Gaming Posthuman Technotopias
This talk explores entanglements between critical utopias and dystopias in videogames on posthumanism. Specifically, it examines inherent dualities of gaming utopia; their connections with dystopian projections of sociopolitical issues on artificial intelligence; and how gameplay posthumanizes player action via semiotics, bodies, and worlds. Deliberating progress of the posthuman from archetypal human-machine hybrids to constituents of the nonhuman turn, I apply theories of socio-semiotic multimodality, procedural rhetoric, and transmedial narratology to analyze three videogames. They are Metal Gear Solid 4: Guns of the Patriots (2008), MGSV: The Phantom Pain (2015), and Detroit: Become Human (2018). To address differences in the demand for utopian and dystopian games, discussion elaborates gamic medium specificity in simulating utopian ideals and constructing critiques; tensions between framing games as allegories or playable fantasies; and thus affects on changing approaches to key issues, such as agency, gender, race, and transnational war economy.
Comments are closed.