UC Irvine

This dissertation theorizes the concept of ‘Unselfing,’ which is a form of radical aesthetics and design through which the medium of the videogame deconstructs neoliberal subjectivity. This dissertation, in turn, argues that the neoliberal subject is the videogame’s normative subject-form, and that medium produces this subject through technical, nonconscious processes which subject player action to an economic grid of intelligibility, constituting player agency. This dissertation’s theory of Unselfing proceeds from this premise, arguing that the radical deconstruction of the player-subject must reckon with the medium’s totalizing mechanism of subjection by critiquing agency as the product of a process of subjection. Unselfing offers to game studies a radical politics of selflessness outside of the paradigm of agency. Part I of this dissertation begins by theorizing the normative form of the videogame subject, and then identifying that subject in a game which appears to displace it: the indie adventure game Outer Wilds. Part II of the dissertation then proceeds to theorize Unselfing, the negation of the dominant processes theorized in Part I. Part II consists of three close readings of games which ‘unself’ their players. First, Chapter 3 argues that the Russian game Pathologic 2 ‘unselfs’ its players by exaggerating the internal tensions of capitalist, homogenous time, forcing players to acquire an alternative mode of being not dictated by abstract time. Chapter 4 examines Kane and Lynch 2, arguing that the game dismantles cinematic constructions of identification and subjection through the materiality of digital media and glitch aesthetics. Finally, Chapter 5 analyzes Bloodborne as a game that locates the embodied, animal formlessness beneath the human subject through a fragmentary narrative structure and representations of monstrous brains and oneiric spaces.

As a conceptual tool, rather than an explicit set of game design guidelines, unselfing functions as a critical framework which offers scholars a malleable, yet specific, materialist language for identifying resistance to normative paradigms of ideological subjection within videogame texts. Unselfing also provides game studies with a mode of Ideology critique which does not take the form of a privileged denunciation of the world from the outside, but instead imagines Ideology critique as a form of immanent critique staged from within the Ideological apparatus. Finally, this dissertation brings to game studies a new ethics of radical, cross-species collectively rooted in anti-capitalist design and praxis.