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• 1 2023-04-03T09:41:43-07:00 Video Games and Necro-Politics 9 image_header 2023-04-06T09:50:33-07:00 Contemporary necro-politics:

  “the administration of death: ‘the generalized instrumentalization of human existence and the material destruction of human bodies and population’ (Mbembe 2003, 19). And not only human […] but also planetary” (Braidotti 2013, 122).

  And not only physical, I might add, but also digital bodies. In his Feasts of Indifference, Mayar (2021) talks about 4X war games that adhere to the following four principles: eXplore, eXpand, eXploit, and eXterminate. These games, he argues, follow the “essentialized blueprint of colonization” (2021, 2), in which the ‘hero’ “set[s] out to save the civilized world (‘homo humanus’) from its enemies (‘homo barbarus’) under the venerable banners of liberty decency and democracy” (quoted in Davies 1997, 134). In games like Muslim Massacre (2008) or September 12^th (2003), the enemy, or the ‘other’, is the “identifiable, racialized adversaries” (Mayar 2021, 1) and is used as justification for all the confrontation and violence in these war games. Games like these never even specify why the racialized other is the enemy in the first place. Their race, their ‘otherness’ alone is enough to justify the violence inflicted upon them. Unlike the American (typically male) hero, the protagonist of the gameplay, the Muslim enemies in these games have no past, meaning they have no selfhood (Mayar 2021, 7). They are simply an obstacle to the game, “an unworthy, easy/ready/deserving-to-exterminate, worthless rabble of bugs” (Mayar 2021, 7). Even though Muslim Massacre was banned, it still reflects, what Amanda Phillips calls mechropolitics, meaning the recreation of real politics of death in the digital world (Mayar 2021, 4). As such, these ‘others’ are merely used to fulfill a project, whether it be in the digital or the real world.
  
  Furthermore, such objectification does not stop at race. In my own experience, especially as a woman, I am aware of how games degrade and utilize the female body to cater to a wider male audience. One example of this would be in the Grand Theft Auto series. Though I have never played a single game from the series, I have heard quite a few things about it, and how the female characters in the game merely serve as eye candy. From what I have heard about the game, I know that it consists of the protagonist beating up or running over people in the streets filled with criminals and prostitutes. The latter, according to my research, offer their services to raise the player’s health. While Googling the purpose of prostitutes in the series, I also came across other disturbing popular searches.
  
  And if this is not enough to prove my point, here is another disturbing finding.
  The worst part is that the game does not even require players to kill the prostitutes. It is optional. So why even add it in the first place? But then again, this sort of violence against the racialized and gendered other is a reflection of the real world.