Videogame Monsters, Abjection, and the Enemy Within
The following is an abstract for a conference paper:
Videogame monsters embody a paradox: They often represent ontological evil while being inherently exploitable. Game monsters still echo Cold War-era fears of the “Other,” clear and present threats that must be identified, contained, and neutralized. But these Others also profit players, rewarding them with loot or XP upon defeat. As such, monsters become an extractable resource that makes the player into a kind of ludic colonizer. Videogame monsters prompt us to ask who the real monster is: The creature or the player? This paper uses Julia Kristeva’s theory of abjection—the reflexive fear of a breakdown in meaning caused by the loss of distinction between self and Other—to explore Housemarque Studio’s space horror game Returnal, which deliberately collapses this distinction. For the first 15-20 hours of gameplay, players understand themselves to be helping their avatar escape a hostile planet, only to realize that the environment is Selene’s own mind, and the automated sentries and hostile fauna are defense mechanisms and monstrous vestiges of trauma that she has externalized. I argue that the studio’s sleight of hand prompts us to question the nature of monsters, and to look within ourselves if we want to find our enemies.