Control (2019) and Concrete: The Haunting Thingness of Digital Assets

This paper reads Remedy Entertainment's 2019 game Control through new materialist and thing-theory frameworks, arguing that the game's Brutalist concrete environments, mundane objects, and sand-based materials stage a haunting encounter with the agency of matter. Drawing on Bogost, Bennett, Morton, and Cohen, the analysis treats the game's visual surfaces, from polished slabs to fracturing concrete, as significant sites of meaning rather than superficial decoration. Its central claim is that the game entangles players in the deep-time ontology of sand, the historical memory of Brutalism, and the infrastructural power of neoliberal "societies of control," producing an experience that is simultaneously eerie, weird, and oppressive.

The author positions this work as a corrective to Game Studies' perceived neglect of visuality and of games' representation of things, which has tended to focus on hardware and platform substructures. Through close reading of the Northlight Engine's rendering of materials, the game's "Altered Items and Objects of Power," and its cut-scenes moving between impossible architectures, the paper argues that Control's fictive architecture functions as a "medial hinge" linking ideology, narrative, and aesthetics. The sand economy, described as a hyperobject consuming tens of billions of tons annually, is presented as a framing for the game's preoccupation with ambivalent materiality.

The analysis draws its historical context from Forty's account of concrete's ancient-modern ambivalence and from Brutalism's shifting cultural reputation, from authoritarian symbol in the late 1960s to a hauntological figure of lost egalitarian possibility. The paper's broader scope spans material ecocriticism, affect theory, and game studies, with the single case study of one commercially released title as its empirical basis. Methodologically, it relies on textual and visual analysis rather than player data, interviews, or surveys, and it acknowledges that scholarship on Remedy's catalogue has been limited.