Playing with Plants, Loving Computers: Queer Playfulness beyond the Human

Daniella Gáti's 2021 Eludamos essay, "Playing with Plants, Loving Computers: Queer Playfulness beyond the Human," argues that queer playfulness can decenter the human subject by reframing play as a vulnerable, nonhuman-inclusive form of love rather than a pursuit of mastery. The essay challenges the prevailing "refusal and failure" framing within queer game studies and proposes instead that pleasure in play can be distributed between humans and nonhumans. Its central interpretive claim is that games deliberately stripped of goals, instructions, and clear feedback invite players to relinquish control and encounter the nonhuman as a fully unknowable Other.

The essay's two case studies anchor this argument. Rustle Your Leaves to Me Softly has no win or loss states, no instructions, and no discernible goal, shifting enjoyment away from the player and toward the plant. Digital: A Love Story (Love, 2010) restricts mechanics so severely that players experience helplessness, isolation, and frustrated desire rather than conventional competence. Desire for the AI Emilia, revealed as non-human, together with a bare computer environment, undermines techno-futurist fantasies of human empowerment through technology. Gáti reads these affects as modeling a posthuman playfulness in which the player yields human subjectivity to the computer.

The analysis is interpretive rather than quantitative, drawing on close readings of the games and definitional work, including a careful account of the "player-character" and the deliberate blurring of player and avatar. Its scope is focused on two digital games and the theoretical frameworks of queer and posthuman game studies, positioning them as counterpoints to goal-driven and educational play.