Chapter 8 Light My (Camp-)Fire: Affect and Incitement in Firewatch
In: Culture at Play: How Video Games Influence and Replicate Our WorldSearch for other papers by René Reinhold Schallegger in
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Abstract
The affective turn in the humanities, driven by Cultural Studies and their interest in social involvement, empathy, and connectibility, has positioned affect as central to understanding contemporary culture. The potential to affect and be affected, embodiment, transformation, and selection, all lead to a conception of affect as ‘the virtual as point of view’ that makes its application to videogames and their design meaningful. Bringing together various perspectives from Melissa Gregg to Patricia Clough, Lawrence Grossberg, and several other related researchers, this article first establishes videogames as transhuman experiential spaces for affective labour, collections of everyday affective events that express new sensations and new conceptions of what it means to be human. Relationality, intersubjectivity, and the subjectification of objects are identified as essential strategies for affective game design. The player’s experience of emotional incitement shares equal relevancy to action-based immersion and engagement via critical thinking. In a second section, these ideas are then applied to a concrete game: Firewatch (Campo Santo, 2016). This semi-indie ‘walking and talking simulator’ exposes the player to a secondary reality in which freedom of choice is consistently deconstructed on narrative, mechanical, and aesthetic levels. Using exploration and communication as the main mechanics, players transform the personality avatar they are presented with while engaging in the affective labour of reconstructing the subjectivities of a cast of absent characters through the physical and emotional traces they have left behind. Violating the logic of mastery prevalent in game design and replacing it with an affective premise, Firewatch gives other characters and the world enough agency to resist most player interactions, while at the same time its rigid designer ethics communicate to the player a deep sense of interconnectedness and responsibility for the Other.