Disciplined Play: Finding Foucauldian Architecture in Virtual Worlds

This paper, by Lawrence May of the University of Auckland, examines how virtual architecture in videogames both reinforces and destabilizes ideological positions, drawing on Michel Foucault's writings on space, power, and governmentality. Its central argument is that videogame spaces act to discipline players and shape their behaviour both inside and outside the game world, and that game environments, rules, interactivity, and narrative operate together as a discursive circuit. The analysis is framed as an ongoing project and proceeds through textual analysis of two case studies rather than empirical audience research.

The first case study concerns Red Dead Redemption 2 (2018), whose late-nineteenth-century American frontier settings such as encampments, hotel rooms, and cabins are read through Foucault's concept of the panopticon. The author contends that persistent, invisible surveillance by the game's programming and artificial intelligence systems produces a state of permanent visibility that regulates conduct, and that these spaces also reinforce the game's thematic critique of a collapsing cowboy masculinity. The second case study addresses Kowloon's Gate VR: Suzaku (2017), a virtual reconstruction of the demolished Kowloon Walled City. Here the author applies Foucault's notion of heterotopia, finding that the game sustains both hegemonic and non-hegemonic accounts of Chinese history within its architecture.

The paper concludes that both panoptical and heterotopic experiences normalize players into endorsing the control and behavioural management systems of games, and that spatial design is never neutral. Drawing on Foucault's claim that liberty is a practice, the author closes by beginning to consider how players might resist these disciplinary architectures. The scope is limited to two titles and a theoretical framework rooted in Foucault and spatial narrative scholarship.