Games Biting Back: Anatomy and Ecofeminism

Alexander Duncan's paper examines the indie horror game ANATOMY by Kitty Horrorshow through an ecofeminist lens, arguing that the game deliberately challenges the traditional hierarchy that casts environments as passive containers of information and subordinates them to an active, male, European subject. The paper builds on Henry Jenkins's concept of embedded narrative, which frames game worlds as repositories waiting to be assembled by the player, and contends that this framing still positions the environment as inert. Drawing on Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer's critique of Enlightenment domination of nature and Val Plumwood's ecofeminist account of the dichotomies linking passivity, nature, women, and colonized peoples, Duncan positions ANATOMY as a work that exposes these assumptions rather than reinforcing them.

The analysis traces how the game moves from a conventional exploration loop, in which an active player discovers and unlocks a passive suburban home, into a sustained reversal of agency. The house gradually asserts itself as a character with a voice, reconfigures its rooms, traps and devours the player's avatar, and recounts a gendered dream of violation. Simultaneously, the game undermines the player's control by shifting the avatar without input, closing itself unexpectedly, and stripping away actions until the player can only look and listen. Duncan reads this destabilization of who or what holds agency as an inversion of the subject-environment hierarchy.

The paper emphasizes that this inversion extends beyond environmental concerns to gender, since the domestic setting, bodily imagery, and femininity of the house align with the categories Plumwood identifies as subordinated. As a short extended abstract presented at DiGRA 2018, the work is primarily a theoretical close reading of a single game and draws on secondary critical reviews alongside its philosophical sources.