Mutual Incorporation: On Eating and Being Eaten in Bugsnax (2020)

This paper is an extended abstract from a DiGRA 2025 proceedings that offers a phenomenological and affect-theory analysis of Bugsnax (Young Horses, 2020), using the game as a case study for rethinking eating in digital play. Its central thesis is that Bugsnax takes "incorporation" literally, through a comedic body-horror premise in which players capture hybrid bug-snacks and use them to recompose the limbs and bodies of non-player characters. Drawing on Annemarie Mol's Eating in Theory and Calleja's model of incorporation, the author argues that the game moves beyond conventional depictions of eating as sustenance or resource management toward a model of "mutual incorporation," in which eaters are themselves eaten by what they consume.

The analysis identifies several key dimensions of the game's design and reception. It highlights the prioritization of proximal senses, such as the crunch of sound design, animated eating, and haptic feedback, over the visual, which the author positions as a departure from ocularcentric video game conventions. Reviewer responses are cited as evidence of the tension between humour and horror in the game's affective register, along with its queer character representation. The paper also addresses the colonialist and extractivist logics embedded in the game's exotic island setting and taxonomic framing, while noting an alternative reading in which cultural hybridisation produces renegotiated meanings.

The scope of the paper is conceptual and textual rather than empirical: it relies on close reading of a single game and a body of secondary literature in game food studies, eco-game studies, and posthumanist theory, without reporting survey data, sample sizes, or quantitative findings. Its conclusions are interpretive, culminating in the proposal of "playing-as-eating" as a framework for understanding how games move through players as players move through them.