A Stray Autoethnography: Becoming-Animal, or Anthropomorphic Humanism?

This paper, by Poppy Wilde of Birmingham City University, examines whether the player's empathy for the cat avatar in the 2022 videogame Stray represents a genuinely posthuman relation or instead reinforces anthropocentric humanism through anthropomorphism. Drawing on Braidotti's critique of anthropomorphising animals, Deleuze and Guattari's notion of becoming-animal, and Haraway's companion species framework, the author argues that the emotional force of the game depends heavily on the primacy of human feeling, raising questions about how posthuman the experience can truly be. The paper positions itself as a critical extension of earlier work on "posthuman empathy," which the author defines as empathy arising through intra-action between human and technological or non-human components, and as a response to critiques of "empathy games" that commodify affect.

The methodology is autoethnographic, with the author reflecting on their own embodied and affective responses while playing Stray, such as distress at being separated from fellow cats during the opening minutes. This reflexive approach builds on the author's prior posthuman autoethnographic work and on established autoethnography in game studies. The analysis centres on the avatar-gamer relationship through the lens of animal-human hybridity, situating Stray alongside other game studies treatments of becoming-animal, including werewolf, octopus, and Mario-focused readings.

The central conclusion is that tensions and power dynamics persist within posthumanism even in games that disrupt human-machine and human-animal boundaries. The author suggests that the affective exploitation of human emotion complicates claims that becoming-animal experiences in videogames fully escape anthropocentrism. The paper is a conceptual and critical contribution rather than an empirical study, and it does not report survey data or sample-based findings. Its scope is limited to a single game and a single researcher's experience, and its arguments are primarily theoretical.