Initial Remarks
From the first ever video game created in the 1950s called Tennis for Two, digital gaming today looks nothing like its pixelated predecessors. Rather, it offers complex plots and characters in realistic-looking universes, which often include the evoking of numerous emotions and/or critical thinking, making gamers feel as if they are “active participants in the games themselves” (Rakes 2016, 8). As such, these digital parallel worlds can be characterized as posthuman. In effect,
“Digital games’ very “nature” should allow us to play out versions of breaking away from anthropocentric idealism and experience what new modes of subjectivity and agency might entail, because we are already engaged in an activity that forces this kind of interrelation” (Solberg 2021, 1).
Yet, despite their posthuman potential, many popular video games are counterproductive. For one, war games not only encourage violence, but push problematic ideas on death, justice, and more. In addition, a lot of these games are primarily based on anthropocentrism and what Achilles Mbembe calls necro-politics.
Such concepts are more thoroughly discussed throughout the project, but to start off, I propose that the issues created by such “technologically mediated violence” (Braidotti 2013, 124) can be countered. “When purposefully designed” (D. Melnic and V. Melnic 2018, 167), video games, unlike any other form of media, offer a posthuman experience. Indeed, through Braidotti’s ontological relationality, this project explores the many ways in which video games allow players to Become- (The Posthuman, 2013). With the possibility of adopting new subjectivities, digital gaming has the potential to offer much more than just entertainment. Similar to other forms of media, games also have the ability to raise philosophical questions, and can perhaps even be used as an educational tool.
Therefore, this project looks at three different video games—Flower (2009), Stray (2022), and Season: A Letter to the Future (2023)—that are nothing like the war games mentioned in Braidotti (2016). Rather, they offer methods of defamiliarization which allows players to Become-Earth/Animal/Imperceptible. In effect, for the creative aspect of this project, I offer a self-reflection on elements—whether it be the plot, the avatars, the gameplay, or the console features—that allowed me to defamiliarize myself and raise philosophical questions, which ultimately gave me the opportunity to learn not only new perspectives, but new subjectivities.
