Shelter 2

On Inhabiting Nonhuman Bodies: Review of Research Perspectives

This review synthesizes existing research perspectives on "animal games," defined as digital games where players embody nonhuman animal avatars.

• The review argues that a substantial body of work on animal games already exists across animal studies, environmental humanities, and game studies, but lacks an organized discourse in which its contributors recognize themselves as part of a shared conceptual field.
• Its central analytical question is whether inhabiting a nonhuman animal avatar can convey what it is like to be that animal, and it presents this as a methodological and ethical debate rather than a settled finding.
• Gualeni (2011) sees games as spaces of experimental ontology that can transcend human subjectivity, Eggertsson (2022) argues they convey nonhuman animal experience through a blend of biological fact and narrative fiction, and Caracciolo (2021) rejects this as illusory and warns it may reinforce human superiority as a colonizing act.

Inhabiting Other Bodies: Animal Characters and Avatars

Video games featuring non-human protagonists, such as Stray or Shelter 2, function as sophisticated interfaces for exploring the phenomenological experience of the animal Other.