Cruel Pleasure: Affective Security and Territoriality in Games

This paper examines how pleasure in gameplay relates to the circulation of political and cultural affect, focusing on mobile games depicting conflict in Israel and Palestine. Building on Lauren Berlant's concept of cruel optimism, the author proposes "cruel pleasure" as a framework for understanding how pleasurable gameplay can be bound up with narratives of security, territoriality, and exceptionalism, even when those narratives are unstable or harmful. The central claim is that pleasure should not be treated as a neutral or purely positive measure in games research, since seemingly objective data on enjoyment can obscure the political structures that shape which games are produced and made visible.

The study's method is comparative and longitudinal. The author examines the landscape of Israel and Palestine-related games available in app stores and on game platforms in 2014 and again in 2025-26. The 2014 corpus included numerous simplistic games that used basic mechanics, bright colors, and cheerful music to frame violence against Gaza or Israel as entertainment, with titles such as Bomb Gaza, Iron Dome, and Gaza Resistance. Many of these titles had disappeared from app stores by 2025, which the author reads not as evidence of a broader social justice shift but as a decline in public tolerance for openly racist, Islamophobic, and antisemitic games.

The paper situates its approach against prior game studies scholarship, which typically measures pleasure through self-reported challenge, competence, flow, or play time. The author argues that such psychological frameworks have largely not addressed how pleasure is tied to structural political feelings embedded in game design and production. By foregrounding these connections, the paper aims to make visible the often-invisible narratives that shape collective futures, offering affect theory as a method for analyzing how desires for security circulate through digital games.