Monsters and the Mall: Videogames and the Scopic Regimes of Shopping

Mike Molesworth's paper "Monsters and the Mall" argues that videogames, particularly first-person shooters, can be understood through the same scopic regimes that structure the experience of shopping and tourism. Drawing on Romero's Dawn of the Dead, which parodies consumer culture, and on Walter Benjamin's flâneur and Mike Featherstone's work on consumer culture, the author identifies three modes of looking: temporal glancing, spatial gazing, and panoptic self-surveillance. The central thesis is that games offer a controlled, pleasurable novelty that mirrors the wandering, commodified gaze of the shopper, and that critiques of consumer culture's alienating effects may therefore apply to play as well. The paper contends that public debate fixated on game violence overlooks these deeper aesthetic and market dynamics.

The analysis is grounded in close readings of Doom 3 and Halo, showing how these games balance novelty, spectacle, and a surveillance-like sense of threat to sustain engagement. Cut scenes, weapons, and vehicles are treated as analogues to commodities or souvenirs, and the player's movement through game space is framed as a form of individualized consumption. The author concludes that this mode of play can reinforce the market-oriented systems that produce it rather than challenge them.

The paper's closing argument is that both the film and the games can be read as re-enchanted forms of shopping, combining disciplinary, flâneur, and romantic gazes. Games are praised for their novelty and diversity but criticized for their inward focus, which privileges the virtual over real social experience. The author suggests that players, especially of first-person shooters, are seduced by a commercialized flânerie that fetishizes the virtual. Notably, titles that satirize consumer lifestyles, such as The Sims and Grand Theft Auto, rank among the industry's best-selling commodities within a market worth roughly $20 billion.