Hackers and Cyborgs: Binary Domain and Two Formative Videogame Technicities

Summary

Brendan Keogh's paper "Hackers and Cyborgs: Binary Domain and Two Formative Videogame Technicities" uses Sega's Binary Domain as a lens for arguing that two competing modes of identifying with videogames have shaped the medium. The first is the "hacker" identity, rooted in university and hacker culture of the 1960s and 1970s and carried into the dominant "gamer" consumer identity, which emphasizes mastery, control, and autonomy. The second is the "cyborg" identity, which foregrounds participation and integration with technology and has grown more visible through DIY, casual, and mobile games. Rather than treating these as strictly opposed, the paper frames the cyborg as a resistant and complementary perspective.

The analysis contends that the hacker ideal is masculinist, and that this "technicity" shapes which games get made, which are celebrated as exemplary, and how scholarly and popular discourse values the form. Drawing on Turkle, Wajcman, and especially Haraway, the author presents the "hybrid person" of Binary Domain as a challenge to the exclusionary category of the "Human" and as a basis for a feminist-inflected understanding of technology and play. Its examples include blockbuster game marketing that promises player autonomy and a narrative of blurred human-machine identities.

A central finding is that mainstream journalism and design privilege skill-based mastery, leading critics to dismiss exploration-focused and queer or women-created titles such as Dear Esther and Gone Home as "not real games." Casual and avant-garde games, which reach broader and more diverse audiences, face the same rhetorical policing. The paper concludes that hacker and cyborg identities are entangled and interdependent, and that recognizing this supports a more descriptive, less prescriptive account of the videogame form. The scope is largely historical and theoretical, tracing lineages from Spacewar! onward, and it draws on game studies, feminist theory, and posthumanist scholarship.