Playing with One's Self: Notions of Subjectivity and Agency in Digital Games

Alec Charles's 2009 article in Eludamos argues that digital games produce an illusion of player agency that functions as a mechanism of ideological interpellation. Drawing on Baudrillard, the author contends that the boundary between material history and its electronic mediation has largely collapsed, so that the virtual is increasingly regarded as the primary or "real" version of events. Examples such as the Gulf War, the events of 9/11, and the America's Army recruitment tools illustrate how military conflict is staged, represented, and even trained through the logic of video games, with the first-person shooter singled out as a particularly potent vehicle for this effect.

The central claim is that games announce their interactivity more forcefully than other media while offering only reactive, preset choices that shape players' subjectivity in ways Althusser's theory of interpellation helps explain. Through analysis of machinima such as Red vs. Blue and the concept of the "faux-scriptible" text, the author concludes that multiplayer games fragment authorship into parallel, solipsistic experiences rather than realizing Barthes's ideal of the reader as producer. Although the analysis treats the medium broadly, its examples center on mainstream commercial titles and military-themed shooters.

The argument culminates in a distinction between commercial and arthouse production. Works such as Frasca's September 12 and Ledonne's Super Columbine Massacre RPG! employ Brechtian distancing and reject graphical realism to provoke critical interpretation. Players can also reinterpret commercial games, as seen in Hezbollah's Special Force and al-Qaeda's Quest for Bush, though the author notes that such radical misreadings remain rare. The essay's conclusion is that the video game's principal function is to serve capital, military, and state interests by manufacturing a subjectivity under the guise of interactivity, a illusion that ultimately disempowers rather than liberates players. As an argumentative essay rather than an empirical study, its conclusions rest on theoretical reasoning drawn from Barthes, Benjamin, and Althusser rather than quantitative data.