Unhuman Agency: Reading Subjectivities in Playdead's Inside

"Unhuman Agency" offers an analysis of Playdead's 2016 game Inside, arguing that the game disperses agency among the player, the game's systems, and nonhuman or abject actors, producing a sense of compromised control. Drawing on Karen Barad's agential realism, Dylan Trigg's phenomenology of horror, and Daniel Cottom's concept of the unhuman, the analysis positions the unhuman as a category distinct from both the posthuman and the nonhuman. Its central claim is that the game compels players to unlearn conventional assumptions about gaming agency, exposing aesthetic, social, and political tensions within its world.

The analysis locates the clearest expression of this idea in the game's final entity, the "huddle," a fleshy aggregate that exceeds both the player's control and the notion of the human subject as an absolute agent. Read through Galloway and Thacker's theory of network control and Foucault's account of bodily rhetorics, the huddle is figured as the energy source of a corporate mind-control network. Sparse narrative and affective cues, including sound, movement, and the slippery sensation of controlling the huddle, implicate players in these systems. The argument holds that videogames, through embodied and affective mechanics, are uniquely suited to staging encounters with forms of agency that escape human grasp.

The analysis extends this reading to the "weird" affects produced by docile, mind-controlled bodies whose movements the player must adopt to advance. Hidden generators and an alternative ending, which suggests the boy himself may be controlled, make the player complicit in the dystopian system. The conclusion is that Inside asks players to attend to how it feels to be played, rather than to the satisfaction that normally accompanies progress.