Code Red

Cruel Pleasure: Affective Security and Territoriality in Games

This paper examines how pleasure in gameplay relates to the circulation of political and cultural affect, focusing on mobile games depicting conflict in Israel and Palestine.

• The paper argues that pleasure in games is not a neutral metric: it can be bound up with narratives of security, territoriality, and exceptionalism, even when those narratives are harmful, and this can obscure the political structures shaping which games get produced and made visible.
• Drawing on Lauren Berlant's concept of cruel optimism, the author proposes "cruel pleasure" as an analytical framework for understanding gameplay that circulates political and cultural affect, focusing on mobile games depicting conflict in Israel and Palestine.
• A comparative, longitudinal study of Israel and Palestine-related games in app stores and game platforms contrasts the 2014 corpus, which included simplistic titles such as Bomb Gaza, Iron Dome, and Gaza Resistance framing violence as entertainment, with the 2025-26 landscape.