is cloning. As my synopsis of the Metal Gear Solid series suggests (see above), Hideo Kojima’s games have always in some fashion been about apocalypse, have always, perhaps more precisely, taken place against a background of potential apocalypse; in this game series, the shape of the apocalypse has always been nuclear. The games all, in one way or another, directly or indirectly, have been about the threat posed to the human species by nuclear weaponry, and while it is too simple and perhaps reductive to point out that Kojima himself is a citizen of the only true post-nuclear—can we say post-apocalyptic?—country, we cannot avoid the idea that Kojima’s games have a deeply felt historical-biographical resonance. Kojima’s games are replete, thematically, with the idea that total annihilation is a distinct possibility at any time, given the proliferation of nuclear weapons and, most importantly, the proliferation of rogue states and terrorists group that may have access to these weapons. Thus, at the end of Metal Gear Solid, Kojima inserts the following series of facts: “In the 1980s, there were more than 60,000 nuclear warheads in the world at all times. The total destructive power amounted to 1 million times that of the Hiroshima A-bomb. In January 1993, START2 was signed and the United States and Russia agreed to reduce the number of deployed strategic nuclear warheads to 3,500 to 3,000 in each nation by December 31, 2000. However, as of 1998, there still exist 26,000 nuclear warheads in the world.” This is to say that Kojima’s games always play out with catastrophe as a given, catastrophe for the world, catastrophe for the individuals populating his games. What becomes fascinating to me about Metal Gear Solid 4, and what marks this particular game as distinct in the Metal Gear canon is that the protagonist, Snake, is himself a figure of catastrophe throughout the game. Snake, we recall, is a clone of the original super-soldier, Big Boss; one of the unfortunate side effects of the cloning process is a rapid onset of a radical and crippling aging (his symptoms seem, as Snake’s friend Otacon suggests, to resemble Werner’s Syndrome); he is told that he has “a year at best” to live. Snake, or as he is called in this game, given his symptoms, Old Snake, still is the hero of the game, still, given the 87

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various posthuman technologies that extend his bodily limitations, able to carry out his physical and intellectual tasks, but we are consistently reminded that our avatar is aging, in pain, and weak. It is surely one of Kojima’s most brilliant narrative gestures to fashion his hero as weak, as, precisely, all-too-human. While there are heroes in games who are figured as merely human (Gordon Freeman is represented as a typical nerdy scientist; Alcatraz is, as suggested above, essentially a corpse being kept alive by his Nanosuit) none has made the hero’s weakness such an overt thematic in the game. There are, perhaps, two important ideas that emerge out of Kojima’s decision to offer an aging and frail hero. First, it is an overt signal that the series itself is coming to a natural end (Kojima had made several comments at the time of the game’s release indicating that the game was to be the end of Snake’s narrative). The game, in other words, is a way of paying tribute to this iconic character by celebrating his history: it is impossible for the gamer who knows the Metal Gear Solid series not to think about what Snake, as a character, has been through in his long struggle with tyranny and violence. Thus, and realizing I run the risk here of turning maudlin, the deep resonance of Otacon’s comment to Sunny at the end of the game when we may believe Snake has committed suicide, “Snake has had a hard life.” Second, and perhaps most importantly, the game has humanized the abstract idea of apocalypse. No one is capable of conceiving the total end, the total event of the end of all life, but all can at least begin to grasp the significance of the loss of an individual. Snake’s aging is a brilliant telescoping of the idea of apocalypse and catastrophe onto a knowable—and deeply loved—personal site: our avatar.37 But of course the abiding and critical tension in the game is that which arises between Old Snake’s frailty and the sublime posthuman technologies of the various systems, weapons, and biomodifications that work to enhance his limited physical capabilities. And these enhancements, of course, work, at least initially, to efface, and repress, the immediacy of Snake’s illness: he may in fact have the body of a seventy-year-old man, but the technologies that support him transform him into another order of being entirely. Snake has been provided with three major technologies for his mission. The first is the Metal Gear Mk. II: a remote mobile terminal device designed for operational support. This small anthropomorphized robot is controlled by Snake. It feeds him (and his handler, Otacon) data 88

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Metal Gear Solid 4: Playing the posthuman. about the surroundings; the Mk. II provides Snake with contextual topographic details allowing him to see beforehand what obstacles, and how many soldiers, he will be facing. This information, obviously, gives Snake a distinct advantage in battle. Snake’s second technological enhancement is The Solid Eye. This “all-purpose goggle,” as Otacon calls it, resembles an eye patch (and is worn over the left eye) and displays radar and other images in 3D. The Solid Eye has light-amplifying night vision; it also, crucially, feeds information about soldiers’ health and stress levels directly to Snake. Finally, Snake is given the OctoCamo suit, a “smart” camouflage system that is modeled after the camouflage capacities of the octopus. The OctoCamo suit allows Snake to blend into the immediate background by imitating the colors and textures of his surroundings: the suit will, for instance, imitate the complex patterns of a tiled floor if Snake presses against it and activates the suit. Snake is thereby rendered invisible to the human eye and to infrared detection. The OctoCamo also has strengthenhancing technologies that give Snake slightly more muscle strength. There are details about these technologies that the knowledgeable player of the Metal Gear Solid series will recognize, details that are crucial for figuring Old Snake as being linked back to an inescapable history of violence and loss. His Solid Eye, for instance, is an echo of the eye patch that Old Snake’s clone parent Big Boss wore in the 1960s and 1970s (the 89

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original Big Boss had lost his eye by being tortured). As Otacon reveals the Metal Gear Mk. II to Snake he says, “Yes, just like TRex,” a reference to the original technologically enhanced nuclear launch system that Snake destroyed years previously (in 1998’s Metal Gear Solid 2: Sons of Liberty). These reminders of Snake’s biological and historical past serve, it seems to me, as inexorable reminders of Snake’s essential humanity even as they serve to enhance his physical capacities beyond normal thresholds. In Freudian terms, these technologies are melancholic reminders of a past that defines Snake as a soldier woven into a complex fabric of violence even as that past threatens continually to destroy him. But do these technologies not also serve, precisely as they enhance Snake’s physical capabilities, to remind us of Snake’s essential weakness? Do they not in fact serve to reify his illness, frailty, and being-towards-death? And do these reminders of Snake’s frailty, a side effect of his cloning, not also recall his essential ontological groundlessness? For surely one of the uncanny effects of the Metal Gear Solid series is the fact that Snake—the various Snakes, the original Big Boss, called “Naked Snake” in Metal Gear Solid 3, Solid Snake, or “Old Snake” as he is now—is always represented in the same character model and is always voiced (in English versions) by the same voice actor (David Hayter). This is to say, whether we are playing a game set in 1964 (Metal Gear Solid 3: Snake Eater) or one set in 2007 (Metal Gear Solid 2: Sons of Liberty) or 2014 (Metal Gear Solid 4: Guns of the Patriots), Snake is always the same, to us. At one level Kojima is merely hitting home the point that Snake, now in 2014, is always already a clone of the original Snake. This is to say, there is, for Old Snake, in 2014, no escape from his essential origins. But, and this is crucial for the emotional resonance of these games, that original source, his ontological ground, is always already retreating from him or set up in opposition to him: in the very first Metal Gear Solid game (1987), Snake was in direct conflict with Big Boss and this sense of opposition is firmly in place throughout the series. And so what are we to make of the fact that in this, the final game in the series, Kojima has chosen to make Snake’s essential, genetic link to his antagonist a major feature in the narrative? What are we to make of the fact that Snake’s essential physical weakness—which stands as a pretext for his technological augmentation—serves always as a reminder of his lost origins? In my mind, this final game of the series stands as a canny critique of 90

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the posthuman fantasies that typically proliferate in action games. Surely Snake’s cloned status serves to remind us of the costs of entering into the posthuman condition; surely Snake stands as the perfect emblem illustrating Virilio’s “nothing is gained without loss.” And this idea, the idea of loss, that folds into and articulates almost every major event in this final game. It is clear, as the game concludes and character after character is killed or revealed to have been killed, that this world is one defined by loss. As Snake withdraws to “live in peace” as the game concludes, we are presented with a sharp rebuke of the violence that has defined his character to this point. But surely the primary loss that has shaped the experiences of both Big Boss and Solid Snake is precisely that loss initiated by the cloning procedure itself. And let us be clear about what is happening, in terms of plot, as this game proceeds and concludes. Snake has been sent into the Middle East to do battle with Liquid, another of the clones fabricated from Big Boss. Liquid, precisely a hybrid of two subjects, Liquid Snake (one of the clones of Big Boss) and Revolver Ocelet (a former enemy of Big Boss and Solid Snake) is threatening to gain control of an Artificial Intelligence system which, through nanotechnology, controls the actions of all soldiers working for the world’s five major Private Military Companies. Liquid’s ultimate goal, however, is to wreak his vengeance on Solid Snake. And thus the game sets up Solid Snake’s task: to destroy his own cloned “brother,” his “twin.” And as their final confrontation unfolds, in a protracted, bloody, and increasingly desperate fistfight, the pathos of this struggle becomes quite clear: Snake is only doing battle with a version of himself; a lethal narcissism demands that Snake destroy himself as his enemy. I am here reminded of Baudrillard’s meditations on cloning in The Vital Illusion: A sort of anticipation of cloning can be found in nature itself, in the phenomenon of twins and twinship (gemellite). We can perceive a kind of cloning in the hallucinatory redoubling of the same, in the primitive symmetry that makes the two twins seems to be two halves of a single cell, of the same individual— and we escape the phantasm only by way of a break, a rupture in the symmetry. But perhaps we have never properly escaped our double; and cloning, then, may simply be reviving this hallucination of the same, of the twin from whom we have never 91

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quite been separated. At the same time we may see in cloning the resurgence of our fasciation with an archaic form of incest with the original twin, and the grave psychotic consequence of such a primitive fantasy. (12–13) If cloning is, as Baudrillard says, a resurrection of primitive fantasies of doubling, of psycho-sexual fantasies of (too close) links to the same, surely Kojima’s game raises the psychoanalytical-ontological stakes here. Because Liquid and Snake are twins, insofar as clones are twins, who are in a very real sense “two halves of a single cell, of the same individual.” It is not precisely my purposes here to unfold a sexualized psychoanalytical reading of the trope of cloning in the Metal Gear Solid series, but it is not too difficult to see the emotional effect at work here between Liquid and Snake—lethal anger—as merely a sublimation of deeply repressed, can we say even genetic?, sexual desire. And it becomes quite clear as this protracted, and intimate, physical battle unfolds that one of the real traumas initiated by the antagonists’ ontological condition (of being clones) is the loss of a sense of individuality itself. That is, the real anger here is the idea of the loss of self, or a sense of the unique self, initiated by the state of being a double, twin, and clone. Kojima signals this idea quite brilliantly through extra-diegetic means: as the protracted battle between Solid

Metal Gear Solid 4: Posthuman nostalgia. 92

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Snake and Liquid progresses, their character names are displayed beside their health bars. As the fight begins, the names beside their respective bars are “Solid Snake” and “Liquid”; that is to say, “Old Snake”—as he is called throughout most of Metal Gear Solid 4—is now referred to by the name associated with his younger, healthier self, the self that in fact did battle against Liquid in Metal Gear Solid (1998). We are further reminded of these encounters by the music that is playing during this initial stage of the fight: it is part of the soundtrack of the 1998 game. As the battle moves into its second phase, Liquid’s name shifts to “Liquid Ocelot” and the music now shifts to material from Metal Gear Solid 2 (2001): that is, the player is now asked to recall Solid Snake’s second encounter with Liquid. In the fight’s third phase, Solid Snake’s name shifts to Naked Snake (and Liquid’s to Ocelot): this is a crucial shift as here we have transitioned back to 1964 (in narrative time) to Metal Gear Solid 3: Snake Eater, this being the game that features Naked Snake, or as he will come to be known, Big Boss. I am intrigued by the implications of this flashback to 1964, back to Big Boss, back to the original father of both Solid Snake and Liquid. For surely Kojima is signaling that while genealogy is inescapable—Solid Snake and Liquid are inevitably “destined” to be the warriors that they are—the subject, as such, is never a unique, singular thing. And, while the following question might sound rather curious, it must occur to any attentive player—and reader—of this game and this fight scene: just who is the subject/character Snake at this moment that his name shifts to Naked Snake? Is he Solid Snake? Is he Naked Snake? Old Snake? It might also be important to note that this name change is the final one shown in this fight scene: that is, Snake is ultimately shown to “be” Naked Snake as the climactic fights ends, if only extra-diegetically. It strikes me that this lengthy, and narratively very complicated, battle is an appropriate site for a consideration of many of the themes I have analyzed throughout this first section of Parables of the Posthuman. For what is Snake here, in this scene, if not a perfect emblem of the posthuman? As a clone, as a being that has been created by bypassing the “normal” procreative routes, Snake stands as something neither recognizably human nor nonhuman (and I wonder if Kojima always intended to suggest Snake’s “inhumanity” by calling him, precisely, Snake [or Old Snake, Naked Snake]; “Liquid,” equally, seems a strange, inhuman name 93

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for Snake’s clone, not to mention “Liquid Ocelot”). As this scene unfolds, how perfectly illustrated is Blanchot’s notion of subjectivity without any subject in this shifting from one subject position to another (Solid Snake to Naked Snake). That is to say, Snake, in this scene, both is and is not himself and his genetic father; he is the subject who feels, physically, emotionally, the weight of his historical actions, and the actions of others who have fashioned him into the role he now plays. And it is precisely this last idea, that Snake is playing out a role that in some crucial sense precedes and exceeds him, that is crucial for us here because what Kojima’s extradiegetic textuality indicates, in its Brechtian fashion, is that Snake’s being is one that it entirely fictional, entirely fictive, entirely a construct. The trope of cloning in some sense is only one of many tropes deployed by Kojima to remind the player that s/he is only ever playing a game. But I do wonder, as always, if one of the implications of these extra-diegetic references is to alert us to our role in this system. I analyzed at some length above the way in which the Metal Gear Solid series always instantiates a critique of the game as such, but I wonder if here, in this final game, Kojima is signaling his ultimate critique of the idea of the posthuman by suggesting, uncannily, that Snake’s status as clone somehow translates, parabolically, into our own status as player. But how would this idea work? How is the player of a video game, tropologically, a clone? And if the player is indeed a clone does the following from Baudrillard’s The Vital Illusion make a radically uncomfortable kind of sense? “Is it possible to speak of the soul, or the conscience, or even of the unconscious from the point of view of the automatons, the chimeras, and the clones that will supersede the human race? Both the individual and the species’ capital are jeopardized by the erosion of the limits of the human, by the slide, not just into the inhuman but into something that is nether human nor inhuman: namely, the genetic simulation of life” (23). I can answer my own question—how is the player like a clone?—by returning to my opening analysis of the player and the uncanny. For surely one of the essential links between the player and the onscreen avatar is a sense of doubling that occurs, a sense of being and not being that figure on the screen simultaneously. And what does this flashing between Solid Snake to Naked Snake do but suggest that Solid Snake is both himself now and another subject, elsewhere, and at another time? The clone, in 94

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other words, is a displacement of singularity but a simultaneous enforcement of similarity. Solid Snake’s melancholy is a precise sense of having been another, another whose actions have defined his present situation beyond his agency and control. The player’s sense of becoming other may lack this precise sense of melancholy but surely he has become other in ways that mirror and mimic Snake’s own sense of painful, catastrophic doubling. And of course it is this idea, of catastrophe, that must detain us for one of the implications of this doubling is that the avatar’s birth into catastrophe—and I think here not merely of Snake, but of Alcatraz of Crysis 2, Adam Jensen in Deus Ex: Human Revolution, Gordon Freeman in Half-Life, Shepard in Mass Effect (and the list goes on)—mirrors and mimics our own. This is to say that the state of being that defines the avatar as catastrophically posthuman surely must, in a parabolic fashion, become our own. And I mean here not in the psychoanalytical sense that the avatar, as my double, translates his existential predicament onto me, but that the very entry into the conditions of play may, to look back to Virilio, uncannily echo and anticipate the technologically enhanced state of our avatars. My screen, my controller, my ability to modify myself “as” another, to become another, my ultimate sense of extension into other modes of being: these are precisely the conditions and technologies that, for instance, accompany and define Snake at the outset of Metal Gear Solid 4. His Solid Eye, his remote viewing device (the Metal Gear Mk. II), even his OctoCamo suit that translates him into another way of being within nature, these devices all echo uncannily the player’s own technologies. Kojima in fact signals the link between player—and play—and his character by making the device that controls Snake’s Metal Gear Mk. II a copy of the PlayStation 3 controller: Snake, the catastrophic subject is playing, just as we play. Metal Gear Solid 4 in crucial ways stands as perhaps the perfect parable of the posthuman: the game explicitly thematizes becoming the posthuman and points, extra-diegetically, to the player who must become the double, a metaphorical “clone,” of Snake himself; that is to say, the game calls attention to the way engaging with the game transforms the player into the posthuman and compels him or her, through this specular doubling, to pay attention to the costs of having become something other than what one has been. The Metal Gear Solid series, as I have outlined 95

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above, has always functioned in a Brechtian manner to force the player to be aware of her proximity to the violence being enacted by her avatar, Snake; and of course one of the effects of this awareness is the realization (one that is so obvious we may not see it) that it is not only Snake who perpetrates these acts of violence but the player herself. And if, as the game series ultimately suggests, there is a great cost, emotionally, physically, even spiritually, to Snake at having led a life of absolute violence, perhaps we are meant to ask if there is not some effect on us for having mirrored this violence. In other words, the true narrative of the Metal Gear Solid series is the narrative of our own complicity in this world of violence: the parable here reveals that the player, like Snake, must come to some realization of her responsibility for having desired to accept the violence that inevitably attends the entry into the posthuman condition. And so where does this leave us? I suggested at the outset of my meditations on apocalypse and catastrophe that I wished to move beyond Virilio’s notion of the negative catastrophic subject, the subject modeled, as he suggested, on the image of disability. I wanted to offer the possibility that the catastrophic subject, precisely as he is given over to the gaming world— and I mean here the avatar and the player—is woven into some kind of apocalyptic revelation: something, in other words, must be revealed and unveiled to us as the catastrophe unfolds. I think that Solid Snake should be our model of the revelatory catastrophic posthuman here because his narrative surely is one that reveals that even as the subject is born into the posthuman condition—and here that condition is one defined precisely by physical and emotional pain—a concomitant melancholy is born, and it is my suggestion that this melancholy is the precise site of revelation. Snake’s melancholy, in essence, is for what Abraham and Torok call the “lost object”; the lost object is always, as they suggest, born out of some kind of trauma. Snake’s lost object of course is his father, the father who is, in a crucially painful sense, himself. Snake’s entire trajectory is one that is defined by his attempt to work his way back to the lost object father, to find the source of his own being, and the secrets of that origin. Abraham and Torok are surely correct to suggest that “what haunts are not the dead, but the gaps left within us by the secrets of others” (171); and the final extended scene in Metal Gear Solid 4, the long-awaited meeting between Snake and Big Boss, is surely testament to the desire to work through the secrets surrounding this 96

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catastrophic relationship. Here, as Big Boss explains in minute detail the byzantine complexities of his life work and how it relates to Snake’s various activities over the years, we get a sense that some catharsis is being introduced, that some working out has been achieved, for Snake. And as Big Boss himself dies leaving Snake as the sole clone survivor, the story and Snake’s melancholy may come to an end. And what this melancholy reveals, of course, is that even as the subject moves into the condition of the posthuman, even as he becomes more than human, less than human, or even inhuman, there is always a link back to what can only be thought of as essential human emotions, affects, longings, losses. This is perhaps to say that even as the game celebrates, even fetishizes, the sublime enjoyment of becoming other, becoming technologically enhanced, becoming more than human, a concomitant debt to the human is always already in place. Now it is entirely possible that what this melancholy attachment to the human indicates is an essential conservatism in these games, an inherent, not-so-latent warning about the deleterious effects of the transformation of the human. But does this appeal to human affect, to an essential core of the human that cannot be lost even in the face of the most radical transformations of the human, not also, in its very insistent transparency, call attention to the very constructedness of that affect, that affect of loss? Surely one of the darker implications, not to say revelations, of these games is the idea that this essential human affective core is perhaps only the next thing to be fabricated, extended, enhanced, posthumanized. And again, to return one last time to Metal Gear Solid 4, is this not what the game has suggested? Kojima’s game, if read slightly against its manifest humanism, does indicate that Snake, as clone, has had his psychology, his interiority, given to him in a perfectly and intentionally manufactured manner. This is not to suggest that all humans are not in their way given their subjectivity from elsewhere—we are all the products of our DNA, our culture—but Kojima’s games are an extended meditation on the implications of an entire subject and subjectivity being created as a manufactured, intentional, ideologically motivated act. The final implication of this idea of course is that the player too, as he shifts between subjects and subjectivities, as he plays “as” Snake or Freeman or Alcatraz, has been given a subject position, a manufactured, 97

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ideologically motivated subjectivity. But we are able, we think, to step out of the game and back into the self, the true self, that precedes and exceeds the gameworld. But if we read these games parabolically, as allegories of (posthuman) being, that idea of leaving the gameworld comfortably and assuming the self that is here as an essential ground or bedrock surely becomes less assured. If there is one thing the games have done it is to demonstrate how easily is it to step past the self, how easy it is to become seduced by and into the position of being another. And even if this state of being another, of acting as another, as moving, and perhaps even feeling as another is temporary, the implications of having been taken past ourselves must at least raise questions about the strength, the very groundedness, of that essential subject.

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the economy of catastrophe, I began unraveling a reading of the relation between the posthuman subject and what I have been terming melancholy. I have been suggesting that some crucial recent games have all seemed to ground themselves in worlds marked by extreme loss: populations and cities destroyed (Crysis 2, Half-Life 2); subjects themselves marked by the loss of their pasts, their memories (BioShock, Half-Life 2, Metal Gear Solid 4); characters haunted precisely by those losses (Metal Gear Solid 4, BioShock, Half-Life 2). I have, to this point, merely suggested that melancholy is some species of response to loss, to the economy of being haunted by the trace or presence of the past in the present moment and have posed these questions: “Is the gamer—essentially, sublimely, connected to his avatar—in any way defined by loss? Is the gamer, too, a melancholic subject?” I wish here, in this final section, to offer an extended meditation on the idea of melancholy as it plays out in the digital game keeping in mind always that posthumanism, as a trope, as a practical reality instantiated by the experience of digital play itself, is itself, perhaps, only properly understood as concretization of melancholy. Posthumanism, in other words, is a philosophy of loss just as any realization of the posthuman fantasy in games (whether narratively or as practiced by the player as he plays) can only be understood as a species of loss. Our reading of melancholy must begin with Freud and his seminal “Mourning and Melancholia” (1917). Here Freud attempts to come to an understanding of how the subject deals with trauma and loss. There are, he suggests, two responses to loss: to the loss of a loved one, or the “loss In my reading of

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of some abstraction that has taken the place of one, such as one’s country, liberty, an ideal, or so on” (252). The first is what he calls mourning. Mourning is a healthy process by which the loss is comprehended and accepted, “worked through,” to use his terminology. Mourning is the “normal” way one must deal with trauma and loss, with what Freud terms the “economics of pain” (252). How the subject actually, phenomenologically, overcomes loss is not known by Freud. After much mourning “work,” the subject accepts that the loved one, with whom the subject may have identified, or the ideal, by which the subject articulated his ideas of how to be in the world, are simply not present for the subject any longer. Melancholia, on the other hand, is a pathological state in which the subject comes fully to identify with the lost object; she refuses to acknowledge the reality principle that dictates that the loved one is gone, and she thus continually finds herself haunted by the specter of historical loss. More precisely the melancholic works “to establish an identification of the ego with the abandoned object” (258). Freud suggests that the melancholic cannot work past her loss or, more disturbingly, that she perhaps does not wish to do so. The subject maintains this pathological state because the traumatic moment has shaped who she is.1 In The Ego and the Id, Freud notes that melancholia structures the ego itself: the incorporation of the lost object “has a great share in determining the form taken by the ego and [. . .] makes an essential contribution towards building up what is called its ‘character’” (368). A return to Derrida and his reading of melancholia in The Ear of the Other may help clarify Freud’s notions of the economy of melancholia. Drawing on the work of Abraham and Torok, Derrida offers an image of melancholia which in its turn figures the presence of the past, of history, of loss, as a kind of viral, material presence. This materiality of loss, its physical presence inside the body of the melancholic, figures the melancholic as a kind of cryptological archive; it is an image, I wish to suggest, particularly suited to a reading of certain digital games: Not having been taken back inside the self, digested, assimilated as in all “normal” mourning, the dead object remains like a living dead abscessed in a specific spot in the ego. It has its place, just like a crypt in a cemetery or temple, surrounded by walls and all the rest. The dead object is incorporated in this 100

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crypt—the term “incorporated” signaling precisely that one has failed to digest or assimilate it totally, so that it remains there, forming a pocket in the mourning body. The incorporated dead, which one has not really managed to take upon oneself, continues to lodge there like something other and to ventrilocate through the “living.” (57–58) As crypt, as archive ventrilocated by loss, the subject begins to offer itself as a site where the signs of history, of nostalgia, of trauma can be read, deciphered, and interpreted. The melancholic subject, in other words, becomes a spatialized site of reading. What should be clear about the way melancholy is understood in Freud is that melancholy is an illness in which the subject is placed in a complex relation to the past; the subject is unable or unwilling to move out of the “shadow of the [lost] object” (258), as Freud puts it, and thus he lives in a perpetual state of reaction and response to what has been (lost). Freud thus argues that the melancholic’s illness—and for him melancholy is pathological—damages the ego or at least sets up the ego as something to be scorned, repudiated. As Eric G. Wilson summarizes in The Melancholy Android: “Unconsciously, melancholics turn their feelings concerning the lost other towards their own egos. These sentiments are a mixture of love and hatred— affection for the lost object’s virtues, disdain toward the pain caused by the object’s removal. Loving the object, melancholics incorporate it into their egos; hating the object, they loathe themselves. For Freud, this self-hatred is the mark of melancholia” (26). And while it is true that for Freud melancholy is a condition ideally to be avoided (if not “cured”: but what would a cure for melancholy look like if, as he himself argues, we do not know how mourning itself works?), we should also note that there is more than a hint in this essay that melancholy is a condition with certain advantages. I would not necessarily argue that melancholy is a condition to be envied or invited, but Freud seems at least more than slightly ambivalent about melancholy’s absolute negativity. His statement, for instance, that melancholics have a “keener eye for truth than others who are not melancholic” (255) does suggest that melancholia could be thought of as a precondition for a kind of hermeneutic self-understanding. It is precisely Freud’s ambivalence about melancholia that has encouraged more contemporary thinkers to re101

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evaluate melancholy and attempt to depathologize it. David Eng and David Kazanjian, for instance, attempt, in their important Loss, to suggest that melancholy should be conceived, at a larger cultural level, as the grounds for an ethical reading of the relation between subjects and history. In their view, melancholy is precisely ethical insofar as it compels the subject into a continual relation to history, a relation, that is, to what should not ever be forgotten. And while we should note that Freud does not equate mourning with forgetting—for him mourning is a way of living with loss but not allowing it to dominate one’s subjectivity—there is a real value in Eng and Kazanjian’s notion that to allow history to inhabit us, continually, is to begin to live ethically, if not painfully: In this regard, we find in Freud’s conception of melancholia’s persistent struggle with its lost objects not simply a grasping and holding on to a fixed notion of the past but rather a continuous engagement with loss and its remains. This engagement generates sites for memory and history, for the rewriting of the past as well as a reimagining of the future. While mourning abandons lost objects by laying their histories to rest, melancholia’s continued and open relation to the past finally allows us to gain new perspectives on and new understandings of lost objects. (4) At first blush this discussion of the Freudian model of melancholia may seem far afield from the experience of the gamer. I would like to ground my discussion in what follows with the very simple statement: melancholia is an experience in which the subject begins to develop complicated responses to loss; gaming is an experience, I will argue, in which the gamer must also come to terms with complex economies of loss. Of course my task here is to make clear that I am not only interested in how games thematize loss. That is, while it is important to notice how the games tell stories of melancholia (my discussions of catastrophe and devastation, while linked to the concept of melancholia, really begin with noticing how melancholy is grounded in the narrative structures, the story, of the games), it is equally crucial here to attempt to think through the implications of gaming as a melancholic act, as such. This analysis will involve a slight recursive turn back to Gadamer, who defined our sense of what play is; it 102

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will involve revisiting Virilio and his crucial concept of loss as it plays out in the posthuman subject; and it will involve, finally, thinking through the idea that the game represents something approaching the Freudian notion of the ideal lost object: the player’s melancholia, in other words, arises precisely as s/he is compelled from the game back into the real. The end of the game is, in some senses, the end of a kind of perfection. Reality thus is the ground and basis of gaming melancholy. To begin, let us recall Gadamer and his thoughts on play in Truth and Method. A crucial aspect of play, for Gadamer, is that it precedes and exceeds the subject. Play is in some sense an event always already occurring and the player simply, for a time, enters into its logics and economies: “We have seen that play does not have its being in the player’s consciousness or attitude, but on the contrary play draws him into its dominion and fills him with its spirit. The player experiences the game as a reality that surpasses him” (109). To enter into play is in some sense to enter into an event—site, experience; words seem inadequate here—which threatens, if benevolently, to remove the subject from himself; as the player enters into the dominion of the game, of play, his subjectivity is surpassed by the “spirit” of the game. For Gadamer, clearly, playing is not “about” the player; it is about the player’s willing entry into a system that, if temporarily, removes agency, removes subjectivity itself. Thus what is for me Gadamer’s most important statement: “Play fulfills its purpose only if the player loses himself in play” (102). In my discussion of this idea above I suggested that a strict reading of the idea that play is about the player losing himself in play would be at odds with what is perhaps the dominant affect of certain games: the strong sense of the self being extended and altered by the entry into the posthuman position. Surely, I asked, to be aware of the delirious affect of power that games give us means that the subject is acutely aware of himself “in” the game? I shall return to this aspect of Gadamerian play in a moment, but if we can attend to the word “loss” and imagine directing Gadamer’s thought in another direction—the gamer’s loss not necessarily only of himself, but of his world, as he enters the game—then we can begin to think usefully about what it means to enter into posthuman play, to enter into the affect of melancholy play. In my melancholic reading of the economy of play, I will suggest that play is bracketed by two essential losses: the loss of the real world as the player 103

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enters the game and the loss of the gameworld as the player reenters the real world. Understanding the affect of play, the emotional experience of serious play, depends on coming to some understanding of what it means for the player to be—in an ontological sense as well as an emotional sense—between these two losses. While it may be too simple to suggest that one of these losses is positive and one traumatic (the reentry into the real world after gaming is, I would argue, shocking and at some crucial level always disappointing), this assertion does get to the heart of what I am calling the melancholy experience of gaming. Because surely one aspect of the instinct to play is the conscious (and perhaps unconscious) desire to step past the self, past the ego. Gadamer suggests that play fulfills its purpose only if the player loses himself in play. Gadamer seems here to be focusing on the nature of play itself; the loss of the ego, in other words, is a pre-condition for successful play. But what if the desire to play is itself grounded in a desire for loss? What if play demands the self step past—or out—of itself? In this sense, the digital game, and especially the games I have been analyzing here, are perfect experiences of play: they are fully immersive (the play can easily lose him or herself); they thematize the self’s augmentation, radical change, and extension past “normal” limitations and boundaries. Play, in other words—and digital play especially—would seem to be the perfect place for becoming other, becoming what I have been calling posthuman. This entry into play, therefore, with its attendant loss of self, of ego, of subjectivity, is what I would characterize as an instance of positive loss: to become posthuman—and this is the central point of fetishistic departure and desire for the gamer—one must lose oneself. As Virilio says: “Nothing is gained without loss.” The entry into the gameworld, into its sublime spaces, into its possibilities for subjective alteration and ego-loss, is, at the risk of sounding overly dramatic, not unlike an entry into paradise. I have argued this point elsewhere but it might do well to reiterate: the gameworld is perfect.2 Unlike this world, there is nothing truly chaotic about the gameworld: there is no detail about the landscape or cityspace that is random; there is no feature of the gameplay that is without its rules. Johan Huizinga in his classic Homo Ludens defines the experience of being in the gameworld perfectly: Inside the play-ground an absolute and peculiar order reigns. Here we come across another, very positive feature of play: it 104

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creates order, is order. Into the imperfect world and into the confusion of life it brings a temporary, a limited perfection. Play demands order absolute and supreme. The least deviation from it “spoils the game,” robs it of its character, and makes it worthless. The profound affinity between play and order is perhaps the reason why play, as we noted in passing, seems to lie to such a large extent in the field of aesthetics . . . it may be that this aesthetic factor is identical with the impulse to create orderly form, which animates play in all its aspects. (29) This is in some ways to say that nothing in the gameworld is without meaning, or the potential for meaning; gathered as they are within the economy of the gameworld, every detail in the world has the possibility to be meaningful. Roland Barthes, apropos of the world of narrative, says that in a story: “everything has a meaning or nothing has” (104). Barthes’s idea surely makes sense of the feeling one has within a game, that feeling that anything could, and can, have an important effect on the player: any object, NPC, event, area could become meaningful to the experience of play. Barthes puts is thusly: “This is not a question of art . . . it is a question of structure: in the order of discourse, what is noted is, by definition, notable. . . . We might say in other words that art does not acknowledge ‘noise’ (in the meaning that word has in information theory): it is a pure system, there is never a ‘wasted’ unit” (104). Moreover, and this is part of the uncanny beauty of games, objects, things, landscapes or cityscapes that would be banal in the real world, are strangely compelling in the gameworld. The classic example of this would be the crowbar one’s avatar/character picks up early in Half-Life: I recall distinctly the first time I encountered the crowbar, how I was fascinated by the play of light along its hooked ridge, how the game’s physics imparted a real sense of heft and weight to the thing. The crowbar, in other words, becomes meaningful in a game in a way that a crowbar in my garage does not. The gameworld conveys this meaningfulness on these objects, transforming them from banality to resonance. And of course, given the focus of this analysis, it would be remiss of me not to suggest that the gameworld confers a deep sense of resonance onto things that may, in the real world, not always have resonance: the self and space. Games and the experience of gaming, 105

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I have been arguing, serve to actualize the self’s awareness of the self and of space: games, as they function parabolically—that is, as they come to allegorize the self, its limitations and possibilities; as they come to allegorize the idea of trajectivity and spatiality—work, in a Brechtian sense, to alienate our common understanding, or ignoring, of the self and space. The self, its body, its movement through space, these are everyday banalities, things we radically take for granted. Games, by allegorizing the self, by telling stories of what it means to transect space, as such, bring us back, in an almost nostalgic way, to these fundamentals. And this is the crucial point: the gameworld makes being in the gameworld meaningful at every moment. And it is precisely the fact that every moment in the game is meaningful (not every moment in the real world is necessarily meaningful) that makes leaving it perfectly melancholic. Melancholy here thus does mean a kind of haunting by the idea of the plenitude of significance. This is to say that the withdrawal from the gameworld into the real world—the return to the real—is always marked by a conscious or unconscious (I think it operates at both levels) sense of what Samuel Beckett would call the lessness of this world. Freud will speak of the melancholic as being always in search of the lost ideal object; indeed the melancholic subject lives under “the shadow of the [lost] object” (“Mourning and Melancholia” 258). Here that ideal lost object is the gameworld itself: perfect, nonarbitrary, profoundly meaningful and thus conferring upon the subject the profound ability to see meaning, to perceive meaning, to inhabit meaning (where perhaps in the real world no such meaning exists). But the experience of gaming itself, if we follow Huizinga—and I do here—can be understood as being marked itself as melancholic given play’s a priori limitations, its temporary status. Part of the frisson of playing surely must derive from our knowledge, implicitly or explicitly, that play is defined as being only that, play; that play must, by definition, come to an end. Like beauty, play derives its resonance from the fact that it cannot last. It strikes me as accurate thus to suggest that playing marks itself as doubly negatively melancholic in this sense: there is loss as we leave the game, a longing for what was; there is a tacit sense of loss as we play the game, a knowledge that this will end. To be the posthuman, to become the posthuman, thus is a profoundly fragile state of being, insofar as that state is instantiated within the 106

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experience of gaming. At once liberatory and restricted, the state of being the posthuman is melancholic given its temporary nature. But it is melancholic also in the more precisely Freudian sense: for surely one of the effects of playing is the desire to return to the game. No serious gamer, in the midst of playing a game fervently, has not experienced that curious sense of being inhabited by the game when not playing it. We have all looked at this world and thought of it as a pale shadow of the gameworld; we have, perhaps, been in this world phenomenologically, but in the gameworld emotionally, psychologically, affectively. Gaming melancholy takes many forms of course, from a straight and simple desire to keep playing, to those moments when one finds oneself thinking about the game, pondering a particularly difficult task or obstacle, planning carefully one’s next move. What this means for me, of course, is that being posthuman is not a continual state of being: the dialectical nature of gaming—of being in the game, of being out—marks the posthuman, ontologically, as a state of becoming, rather than being.3 A further problem arises from this formulation: can becoming itself be described as a state? Is a state not a fixed mode of being, ontologically, chemically, physically, phenomenologically? Becoming would seem to imply a process that is itself not fixed, not static, not able to be partitioned, segmented, economized, and anatomized. How then does one understand, philosophically, what it means to be in a state of becoming? What does it mean thus to be thinking about the posthuman as becoming? Does this not imply that the idea itself is, in some profound way, unthinkable? And does this, the unthinkability of the idea of the posthuman, not add another level of melancholy to the entire project? I want to consider these questions, however briefly, as a means of offering a conclusion to this section of Parables of the Posthuman. In my discussion of the gamer-as-posthuman, I made reference to Deleuze and Guattari’s notions of the rhizome and deterritorialization. They make use of these concepts and metaphors to analyze the process by which any idea, being, subject, event, becomes decentralized, acentralized, fractured, and discontinuous: Unlike a structure, which is defined by a set of points and positions, with binary relations between the points and biunivocal relationships between the positions, the rhizome is made 107

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only of lines: lines of segmentarity and stratification as its dimensions, and the line of flight or deterritorialization as the maximum dimension after which the multiplicity undergoes metamorphosis, changes in nature . . . in contrast to centered (even polycentric) systems with hierarchical modes of communication and preestablished paths, the rhizome is an acentered, nonhierarchical, nonsignifying system without a general and without an organizing memory or central automaton, defined solely by a circulation of states. (21) My suggestion was that we begin to consider the gamer-avatar relationship as one that is rhizomatic, as one, precisely, that instantiates the event of deterritorialization: the gamer is neither here, nor there; he is materially in one place, psychologically in other; he is an event of extension and change. Another way of putting this, of course, is that the gamer/player, as the instantiation of the posthuman, is always already in a state of becoming: nether one thing nor another, he is liminal, unable to be fixed, defined, centered, or calibrated. As Deleuze and Guattari suggest, “in a becoming, one is deterritorialized” (291), and indeed their analysis of the state of becoming sounds remarkably similar to their analysis of the rhizome as such: But a line of becoming has neither beginning nor end, departure nor arrival, origin nor destination; to speak of the absence of origin, to make the absence of origin the origin is a bad play on words. A line of becoming has only a middle. The middle is not an average; it is fast motion, it is the absolute speed of movement. A becoming is always in the middle; one can only get at it by the middle. A beginning is neither one nor two, nor the relation of the two; it is the in-between, the order or line of flight or descent running perpendicular to both. If becoming is a bock (a line block), it is because it constitutes a zone of proximity and indiscernibility, a no-man’s-land, a non-localizable relation . . . (293) Here Deleuze and Guattari allow us to begin comprehending the ontology of the gamer philosophically. The gamer is not one, nor two, not even the relation between the one and two, the gamer and the game, the player and 108

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the avatar. The event of gaming is precisely that, the event of play which takes play between game and gamer, an event that casts the gamer into a curious position. Deleuze and Guattari call this “no-man’s-land,” and we would be hard-pressed to come up with a better metaphor, for surely this image—especially its military resonance—speaks to the inherent fragility of the position, the possible threat it directs to the idea of unity, stability, coherence. The position of the posthuman, as I argued above in “Posthuman Subjects,” does instantiate the theoretical model of nonbeing that Deleuze and Guattari (and others) posit: gaming calls into being a state of being in which the player’s ontology fades into pure becoming. But our melancholy as gamers surely does begin as we realize that this delirious state of becoming—in which the subject essentially escapes all definitional thresholds, in which the subject becomes other to himself, in which the subject transcends knowability—cannot be maintained. Deleuze and Guattari speak of becoming as not having beginning or end or origin. This, of course, is the tragedy of the posthuman subject as s/he comes into temporary being in gaming: s/he does have an origin, an inescapable origin, an all-too-human origin, an origin that can only be temporarily transcended in play, in the becoming of play. Becoming other inevitably devolves back into becoming what one was: the human subject, limited, centralized, fixed. But looking, always, to play.

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Postscript Play and the Archive Fallout 3, Crysis 2

about the economy of melancholy as it is instantiated in various ways in various games. Melancholy comes to define the affective position of central characters in several seminal games; and, as I have suggested, this affective position, phenomenologically, becomes the player’s own. Given my interest in the phenomenology of the play experience, it has been critical to be thinking primarily of the subjective positioning of the player in play, but I wish here, in this postscript, to examine how melancholy is thematized not merely as an existential, subjective position (for the character and the player) but as a spatial economy. My interest here is merely to outline a possible avenue for further analysis: the emergence of the posthuman within the space of catastrophe. I arrive at this idea, perhaps unsurprisingly, via Derrida’s reading of Freudian melancholy. We recall Derrida’s idea that melancholy essentially creates a crypt within the subject (The Ear of the Other): the melancholic subject, by internalizing her trauma and loss, is transformed into a space of loss, a catastrophic space. In what follows in my reading of the Derridean archive, I wish to suggest that the image of the catastrophic (posthuman) subject emerges often in digital games; often, crucially, this complex form of subjectivity—the subject inhabited, spatially, by loss—comes into being precisely as the character encounters the catastrophic devastation of his civilization. As the character traverses the space of devastation—I am thinking of the central figures in Fallout 3 and Crysis 2—as I have been speaking

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he encounters the archival traces of a lost civilization, the character himself becomes archived, encrypted by those traces. I have argued elsewhere that all archival spaces are a priori spaces of melancholy in the sense that they work actively to preserve some essential connection to loss: if melancholy is that affect which refuses to relinquish the past, an archive can be considered, spatially, to be the material expression and manifestation of the affect of loss.1 What I wish to examine briefly here is how an idea of the archive—as melancholy space—allows us to think about the various melancholy economies of gamespace and how, crucially, space begins to inform the emergence of the posthuman. Let us begin with Derrida. The archive is a location of knowledge, a place where history is housed, where the past is accommodated, preserved, and, as Derrida will suggest, supplemented. The archive is oriented to, just as it is defined by, a peculiar structure of temporality. Traditional conceptions of the archive conceive of it as a response, material or affective, to the past, but Derrida argues that the archive works, as a site of authority, to demarcate and map out the space of beginnings and futurity. Derrida notes that the etymology of “archive” itself indicates that the word means a place of commandment and commencement and thus a kind of control: Arkhe, we recall, names at once the commencement and the commandment. The name apparently coordinates two principles in one: the principle according to nature or history, there where things commence—physical, historical, or ontological principle— but also the principle according to the law, there where men and gods command, there where authority, social order are exercised, in this place from which order is given—nomological principle. (1)2 Crucial here is Derrida’s insistence on the spatial claims of the archive: it is a place—there, there—of geographical, topographical, reality. But this is a curious kind of space inasmuch as, according to Derrida, the archive works not only to preserve loss, but to anticipate loss, to, in a sense, prepare the grounds for loss that will inevitably occur. The temporality of the archive thus is remorselessly futural: “the archive takes place at the place of originary and structural breakdown of the said memory” (11); “the archive . . . is not only the place for stocking and for conserving 112

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an archivable content of the past . . . the technical structure of the archiving archive also determines the structure of the archivable content even in its very coming into existence and in its relationship to the future” (16). It is here, in the anticipation of what is to come, that the spectrality of the archive asserts itself: It is a question of the future, the question of the future itself, the question of a response, of a promise and of a responsibility for tomorrow. The archive: if we want to know what that will have meant, we will only know in times to come. Perhaps. Not tomorrow but in times to come, later on or perhaps never. A spectral messianicity is at work in the concept of the archive and ties it, like religion, like history, like science itself, to a very singular experience of the promise. (36) [T]he structure of the archive is spectral. It is spectral a priori: neither present nor absent “in the flesh,” neither visible nor invisible, a trace always referring to another whose eyes can never be met. (84) It is precisely the curious spectrality of the game-as-archive that concerns me here. And certainly it is not hard to see Metal Gear Solid 4 as operating within the conditions of a kind of spectrality: Snake’s dream and his arrival at Shadow Moses where he encounters memories (or real) voices of his past are marked as deeply spectral, deeply traumatic. It is perhaps possible to suggest thus that any game that contains markers of past memories of itself, markers of past spatial traces, can be thought of as being archival; thus Dragon’s Dogma’s or Ninja Gaiden’s spaces of devastation and return offer themselves as curious spaces of archival return. But this aspect of the archive—marking the spaces of past experiences—is not quite what I find crucial about the experience of some games that I am calling archival. I am here concerned with games that operate specifically in Derrida’s sense as proleptically oriented to the future. The archive, as Derrida insists, is about the future, is about some relation to futurity. And it is precisely because the future has yet to occur (or has always already yet to occur) that its archival economy is spectral, 113

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is ghosted. In what follows, in my reading of devastated spaces in Fallout 3 and Crysis 2, I wish to keep firmly in mind this notion of the game as archive of a spectral future. This spatial aspect of the game as archive, the game that plays out in the space of devastation, relates back to the idea of the catastrophic posthuman subject that I explored above. What is the relation between the spectrality of space in these games and the ontology of the posthuman subject? The subject as thematized within the game; the subject as real player in real space and real time? To begin, let me return once again to Derrida. In Archive Fever he begins to formulate the idea that the archive is grounded on a kind of anxiety of loss: the loss of memory, the loss of history, the loss of the very possibility of remembrance. Derrida’s strong contribution to thinking about the archive is that the archive functions as a marker of the inevitability of loss. Loss will occur, and therefore archive desire stands not only as a possibility of mitigating that loss (Derrida would argue that the archive does not in fact preserve the past but destroy it3) but precisely—and primarily—as a marker of the anticipation of loss. In my own work on the archive I have taken Derrida’s lead and argued that the archive may in fact best be understood as a space where the desire for loss is concretized, made manifest and reified.4 This idea may at first strike one as counterintuitive, not to say perverse, but surely it begins to make sense when we begin to unfold how certain popular cultural texts fetishize catastrophic and spectacular loss. One only has to call to mind the perverse spectacles of the destruction of, say, the White House in Independence Day or of New York in Cloverfield or The Day After, to understand the resonance of Walter Benjamin’s comment in “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction” where he laments the fact that humankind’s “selfalienation has reached such a degree that it can experience its own destruction as an aesthetic pleasure of the first order” (242). And surely the games I will look at here express this fetishistic delight in destruction. But can we not—should we not—complicate matters here and suggest, using our model of the archive, that there is more to these games than mere fetishistic delight in bringing about the end? Can we begin to see that there is a close connection between the spectacle of destruction and the spectacle of posthuman construction? Perhaps another, and better, way of putting this is that the posthuman—as image or reality—is grounded on loss, destruction and catastrophe. And thus we have circulated back to Virilio: “Nothing is gained without loss.” 114

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Fallout 3: Posthuman catastrophe. Fallout 3 (2008) and Crysis 2 (2011), on the surface, have little in common. While both are nominally shooters, Fallout 3 is an RPG while Crysis 2 is a first-person shooter in the classic sense. But both do share some crucial commonalities: both games take place in devastated—yet recognizable—spaces. Fallout 3 unfolds in the environs of a post-nuclear Washington, DC; Crysis 2 in post-alien-invasion New York. And thus while these games do trade in on a manipulation of space—the player is a traject/ flaneur in a classic sense, exploring various spaces—the games do rely on the player’s recognition of place as well. My purpose here is not necessarily to draw out a prolonged discussion of the distinction between place and space, but this binary certainly does have a long tradition.5 I take my lead here from Merleau-Ponty who draws a distinction between what he calls geometrical and anthropological spaces6 (see de Certeau 117). Geometrical space is what David Harvey refers to as Euclidean space: measurable, calculable, knowable; geometrical space is space in an abstract sense. Anthropological space, on the other hand, is human-inhabited, human-marked space: this is space, as Lefebvre might suggest, that is practiced. For my purposes the devastated Washington Monument in Fallout 3 is a space, of course, but because it has massive cultural and political resonance, it is a purely anthropological place.7 Perhaps this statement is too sharp but for now let it stand: only a place can instantiate and have an archival affect 115

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Crysis 2: Posthuman catastrophe. in the player; only a space that maintains what Benjamin would call an aura can move the player into a sense of response to history and loss. And of course one of my large suggestions here is that gamespace quickly becomes gameplace as soon as the player enters into it and begins to use it, practice it, make it known, make it archival, in the sense that it becomes a marked space of past use, past resonance. That is to say, Shadow Moses may not be a real space, like Washington or New York, but it becomes place as soon as it is played and replayed. Of course games like Fallout 3 and Crysis 2 arguably have more archival resonance, more archival aura, than a game like Metal Gear Solid 4, given the iconic status of the places they unfold for the player. Ken Hillis is correct in what he says about place in Digital Sensations: “our sense of place is memory qualified and deepened through imagination” (83). Hillis is not offering a reading of the digital space and the archive, but his idea that place unfolds between memory and imagination is the perfect way of describing how (1) the game makers have created the now devastated places of Washington and New York; that is, the games are imagined, real (thus occurring in memory) places; (2) the games rely on the player’s recognition of the real place (in memory) via the imagined space of devastation. What we need to explore, now, is what the affect of devastation has here, in terms of its relation to place, space, and the posthuman subject. 116

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Because in some crucial ways these places are posthuman places as much as they are places of spatial devastation. Let us just recall Derrida’s main contribution to archive theory: he contends that the archive is not oriented, necessarily and only, to the past; the archive is not, as he theorizes, a space of pure melancholy inasmuch as it attempts to recoup the past or maintain a strong connection to the past. According to Derrida, the archive’s temporal orientation is futural: it promises something for the future, it asks questions about the future, and the archive attends to the future. Perhaps the best way of understanding this at first counterintuitive notion is to cite Derrida again: “The technical structure of the archiving archive so determines the structure of the archivable content even in its coming into existence and in its relationship to the future. The archivization produces as much as it records the event” (17). It is this last sentence that is crucial. Here Derrida is suggesting that, yes, the archive maintains the record of the past event; the archive does contain history. But the structurality of the archive—the fact that it constructs itself as a container for this past event—articulates the means by which we understand the event. Derrida is not arguing that the archive a priori creates the event, but rather, like Hayden White, that an archive— as trace, record, text—structures the way we comprehend the event as such.8 But for Derrida this idea is not put forward simply to suggest that our understanding of the event is always determined by its retrospective structuring. Rather Derrida wishes to suggest that this structuring of the event continues into the future; the event, in short, never is complete, will never be complete. The present act of recording, of archiving, lends the event an endlessness. And, in my reading of Derrida, given this endlessness, the event can take on endless suggestiveness, endless possibility, thus: “A spectral messianicity is at work in the concept of the archive and ties it, like religion, like history, like science itself, to a very singular experience of the promise” (36). In what follows I want to tarry with this notion of the promise in relation to Fallout 3 and Crysis 2. I want to know how we can come to read the archivization that is occurring in these games. I want to begin to unfold how we may read the idea of promise here as a specific kind of perhaps perverse fulfillment of a desire for catastrophe and the concomitant transformation of the human subject. Are these games positing, perhaps, 117

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that radical spatial catastrophe is the pretext, the grounds, for the radical and sublime transformation of the human subject? Is posthumanism grounded in the devastation of space and place? To begin, let me state one of my premises for the analysis that follows: these games, Fallout 3 and Crysis 2, are not really (or do not have to be) what they appear to be about: survival in post-nuclear or post-invasion wastelands. We should read beyond the manifest pleasure principle at work here—shooting, leveling up, exploring—and see the games as what they are, parabolically. For surely the operational fantasy here is the fantasy of futural destruction; surely the fantasy here is the very idea of being in the space of after. The fantasy, in other words, is that of inhabiting the space of the devastated future using present knowledge of these places as map and guide. I am fascinated by how these games mobilize our present knowledge of these places as present day and futural archives simultaneously: we recognize, for instance, the Washington Monument in Fallout 3 because it speaks to our present-day knowledge of it; but as it comes to be marked as itself partially devastated and metonymically as monument to (and of) a devastated Washington tout court, the game sets up an uncanny temporality. Fallout 3 thus offers itself, in some complex sense, as an archive of events that have yet to occur; our knowledge and memory of what Washington looks like is mobilized within a futural space, that is to say, one that has yet to occur. Fallout 3 thus instantiates a peculiar affect: it is a realization of the Benjaminian fantasy of witnessing our own destruction as an aesthetic principle, and it places us in the curious position of anticipating that loss and that destruction.9 But because that loss has yet to occur we are placed in a spectral archival position: desiring loss, enjoying loss, realizing the fantasy of loss precisely as we play.10 And of course the concomitant aspect of this realization of loss—by which I mean that as we play the space of devastation comes into being: the game makers’ fantasy of witnessing our destruction, if only prolepetically, is instantiated—is the coming into being of the avatar/character whose status as posthuman fantasy now seems dependent on the fantasy of cultural devastation and loss. Within the first few minutes of Crysis 2, for instance—after an opening cinematic showing the devastating effects of the spread of some kind of deadly virus in New York (this leads to chaos and what appears to be some kind of military crackdown)—the player 118

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takes control of the avatar as his submarine (being deployed into New York) comes under alien fire; as he surfaces, the avatar witnesses the firebombing of New York and the partial destruction of the Statue of Liberty. I wish, in my reading of Fallout 3, to offer a reading of the link between the fantasy of becoming posthuman and the fantasy of societal and cultural devastation, but surely this one moment in Crysis 2 concretizes and reifies the point: as one of the most potent and iconic symbols of America (symbolizing freedom, security, individualism, and so on), the Statue of Liberty stands metonymically in some crucial ways for not only (American, possibly, world) culture but for the idea of the subject as such; surely one of the grounding ideological fantasies of American culture, with its dominant myths of heroic individualism, which can only be read logically an extension of the humanist fantasy itself, is the idea of the subject (the subject as self-producing, transparent to itself, responsible for itself). I find the image of the destruction of the Statue of Liberty, which comes immediately prior to the player assuming the position of the posthuman, cyborg, avatar, hugely telling if, as is perhaps to be expected in this fairly straightforward shooter, rather predictable. Something rather more subtle occurs in Fallout 3, as the player/character/avatar makes his/her way into the National Archive in Washington. Because Fallout 3 most obviously spatializes the relation between the archive and the subject, the game can be read as an explicit examination of—at one level—the spatial grounding of the posthuman subject. It is crucial to note how the game places the player in direct contact with the archive, literalized in the National Archives in Washington, DC. Part of what the player can choose to accomplish while in the archives is the discovery of several crucial manuscripts: the Magna Carta, the Declaration of Independence, and the Bill of Rights. The ostensible goal of finding these documents—turning them over to an NPC in exchange for a modest amount of money—is obviously only that, ostensible. For surely there is something important about the fact that these documents, preserved and in good condition, are housed within the completely devastated National Archives. This image— a destroyed building housing preserved documents—surely does speak to the idea that the archive is always already more than a simple architectural structure: the archive is an idea of preservation, an idea of accommodating—housing—traces and remnants of the past for a possible future. As 119

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Derrida suggests, we have a desire of the archive, a desire to instantiate the archive as such, given an ineluctable knowledge of the possibility that the past will be destroyed: “There would indeed be no archive desire without the radical finitude, without the possibility of a forgetfulness” (19). The archive, in other words, stands always at the point of destruction, as a site of the possibility of oblivion. In Fallout 3, of course, the contents of the archive are still preserved and thus we can read the image of the devastated National Archives as a perfect emblem of the idea of the futurity of the archive: the idea of the archive continues as the documents are placed in other hands. The archive, the idea of the archive, persists precisely into the future that Derrida posits as its central defining ontology. What is crucial about this aspect of the archive—its continuity into the future—is the manner in which it maps onto the avatar/player/character. Surely there is something significant in the fact that the documents preserved in the devastated Archive are documents speaking generally and specifically, to the idea of the subject as such. These documents exist in a curious, and delicate, temporality do they not? They speak to a past where the idea of rights—and the subject as such—were formed; but they exist in a time, this post-nuclear wasteland, where the idea of the subject, democratic, political, is evaporated absolutely. Moreover, as we have discussed, the dominant fantasy of the game, the assumption of an almost pure posthumanity, is at some odds with the fetishization of these documents. Surely the game is suggesting that these documents, so casually turned over for a paltry reward, no longer have any significance in this world of the emerging posthuman. But I wonder if as a concomitant to this archival futural fantasy, to this reduction of foundational documents to objects of exchange, is a fantasy of the posthuman subject who must rise to meet this new world. The world is devastated, but the subject is enhanced; the world is torn down, but the subject is built up into a new kind of human. But surely this new human, as I have suggested, carries always within it a trace—now we can call it an archival trace—of what was lost; a trace of the fantasy of being more; the posthuman subject, in other words, is always already a fantasy of loss (of the human, as such). And thus it is possible to suggest that an archival haunting inhabits the posthuman subject within the spaces of the now enhanced body. I will return to this idea presently—the idea of the posthuman as melancholy subject—but 120

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we need simply to acknowledge here the particular effectiveness of Fallout 3 in its thematizing both the desire for loss (of the human in the fetishizing of the enhanced and extended posthuman body) and for fetishizing that loss within spaces—Washington, DC; the National Archives—which speak precisely to a sense of nostalgia for what has been lost. Because one of the affects of this game arises from the tension between the gamer’s desire to be the enhanced posthuman and the deeply culturally nostalgic (and perhaps for some players nationalistic) sense of what we may term “loyalty” to the now lost world. The game’s canny placement of these various foundational documents within the space of devastation, even as they are treated merely as commodities (and even as the character within the game in a sense trades himself as a commodity), does speak to a melancholic—if anticipatory—desire precisely for those foundational texts that fashion the subject as subject.

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Conclusion It is a question of the future, the question of the future itself, the question of a response, of a promise and of a responsibility for tomorrow. Derrida, Archive Fever

I have attempted to demonstrate in this study, holds itself out to the player in a gesture of promise. Insofar as the game allows itself to stand as a site whereby a fantasy of being more than one is, we are in the condition of a promise; insofar as the game is delimited by the facticity of human reality—I must return to the real world—the game stands in the condition of a promise; insofar as the experience of sublime extension into other forms and ways of being is strictly limited temporally, philosophically, and structurally, the game, again, stands in the condition of the promise. We might say, to return to Heidegger yet again, that the game’s ultimate ontology is conditional: this, the game says, is what may be, at some point, at some time. Unlimited extension of the posthuman condition of being otherwise, insofar as this relation is defined between the human and the game, cannot be sustained. The posthuman position is, thus, only ever a promise, forever haunted by the structural necessity of a return to the world of the all-too-human, the player is by definition melancholic, looking always, perhaps, for the sustained mode of being the other that is not posthuman but something else entirely, something entirely new and unaccountable to this world, this reality.

The video game, as

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I have argued that the resonance of certain games resides in that game’s status as archive. A game like Fallout 3 or Crysis 2 achieves some of its emotional resonance by representing sites of recognizable devastation (Washington, DC; New York) and while, at one level, this destruction is ostensibly lamented, surely, I argued, the game insofar as it works to fetishize that loss, is working to preserve always that uncanny anticipatory nostalgia for what will be lost. An archival game, thus, is always already oriented to the future. And like Derrida’s archive, the archival game has something spectral about it, something uncanny that draws us toward a point of aporetic desire for catastrophe. I wonder if something like this, some desire for a future catastrophe, is always thematized by the video game, as such. I wonder, to return to my title, if the video game is always already acting as a parable for the posthuman future, a parable for an uncanny catastrophe that has yet to occur but is always ever occurring in the game. Because Virilio is surely correct in his suggestion that the posthuman figure is a figure of catastrophe; it, almost by definition, has to be given that the singularly situated human—this human in the real, un-cyborged, rooted in the temporal and spatial real that we all recognize—will have to be radically altered in order for the condition of posthumanity to emerge. And while the metaphors Virilio mobilizes to characterize the posthuman figure are troubling, there is a core of accuracy in his analysis; he speaks, we recall, of the citizen-terminal soon to be decked out to the eyeballs with interactive prostheses based on the pathological model of the “spastic,” wired to control his/her environment without having physically to stir: the catastrophic figure of an individual who has lost the capacity for immediate intervention along with natural motoricity and who abandons himself, for want of anything between, to the capacities of captors, sensors and other remote control scanners that turn him into a being controlled by the machine with which, they say, he talks. (20) But what Virilio perhaps fails to account for in his extensive analyses of the catastrophic posthuman is the very human desire to alter our ways of being, the very real desire to become other, and permanently. It is in 124

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Virilio’s blindness that he cannot come to terms with the fact that for some this reality—located, rooted, singular—may in fact be a terrible place to be, ontologically, socially, really. Thus what for me is truly poignant about Virilio’s analysis is the fact that his dark fantasy of the catastrophic posthuman is precisely not yet an achievable one: the fully catastrophic figure of the posthuman is only there as a figure of fantasy. And of course the game is, in my estimation, the primary place for the realization of this fantasy, even if only in temporally limited form, if only in, to be precise, parabolic form. Let us return to this idea of the parable. I have titled this study Parables of the Posthuman because it is my sense that the digital game, or, precisely, certain digital games, offers instances in which the condition of being the posthuman can be realized, temporarily. These games are parables because they (i) thematize what it might look like to be the posthuman: cyborged, extended, more than singularly human and (ii) enact, structurally, a coming-into-being of the poshuman: as the subject enters into the game, as s/he picks up the controller and merges with the logics and economies of being the avatar, a condition of the posthuman is realized. The act of playing the game enacts a version of posthumanity and offers itself, I would suggest, as a model of what being the posthuman might, eventually, look like. Games thus, in at least two potent ways, tell stories of what it means to be posthuman; more precisely, they tell stories of what being the posthuman could mean, will mean, may eventually mean. This is to say, the game enacts a fantasy not an actuality; the game is parabolic because while it tells a story of what it mean to be posthuman, it does not enact the posthuman in a sustained fashion. This is perhaps all to say that the game, at crucial levels, is oriented to a kind of radical futurity, a futurity that is central to all parabolic narratives. I am drawing here from two sources in order to make my final claims about the parabolic nature of the game. The first is J. Hillis Miller who, in his analysis of the parabolic nature of narrative in Tropes, Parables, Performatives indicates what is surely central to any parabolic narrative and to Christ’s originary stories. In his fascinating reading of Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, Miller makes a crucial introductory remark about the nature of the parable: Those things which have been kept secret from the foundation of the world will not be revealed until they have been spoken 125

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in parable, that is, in terms which the multitude who lack spiritual seeing and hearing nevertheless see and hear, namely, the everyday details of their lives of fishing, farming, and domestic economy. Though the distinction cannot be held too rigorously, if allegory tends to be oriented toward the past, toward first things, and towards the repetition of first things across the gap of a temporal division, parable tends to be oriented toward the future, toward last things, towards the mysteries of the kingdom of heaven and how to get there. (181) Miller’s analysis here should remind us of Derrida’s reading of the economy of the archive, which, as he states, is also oriented toward the future, a spectral kind of future because not yet realized. The parable, as for the archive, calls into being a potential for a possible state of futural being. Heidegger, of course, has always maintained the rigorously futural nature of being, to the point of suggesting that the human’s trajectory is a beingtowards-death. But surely we can take Heidegger’s larger point here as being crucial: being is not realized in the now, in the temporal as marked out by the conditions of a present state of things. Authentic being, for Heidegger, is defined, parabolically perhaps, as a potential in the future: By the term “futural” we do not here have in view a “now” which has not yet become “actual” and which sometime will be for the first time. We have in view the coming in which Dasein, in its ownmost potentiality-for-Being, comes towards itself. Anticipation make Dasein authentically futural, and in such a way that the anticipation itself is possible only in so far as Dasein, as being, is always coming towards itself—that is to say, in so far as it is futural in its Being in general. (373) I take Heidegger here to mean that the human’s true nature, its Dasein or being, is only realized at some point in the future, a point that, in some curious way, is only ever a realization of a present state of being that has not fully been recognized by the subject. I am reminded here of Blanchot’s notion of subjectivity without any subject: the condition of the posthuman, read along the lines of a Heideggerian anticipation of being, is a 126

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condition, a conditionality, a potential. The game holds the subject position of the posthuman up as a possibility, as a subjectivity to come, but there is no subject, yet, who is able to assume that position. Heidegger’s futurity, as may in fact be true of Blanchot’s figure of the subjectivity-less subject, in other words, is not necessarily an actual one: it is one always already a possibility given that being always is oriented toward some kind of future. On a practical level, and to ground this in the real that is the realization of the posthuman experience of gaming, I would suggest that Heidegger gives us a sense that authentic states of being are always already a kind of impossibility: being-towards-death is a state of being that is conditioned by the realization of the end, but the end itself—death—is never known and can never be known. In my sense of things, to read Heidegger parabolically, the condition of being-toward-the-posthuman has a similar impossible structure. We can realize aspects of what that state of being is—because in some sense we are always already posthuman; or, we can realize the posthuman fantasy within the game—but the authentic, permanent state of being the posthuman is always already to come.

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Introduction 1. I will be answering these questions in the affirmative, but with a proviso. Games rarely offer themselves as overt critiques of the conditions of play (or the conditions of capitalism which legislate play); it is the rare—and thus most valuable—game that unfolds as a self-conscious meditation on the implications of play: Hideo Kojima’s Metal Gear series does this, as does Deus Ex: Invisible War and Silicon Knights’ recent Too Human. 2. In a different philosophical register, Gray Kochhar-Lindgren argues that the idea of the posthuman, as such, is problematized by the fact that the human has always been “machinic,” subject to the real or ideal prosthesis (193–94). David Wills argues a similar point in his enigmatic, idiosyncratic Prosthesis. He suggests that a prosthetic economy haunts all forms of human discourse. Dongshin Yi’s A Geneaology of Cyborgothic offers a fascinating reading of the posthuman trope in the literary gothic and philosophy. 3. See my “Posthuman Melancholy: Digital Gaming and Cyberpunk” in Beyond Cyberpunk: New Critical Perspectives. 4. For a fascinating reading of the Niezschean elements of Haraway’s thought, see Casper Bruun Jensen and Evan Selinger’s “Distance and Alignment.” 5. In How We Became Posthuman, N. Katherine Hayles offers three assumptions characterizing the posthuman. The third is as follows: “the posthuman view thinks of the body as the original prosthesis we all learn to manipulate, so that extending or replacing the body with other prostheses becomes a continuation of a process that began before we were born” (3). We might here be reminded of Freud who, in Civilization and Its Discontents, writes: “when he puts on all his auxiliary organs he [‘man’] is truly magnificent.” He further writes, in a sentence that anticipates the relation between posthuman extension and the sublime, “Man has, as it were, become a kind of prosthetic God” (280).

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6. Gadamer is, of course, writing in partial response to Johan Huizinga’s Homo Ludens, a text crucial for its anthropological analysis of play. I address Huizinga in more detail in Part One, but it should be noted here that Gadamer’s notion of the “seriousness” of play is adapted from Huizinga’s reading of play as an expression of order within the chaos of quotidian experience: “Inside the playground an absolute and peculiar order reigns. Here we come across another, very positive feature of play: it creates order, is order. Into an imperfect world and into the confusion of life it brings a temporary, a limited perfection” (29). I am especially interested in teasing out the implications of Huizinga’s notion of the temporary nature of play: play takes on its resonance precisely because we know it will end; if an entry into play is a condition of becoming the posthuman this means, of course, that the posthuman condition too is temporary and limited. 7. For an analysis of play in a different theoretical register see Ruggill and McAllister who suggest that games, from the frenetic to the more “Zen-like,” are demanding of the player’s attention: “players not only play computer games but are also in fact played by them in equal measure. This insistency, rather than player input, is ultimately what drives gameplay and keeps players interested and immersed” (9). 8. Freud was the first to notice how the economy of trauma negated the self’s understanding of itself in relation to history and thus to experience that essentially forms subjectivity (Beyond the Pleasure Principle).

Preamble 1. I acknowledge the risk here that I am perhaps underestimating the phenomenological experience of literature and film; this is not my intention. Phenomenological readings of the film experience critically suggest the intimate connection between spectator and film. For instance In her reading of Vivian Sobchack’s The Address of the Eye (discussed above) Laura Marks suggests that the phenomenological experience of reading a film enacts a similarly specular relation between text and reader: In theories of embodied spectatorship, such as Sobchack’s, the relation between spectator and film is fundamentally mimetic, in that meaning is not solely communicated through signs but experienced in the body. The phenomenological model of subjectivity posits a mutual permeability and mutual creation of self and other. Cinema spectatorship is a special example of this unfolding of self and world, an intensified instance of the way our perceptions open us onto the world. Sobchack’s phenomenology of cinematic experience stresses the interactive character of film viewing. If one understands film viewing as an exchange

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between two bodies—that of the viewer and that of the film—then the characterization of the film viewer as passive, vicarious, or projective must be replaced with a model of a viewer who participates in the production of the cinematic experience. (14–15) Marks’s sense of the film viewer as active, as the subject who produces meaning in the exchange with the film, can easily be transposed to an understanding of the player (as avatar) for it is equally true of the game player that she produces and uncovers meaning as she tracks through the game. And while both Sobchack and Marks emphasize the bodily element of the production of meaning (through the dialogical relation with the film), I wish to argue that the phenomenology of gaming and game experience involves the body at a more immediate level precisely because the player can control the trajectory of the avatar’s movement (we cannot argue the same for an experience of film; film is, in this sense, more dictatorial in terms of the body’s possibilities than the game); moreover, the player of a video game employs more than her eyes as she plays; her hands must activate the movement of the avatar; she can experience a physical response to movement through force feedback in her controller; increasingly, as seen with the Xbox’s Kinect system, at times the entire body and its movements are woven into the experience of gaming. This, simply, is a different kind of phenomenological experience than reading a novel or viewing a film. 2. Shelley writes: “A man, to be greatly good, must imagine intensely and comprehensively; he must put himself in the place of another and of many others; the pains and pleasures of his species must become his own” (596). 3. For an amusing analysis of the tutorial section of Fallout 3, see Zach Waggoner’s My Avatar, My Self. 4. Of course, the ultimate force controlling Freeman is the player. I am ultimately responsible for calling him into being.

Posthuman Subjects 1. One can choose, by clicking the left joystick button on the Xbox 360 controller, shift into a third-person view in Fallout 3. The result, however, is laughably awkward as the character models look horrendously primitive: aiming, shooting, and fighting is also hampered in this view. Most players tend to favor the first-person view. 2. I still find Iain Chambers’s definition of the posthuman extremely useful: “To accept the idea of the post-human means to register limits; limits that are inscribed in the locality of the body of history, the power and the knowledge that speaks” (26). For a useful summary of Hayles’s view of the posthuman

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subject, see Anthony Miccoli’s Posthuman Suffering and the Technological Embrace. 3. Cary Wolfe’s definition of the posthuman is apposite here: “posthumanism names a historical moment in which the decentering of the human by its imbrication in technical, medical, informatic, and economic networks is increasingly impossible to ignore, a historical development that points toward the necessity of new theoretical paradigms (but also thrusts them on us), a new mode of thought that comes after the cultural represssions and fantasies, the philosophical protocols and evasions, of humanism as a historically specific phenomenon” (xvi). Elaine Graham makes essentially the same point in Representations of the Post/human: “In challenging the fixity of ‘human nature’ in this way, the digital and biotechnological age engenders renewed scrutiny of the basic assumptions on which matters such as personal identity, the constitution of community, the grounds of human uniqueness and the relationship between body and mind are founded” (2). For a fascinating analysis of posthumanism in another register entirely, see K. Michael Hays’s Modernism and the Posthumanist Subject. Hays analyzes modernist architecture in an effort to see within it an emergence of an idea of the posthuman; posthumanism is defined thusly: “the conscious response, whether with applause or regret, to the dissolution of psychological autonomy and individualism brought by technological modernization; it is a mobilization of aesthetic practices to effect a shift away from the humanist concept of subjectivity and its assumptions about originality, universality, and authority” (6). 4. Haraway, however, curiously repudiates this reading in an interview published in Chasing Technoscience: “I think that as an oppositional figure the cyborg has a rather short half-life, and indeed for the most part, cyborg figurations, both in technical and popular culture, are not and have never been oppositional, or liberatory” (52). Sue Short notes the utopian aspect of Haraway’s thinking on the cyborg and adds that despite Haraway’s theory working towards a liberation from confining definitions of the human, the cyborg, as such, as it is figured in media and theory, still evidences a nostalgia for the human (Cyborg Cinema). 5. Kate O’Riordan usefully mobilizes Haraway’s model of the cyborg in her reading of the Tomb Raider games, “Playing with Lara in Virtual Space.” (For another reading of Lara Croft, see Sidney Eve Matrix’s Cyberpop, 121–35). 6. Although written in a different theoretical register, Torbel Grodal’s essay “Stories for Eye, Ear, and Muscles” offers a useful reading of the economy of repetition in video games: “In several respects, video games provide an aesthetic of repetition, similar to that of everyday life. . . . The video game experience is very much similar to such an everyday experience of learning and controlling by repetitive rehearsal” (148).

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7. I am intrigued by Elizabeth Grosz’s analysis of space in Space, Time, and Perversion, where she offers what is essentially a Heideggerian reading of the relation between space and subjectivity: “It is our positioning within space, both as the point of perspectival access to space, and also as an object for others in space, that gives the subject a coherent identity and an ability to manipulate things, including its own body parts, in space. However, space does not become comprehensible to the subject by its being the space of movement; rather, it becomes space through movement, and as such, it acquires specific properties from the subject’s constitutive functioning in it” (92). How can identity emerge within virtual space? 8. Ann Weinstone’s Avatar Bodies: A Tantra for Posthumanism offers an eccentric, yet fruitful, reading of the idea of the avatar. 9. There are many variations of this idea in contemporary theory. I will cite Blanchot from The Space of Literature: “What is a book no one reads? Something that is not yet written. It would seem, then, that to read is not to write the book again, but to allow the book to be” (193). 10. It is also worth mentioning that some game companies license technology from other sources: the Unreal game engine, for instance, is licensed to a great number of game developers. 11. For an explicitly political reading of the Deleuzian-Guattarian model of the subject, see Gerald Raunig’s A Thousand Machines. 12. Deleuze and Guattari’s psychoanalysis is an attempt to move past what they see as the restrictive dependence in Freud on normative concepts (the Oedipal Complex being the primary) that reduce the complexity, the multiplicity, of the subject. 13. Erika Cudworth and Stephen Hobden use what is essentially a DeleuzianGuattarian model of complexity in their analysis of the geopolitical posthuman subject (3). In his discussion of “morphing,” philosopher Don Ihde suggests that contemporary technologies invent the posthuman in a culture of “bricolage, where boundaries and distinctions are blurred, parts interchanged, hybrids produced” (12–13). 14. See my essays “Posthuman Melancholy: Digital Gaming and Cyberpunk” and “Borges and the Trauma of Posthuman History.” I speak also of the relation between conceptions of the posthuman and the work of Samuel Beckett in Beckett: A Guide for the Perplexed. 15. I am not using the term arbitrary here to mean “random” or “chaotic”; the Latin root of the word means “to judge.” That is, someone has judged, not randomly, that these are the paths I must follow; these are the rules that I cannot help but follow. 16. Verfremdungseffekt, or alienation-effect, is a theatrical and acting technique developed by playwright, and Marxist, Bertold Brecht. The techniques of the 133

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Verfremdungseffekt are various but usually involve the play asserting an awareness of its own constructedness. Brecht would, for instance, project the major plot details on a screen before the actual acts; the actors would signal, by drawing attention to gesture and movement, that they were not “really” the character they were playing but were only, precisely, actors. Brecht describes the implications of the actor’s manipulation of the alienation-effect thusly: “The actor does not allow himself to become completely transformed on the stage into the character he is portraying. He is not Lear, Harpagon, Schweik; he shows them. He reproduces their remarks as authentically as he can; he puts forward their way of behaving to the best of his abilities and knowledge of men; but he never tries to persuade himself (and thereby others) that this amounts to a complete transformation” (137). Brecht mobilized the alienation-effect for political reasons: he asserted that his purpose as a playwright was not to entertain, was not to allow his audiences to be distracted from political realities (injustice, economic brutalization, war). His theatrical techniques were designed to keep the audience alert and critical of the events they were witnessing. The Verfremdungseffekt, a technique that aimed at making the play uncanny, worked to keep the audience aware that they were always only watching a play in which behaviors were represented and thus not natural or naturalized: “Characters and incidents from ordinary life, from our immediate surroundings, being familiar, strike us as more or less natural. Alienating them helps to make them seem remarkable to us. . . . A critical attitude on the audience’s part is a thoroughly artistic one” (140). 17. See my “Posthuman Melancholy: Digital Games and Cyberpunk” for an extended analysis of Deus Ex: Invisible War. 18. NES system (1987). 19. Snake is one of three clones of the ultimate warrior, Big Boss (the main character of Metal Gear Solid 3); the two other clones, Liquid and Solidus, pose various threats to Snake, and world peace, as the game series unfolds. Solidus is killed in Metal Solid 2; Liquid is killed in Metal Gear Solid, but his spirit lives on—and his personality occasionally emerges from within—another character, Ocelot, who grafted Liquid’s arm to his own body. This emergent subject, known as Liquid Ocelot, is the primary opponent in Metal Gear Solid 2 and Metal Gear Solid 4. 20. MSX2 system (1990). 21. PlayStation 1 (1998). 22. PlayStation 2 (2001). 23. PlayStation 2 (2004). 24. PSP (2010). 25. PlayStation 3 (2008).

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26. Snake is prematurely aged because he is a clone specifically designed—like the replicants in Blade Runner—to have a limited life span. 27. There is, of course, no camera in a game but merely the illusion that what is shown has been filmed. I discuss Kojima’s remediation of film techniques in what follows. 28. Lens flare, admittedly, is a bit of a cliché by now; the Halo games were responsible for overplaying its dramatic, filmic qualities. 29. I am borrowing the term “remediation” from Bolter and Grusin who read new digital media as deriving their semiological power and resonance from essentially recrafting early media (film, television, painting). As many fans, and critics, of Kojima have noted, the Metal Gear Solid games, with their occasional florid cutscenes, at times read more like film than digital games. For a full analysis of remediation, see Remediation: Understanding New Media. Robert Brookey’s Hollywood Gamers offers a useful reading of the relationship between the digital game and the Hollywood film (curiously without mentioning Bolter and Grusin). For specific commentary on the Metal Gear Solid series and the frustrations with cutscenes, see Phillip D. Dean’s “Interactivity, Inhabitation and Pragmatist Aesthetics.” 30. “Pliskin” of course is the name of a character from John Carpenter’s Escape from New York (1981), a film that Kojima cites as a major influence. 31. Genetic material from Naked Snake (Big Boss) was combined with the egg from a Japanese donor (actually, the assistant to the doctor performing the procedure); the procedure produces Snake, Liquid, and Solidus. 32. Kojima in fact often places images of himself into his games; he will at times have his name appear on screen, as if to remind us who really is in control here. 33. For another view of Gadamer’s importance to an understanding of play, see Ian Bogost’s Unit Operations (116). 34. Although Virilio is curiously absent from his analysis, David Dinello turns a similarly jaundiced eye on the relation between technology and the subject in Technophobia! 35. See Peter Dallow’s brief discussion of Virilio in “Digital Media as Simulation of the Analogical Mind.” 36. The politics of this moment are unclear: is this a lament for lost political power or a (perhaps perverse) celebration of that loss? 37. Snake’s aging may also reflect the aging of the actual gamer.

Posthuman Melancholy 1. In “Melancholy and the Act,” Slavoj Žižek characterizes this reading of melancholy: “In the process of loss, there is always a remainder that cannot be integrated through the work of mourning, and the ultimate fidelity is the fidelity to this remainder: Mourning is a kind of betrayal, the second killing

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of the (lost) object, while the melancholic subject remains faithful to the lost object, refusing to renounce his or her attachment to it” (658). 2. See my “Virtual Bodies; or, Cyborgs are People Too.” 3. Joel Garreau employs the term “transhuman” in his effort to characterize this process of becoming. In Garreau’s thought, a state of posthumanism, as such, has yet to be reached: the subject, thus, as being in a state of change can only ever be transhuman (231).

Postscript 1. See my Melancholy and the Archive: Trauma, History, and Memory in the Contemporary Novel. 2. In The Archaeology of Knowledge, Michel Foucault defines the archive in terms that draw attention to the archive as a system of authority. For Foucault, the archive does not consist of the texts a culture organizes to make sense of itself, nor is it the physical structures housing the various documents of a culture. Rather, the archive is “first the law of what can be said, the system that governs the appearance of statements as unique events” (145). The archive is a system of thought that, according to Foucault, precedes and exceeds (and thus eclipses) the physical and metaphysical presuppositions of the idea of the archive: “it [the archive] is the general system of the formation and transformation of statements” (146). Didier Maleuvre continues from Foucault and notes: “the museum takes part in the process of societal rationalization that controls beings by immobilizing their identity, or by simply postulating an identity” (11). 3. Derrida argues that the impulse to archive—what he calls “archive fever”— does not, in fact work to preserve history, or some sense of the past, but serves, rather, to displace the event of history into its representation: “The archivization produces as much as it records the event” (17). The impulse to archive always carries within itself an implicit acknowledgement that it is a direct response to the threat of the loss of history; archive fever, in other words, is only deeply reactive. Moreover, and fatally, archive fever is a reaction to loss that cannot properly be accommodated: Because the archive, if this word or this figure can be stabilized so as to take on a signification, will never be either memory or anamnesis as spontaneous, alive and internal experience. On the contrary: the archive takes place at the place of originary and structural breakdown of the said memory. (11) 4. See my Melancholy and the Archive: Trauma, History, and Memory in the Contemporary Novel. 5. Michel de Certeau’s discussion of place in The Practice of Everyday Life is useful: “[Place] is an endpoint of a trajectory. It is not a state, an initial flaw or grace, 136

Notes

but something which comes into being, the product of a process of deviation from rule-governed and falsifiable practices, an overflowing of the common in a particular position” (5). 6. See de Certeau, 117. 7. Geographer Yi-Fu Tuan puts this perfectly: “‘Space’ is more abstract than ‘place.’ What begins as undifferentiated space becomes place as we get to know it better and endow it with value” (6). Yi-Fu Tuan is, incidentally, useful for thinking about how games might deny the player the opportunity to transform space into place, to make space knowable. Surely in what he says here we are reminded of how some games make the contemplation of space a punishable act: “if we think of space as that which allows movement, then place is pause; each pause in movement makes it possible for location to be transformed into place” (6). Eric Hayot and Edward Wesp make good use of Yi-Fu Tuan in “Towards a Critical Aesthetic of Virtual-World Geographies.” For a specifically Heideggerian reading of place, see Malpas’s Heidegger’s Topology; see also Helen Thornham’s discussion of space and place in Ethnographies of the Videogame (94 ff). 8. Hayden White argues much the same position in Metahistory: The Historical Imagination in Nineteenth-Century Europe. White’s task here is to outline how historical records of events are marked, shaped, and formed by certain generic restraints. An historical text, in other words, is not an innocent record of an event, but has come to that event with biases, prejudices, and a conception of that event’s place in a larger structure of history. White does not argue that history, as such, is irrecoverable or that the historical event does not (or did not) take place, but rather that historians shape history in the manner that novelists shape narratives to particular ends. In his introduction, White suggests that his purpose is to “consider the historical work as what it most manifestly is—that is to say, a verbal structure in the form of a narrative prose discourse that purports to be a model, or icon, of past structures and processes in the interest of explaining what they were by representing them” (2, italics in original). 9. I am reminded here of Susan Sontag’s essay “The Imagination of Disaster” and her discussion of the pleasure of watching films that represent massive scenes of destruction: “In the films it is by means of images and sounds, not words that have to be translated by the imagination, that one can participate in the fantasy of living through one’s own death and more, the death of cities, the destruction of humanity itself . . . the science fiction film . . . is concerned with the aesthetics of destruction, with the peculiar beauties to be found in wreaking havoc” (119). 10. While he does not specifically address the ethics of anticipating catastrophe, Marcus Schulzke discusses the complex relation between apocalypse and (a certain kind of) morality in “Moral Decision Making in Fallout.”

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Italicized page numbers refer to illustrations

Abraham, Nicholas, 96, 100 aesthetics: of apocalypse, 85, 114, 118; gaming as aesthetic theory put into practice, 26–27; of repetition, in video games, 132n6 alienation: modern interest in apocalyptic scenarios and, 85, 114; of player, 46, 47, 50, 55–57, 61 allegory, gaming as, 5, 40–43, 106 Althusser, Louis, “Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses,” 40–41, 42 anthropological space, 115–16 apocalypse. See catastrophe and apocalypse archive, 111–21, 124; in Crysis 2, 111, 114–19, 116, 124; Derrida on, 111–14, 124; in Fallout 3, 111, 114–21, 115, 124; Foucault on, 136n2; futurity of, 112–14, 117–20, 124; as melancholy space, 111–12, 120–21; in Metal Gear Solid 4, 113, 116; spectrality of, 113–14, 120; structuring of, 117 Artaud, Antonin, 37 avatars: birth into consciousness, 17–24; as both fiction and social

reality, 7–8; as cyborgs, 4–5, 30–34; game as utopian space and, 8; as medial point between subjectivity of player and game, 62–64; nature of, 34–40; as opposite of Renaissance humanist concept of self, 39–40; as rhizomes, 36–40, 57; as uncanny, 26, 32–33, 37. See also player-avatar relationship Barthes, Roland, 105 Battlestar Galactica (TV show), 7 Baudrillard, Jean, The Vital Illusion, 91–92, 94 Beckett, Samuel, 106, 133n14 becoming, posthumanism as state of, 107–9 beginnings of games, 17–24 Benjamin, Walter, “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction,” 25, 85, 114, 116, 118 BioShock (game): challenging concept of unified self, 2; critique of conditions of play offered by, 45–47; illusion of freedom in, 43–47; loss in, 99; methodology of genre and 145

Index

utopian space and, 8; Haraway’s utopian view of, 7, 8, 10, 27, 30–32, 33–34, 132n4; prosthetic sublime and, 64 Cylons, 7

game choice, 14, 15; player-avatar relationship in, 40, 43–47, 56; prosthetic sublime in, 64, 67–71, 70, 77–78; thematization of biomodifications in, 5 birth into posthumanism in games’ beginnings, 17–24 Blade Runner (movie), 7, 135n26 Blanchot, Maurice, 4, 12–14, 26, 38–39, 94, 126–27; The Space of Literature, 133n9; The Writing of the Disaster, 12 Brecht, Bertold, 5, 46, 48, 50, 94, 96, 106, 133–34n16 bricolage, 133n13

Dark Souls (game), 29 Dasein, 18, 23, 126 Day After, The (film), 114 de Certeau, Michel, The Practice of Everyday Life, 115, 136–37n5 Deleuze, Gilles, and Félix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, 4, 36–40, 107–9, 133n11–13 Demon’s Souls (game), 34, 35 Derrida, Jacques, 111–14, 117, 120, 123, 126; Archive Fever, 114, 124, 136n3; The Ear of the Other, 100–101, 111 Descartes, René, 27 deterritorialization and deterritorialized subject, 36–39, 107–8 Deus Ex: Human Revolution (game), 4, 5, 80, 84, 86, 95 Deus Ex: Invisible War (game), 6, 31, 48, 64, 80, 129n1, 134n17 dialogue, Gadamer’s analysis of, 61–66 digital gaming. See gaming and the posthuman experience disability, Virilio’s model of, 82–84 Doom 3 (game), 73 doubling, repetition, and the uncanny, 32–33 Dragon’s Dogma (game), 113

Call of Duty series (game), 54 catastrophe and apocalypse, 80–98; disability model of, 82–84; ending, thematization of, 84–86; essential humanity of the posthuman revealed by, 82, 86, 88, 90, 97; in Metal Gear Solid series, 86–97, 89, 92; player-avatar relationship in, 94–95; possibility model of, 84; prosthetic sublime, relationship to, 67, 79–80; revelatory aspects of, 84–86, 96–97; subjectivity and, 80–86; Virilio on, 80, 82–85, 91, 95, 96 Chambers, Iain, 131n2 clones and cloning, 49–50, 53, 80, 87, 89–95, 97, 134n19, 135n26 Cloverfield (film), 114 Conrad, Joseph, Heart of Darkness, 125 Crysis 2 (game): archive in, 111, 114–19, 116, 124; catastrophe and apocalypse in, 80, 84, 85, 86, 95; instantiation of posthuman narrative by, 4; loss in, 99; methodology of genre and game choice, 14, 15; prosthetic sublime in, 64, 75–80, 76 Cudworth, Erika, 133n13 cyborgs: avatars as, 4–5, 30–34; as both fiction and social reality, 31–32; feminism and, 31–32, 34; game as

Eng, David, 102 Escape from New York (film), 135n30 ethics and morality in gaming: apocalypse and, 137n10; birth into the posthuman and, 20, 22; melancholy and, 102; player-avatar relationship and, 5, 27, 35, 38, 44–45, 55; posthuman extension, ethical implications of, 14; prosthetic sublime and, 77

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Fallout 3 (game): archive in, 111, 114–21, 115, 124; beginning as birth of the posthuman, 15, 18–21, 19, 23; catastrophe and apocalypse in, 84–86; challenging concept of unified self, 2; Halo 3 compared, 75; methodology of genre and game choice, 15; player-avatar relationship in, 25, 28, 34, 35; shift to thirdperson view in, 131n1 fantasy and gaming. See gaming and the posthuman experience feminism and the cyborg, 31–32, 34 film, phenomenological experience of, 130–31n1 Foucault, Michel, 27; The Archaeology of Knowledge, 136n2 freedom, player-avatar relationship and illusion of, 26, 43–47 Freud, Sigmund, and Freudianism: Beyond the Pleasure Principle, 6, 130n8; Civilization and Its Discontents, 25, 129n5; Deleuze and Guattari, antiFreudianism of, 37, 133n12; The Ego and the Id, 100; in genealogy of posthumanism, 6–7; on melancholy, 90, 99–103, 106, 107, 111; “Mourning and Melancholia,” 99–100, 106; on trauma, 13; on the uncanny, 23, 24, 32–33, 37 futurity: of archive, 112–14, 117–20, 124; of being, 126–27; of gaming, 14, 124, 125–26; of parables, 3–4, 124, 125–26 Gadamer, Hans-Georg, Truth and Method, v, 11, 60–66, 84, 102–4, 130n6, 135n33 gaming and the posthuman experience, 1–16, 123–27; archive and, 111–21, 124 (See also archive); birth into posthumanism in games’ beginnings, 17–24; catastrophe and apocalypse, 80–98 (See also catastro-

phe and apocalypse); conceptualized as pathology or utopia, 7–11, 27, 30–32, 45, 82–84, 124–25; definition of posthuman, 27–28, 131n2, 132n3; film experience compared, 130–31n1; genealogy of posthumanism and, 6–7; instantiation of posthuman being through gaming, 2–5; melancholy and, 99–109, 123 (See also melancholy); methodology of genre, game choice, and playing subject, 14–16; parabolic nature of, 2–3, 46–47, 106, 124, 125–26; philosophical importance of gaming, 1–2; player-avatar relationship, 25–58 (See also player-avatar relationship); as practical realization of theoretical models, 4, 11–14, 26–27; as promise, 117, 123; prosthetic sublime, 40, 58–80 (See also prosthetic sublime) Garreau, Joel, 136n3 Geworfenheit (thrownness), 18 Graham, Elaine, Representations of the Post/human, 132n3 Grodal, Torbel, “Stories for Eye, Ear, and Muscles,” 132n6 Grosz, Elizabeth, Space, Time and Perversion, 133n7 Guattari, Félix: Chaosmosis, 67; A Thousand Plateaus (with Gilles Deleuze), 4, 36–40, 107–9, 133n12 Half-Life and Half-Life 2 (game): as allegory of interpellation, 40–43, 42; beginning as birth of the posthuman, 22–23; catastrophe and apocalypse in, 80, 95; Halo compared, 75; loss in, 99; meaningfulness of objects in, 105; methodology of genre and game choice, 14, 15; player-avatar relationship in, 25, 40–43, 42, 45–46, 48, 56; third-person games compared, 73

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Index

Husserl, Edmund, 15–16

Halo and Halo 3 (game), 14, 15, 39, 73–75, 74, 80, 135n28 Haraway, Donna: beginnings of games and birth of cyborg, 19; on cyborg as oppositional figure, 132n4; gaming putting theories into practice, 4; “A Manifesto for Cyborgs,” 7, 8, 10, 27, 30–32, 33–34; player-avatar relationship and, 27, 30–32, 33–34, 37, 39, 40; Tomb Raider games and cyborg model of, 132n5 Harvey, David, 115 Hayles, N. Katherine, 4, 12, 131–32n2; How We Became Posthuman, 27–30, 129n5 Hays, K. Michael, Modernism and the Posthumanist Subject, 132n3 Hayter, David, 90 Heavy Rain (game), 21–23, 26 Hegel, G. W. F., Aesthetics, 26 Heidegger, Martin: Being and Time, 18, 85–86; birth into posthumanism in games’ beginnings and, 18, 20, 23–24; catastrophe and apocalypse, 83, 85–86; conditional ontology of game and, 123; Dasein, concept of, 18, 23, 126; on futurity of being, 126–27; phenomenological model of, 15; place, Heideggerian reading of, 137n7; “The Question Concerning Technology,” 65–66; space and subjectivity, Heideggerian reading of relation between, 133n7; on thrownness (Geworfenheit), 18; on The uncanny, 23–24 hermeneutical encounter/conversation, 62–64, 84 hermeneutics of suspicion, 6 Hobden, Stephen, 133n13 Hoffmann, E. T. A., “The Sand-Man,” 32–33 Huizinga, John, Homo Ludens, 104–5, 106, 130n6 humanity of the posthuman, 82, 86, 88, 90, 97

Ico (game), 73 Ihde, Don, 133n13 Independence Day (film), 114 interpellation, Half-Life 2 as allegory of, 40–43, 42 Kazanjian, David, 102 Kermode, Frank, The Genesis of Secrecy, 3 Kochhar-Lindgren, Gray, 129n2 Kojima, Hideo: catastrophe and apocalypse in games of, 86–88, 90, 92–95, 97; film remediation techniques of, 51, 54, 135n27, 135n29–30; images of, in games, 135n32; player-avatar relationship and, 48, 50–51, 53, 54–56, 57, 61. See also Metal Gear Solid series Levinas, Emmanuel, Totality and Infinity, 37, 38 Longinus, Peri Lupsous (On the Sublime), 64, 66, 72, 73 loss. See archive; catastrophe and apocalypse; melancholy loss of self in play, 11–13, 61, 66, 104 Mad Max films, 85 Maleuvre, Didier, 136n2 Marks, Laura, 130–31n1 Mass Effect (game), 2, 14, 71–73, 74–75, 95 McAllister, Ken S., 130n7 McCarthy, Cormac, The Road, 85 McLuhan, Marshall, Understanding Media, 8–9, 10, 59–61 meaningfulness of gaming, 62–64, 105–6 melancholy, 99–109, 123; becoming, posthumanism as state of, 107–9; of catastrophic subject, 81, 96–97; Derrida on, 100–101, 111–12; of essential humanity of

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the posthuman, 82, 86, 88, 90, 97; Freudian understanding of, 90, 99–103, 106, 107, 111; Gadamer’s play theory and, 103–4; limited, temporary, and melancholic nature of gaming itself, 29–30, 34, 68, 99, 106–7, 123; mourning versus, 100, 102, 135–36n1; perfection and meaningfulness of gameworld and, 104–6; posthumanism as essentially melancholic position, 81–82, 106–7; sense of becoming other and, 95; as spatial economy, 111–12, 120–21; transfer of melancholy from avatar to player, 81; Žižek on, 135–36n1 Merleau-Ponty, M., 15, 58–59, 115 Metal Gear Solid series (game): archive in, 113, 116; catastrophe and apocalypse in, 86–97, 89, 92; critique of conditions of play offered by, 47–48, 50–56, 51, 52, 91, 94, 129n1; filmic techniques in, 51, 54–55, 135n27– 30; foregrounding of weakness of avatar in, 78; loss in, 99; methodology of genre and game choice, 14; narrative arc of, 48–50, 134n19; player-avatar relationship and, 40, 47–58, 51, 52 Miller, J. Hillis, Tropes, Parables, Performances, 3, 125–26 Mitchell, David, Cloud Atlas, 85 Modern Warfare (game), 26 morality. See ethics and morality in gaming Moravec, Hans, Mind Children, 27 morphing, 133n13 mourning, versus melancholy, 100, 102, 135–36n1 negative sublime, 84 Nietzsche, Friedrich, Anti-Christ and Twilight of the Gods, 6–7, 8 Ninja Garden (game), 113

O’Riordan, Kate, 132n5 parable of the posthuman, gaming as, 2–3, 46–47, 106, 124, 125–26 pathology or utopia, posthumanism conceptualized as, 7–11, 27, 30–32, 45, 82–84, 124–25 perfection of gameworld, 104–6 play theory, 11–13, 60–61, 63, 66, 103–4, 130–31n6 player-avatar relationship, 25–58; alienation of player, 46, 47, 50, 55–57, 61; as allegory of interpellation, 40– 43, 42; in BioShock, 40, 43–47, 56; in catastrophe and apocalypse, 94–95; critique of conditions of play offered by games and, 45–48, 50–56, 51, 52; in Half-Life 2, 25, 40–43, 42, 45–46, 48, 56; Haraway’s utopian view of cyborgs and, 27, 30–32; Hayles’s reading of the posthuman and, 27–30; illusion of freedom in, 26, 43–47; limited, temporary, and melancholic nature of, 29–30, 34, 68; medial point between subjectivity of player and game, avatar as, 62–64; melancholy transferred from avatar to player, 81; in Metal Gear Solid series, 40, 47–58, 51, 52; nature of the avatar and, 34–40; as uncanny, 26, 32–33, 37, 48, 56–57, 94 post-apocalyptic scenarios. See catastrophe and apocalypse posthumanism. See gaming and the posthuman experience promise, gaming as, 117, 123 prosthetic sublime, 40, 58–80; in BioShock, 64, 67–71, 70, 77–78; catastrophe and apocalypse, relationship to, 67, 79–80; in Crysis 2, 64, 75–80, 76; Gadamer’s theories of play and dialogue and, 60–66; in Halo 3, 73–75, 74; in Mass Effect, 71–73, 74–75; McLuhan’s extended body

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Index

of self in, 11–13, 61, 66; prosthetic sublime and, 64–66; trauma and, 12–13, 38, 130n8; the uncanny and avatars, 13–14 Shadow of the Colossus (game), 15, 25, 73 Shaun of the Dead (film), 85 Shelley, Mary, Frankenstein, 7 Shelley, Percy Bysshe, Defense of Poetry, 20, 131n2 Short, Sue, 132n4 Sobchack, Vivian, The Address of the Eye, 16, 130–31n1 Sontag, Susan, “The Imagination of Disaster,” 137n9 spectrality of archive, 113–14, 120 Stiegler, Bernard, 10 subjectivity. See self and subjectivity sublime, the. See prosthetic sublime suspicion, hermeneutics of, 6

and, 59–61; Merleau-Ponty’s dialectical body and, 58–59; revelatory aspect of technology and, 65–67; sublime, concept of, 64–65 prosthetics: disability, existing in fundamental relationship to, 82–83; existing devices working to extend the human, 7; games consoles acting as, 5; games systems as, 64; games viewing human body as, 28; humans always subject to, 129n2; Stiegler’s reading of, 10 Quake (game), 73 Rand, Ayn, 43 remediation, concept of, 51, 54, 135n29 repetition: aesthetic of, in video games, 132n6; clones and cloning, 49–50, 53, 80, 87, 89–95, 97, 134n19, 135n26; the uncanny and, 32–33 Resistance series (game), 80 revelation: in catastrophe and apocalypse, 84–86, 96–97; of essential humanity of the posthuman, 82, 86, 88, 90, 97; prosthetic sublime and revelatory aspect of technology, 65–67 rhizome, concept of, 36–40, 57, 107–8 Ricoeur, Paul, 6 Ruggill, Judd Ethan, 130n7

thrownness (Geworfenheit), 18 Tomb Raider (game), 132n5 Too Human (game), 7–8, 31, 73, 129n1 Torok, Maria, 96, 100 totalitarian nature of gaming, 42, 45, 63 transhumanism versus posthumanism, 136n3 trauma: subjectivity and, 12–13, 38, 130n8. See also catastrophe and apocalypse; melancholy Tuan, Yi-Fu, 137n7 Turing, Alan, 27

self and subjectivity: avatars as opposite of Renaissance humanist concept of, 39–40; birth into posthumanism in games’ beginnings, 17–24; Blanchot’s concept of subjectivity without any subject, 12, 13, 26, 38–39, 94, 126–27; catastrophic subject, 80–86; gaming as radical critique of, 2, 26, 38, 129n1; genealogy of posthumanism challenging, 6–7; Heideggerian reading of relation between space and, 133n7; play, loss

uncanny, the: avatars and economy of, 13–14; birth/beginning of avatar/ game and, 17, 20, 23–24; fixed character model and voice of Snake in Metal Gear Solid series as, 90; in metatextual element of gaming, 45–47; player-avatar relationship as, 26, 32–33, 37, 48, 56–57, 94 utopia or pathology, posthumanism conceptualized as, 7–11, 27, 30–32, 45, 82–84, 124–25

150

Index

Verfremdungseffekt, 46, 133–34n16 Virilio, Paul: archive and, 114; on catastrophic subject, 80, 82–85, 91, 95, 96; gaming putting theories into practice, 4; A Landscape of Events, 17; on loss and melancholy, 103, 104; Open Sky, 9–10, 82; pathologized viewpoint of, 8, 9–10, 82–83, 124–25; Politics of the Very Worst, 1, 10, 82

Werner’s Syndrome, 87 White, Hayden, Metahistory, 117, 137n8 Wills, David, Prosthesis, 129n2 Wilson, Eric G., The Melancholy Android, 101 Wolfe, Cary, 132n3

Walking Dead, The (TV show), 85 Weiner, Norbert, 27 Wells, H. G., The Island of Doctor Moreau, 7

Žižek, Slavoj: “Melancholy and the Act,” 135–36n1; The Pervert’s Guide to Cinema, 67–68

Yi, Dongshin, A Genealogy of Cyborgothic, 129n2

151