Content area
Full Text
ABSTRACT
This article explores how Quantic Dream's video game Beyond: Two Souls transforms questions surrounding gendered representation in digital media and performance capture by framing them around questions of control. The game establishes a complex relationship between technology, developer, the performance-captured body, gender, and the player to form a nexus of interlocking influences of control that players are both made aware of and asked to interact with via the act of play. These ideas of control are developed both in the game's mechanics and in its narrative, causing the player to self-reflexively become an active participant in the game's discourse.
Extending beyond the disciplinary societies theorized by michel foucault, the contemporary landscape of digital media reflects a much more diffuse model of distributed, negotiatory control. Instead of functioning within a rigid hierarchy of influence and power, contemporary media productions frequently make visible the array of technological, sociological, and individual sites of control that wrestle within them. Video games are particularly well suited to this kind of visibility, as players must actively confront their own role in controlling video game characters and systems within the very process of play. Rather than conceptualizing video games as something that controls and defines their players' behavior, this article takes as its premise the idea that video games place the personal perspective of their players in a conflict surrounding control. Instead of discussing control hierarchically, I argue that control in video games can be considered as a negotiation that occurs through the interrelationship between the variety of forces that construct and define video games, such as performance capture, gender, animation, and players.
This article develops a two-strand argument connected by the process of negotiatory control. I explore both the gender politics of performance capture technology and the complex approach to both control and agency within the video game Beyond: Two Souls. The game follows the life of Jodie, a character performed in performance capture by Ellen Page, and explores her connection with Aiden, a spiritual entity that has been linked to Jodie since birth. Over the course of the game's narrative, Jodie wrestles with her parents, the US government, and Aiden himself for control over her body and her emotions, a struggle enacted both by the game's performers and...