ABSTRACT
This chapter considers the digital game as an articulation of posthuman subjectivity and space. As a perfect, one might say sublime, confluence of machine and human subjectivities, the digital game-I am here considering Deus Ex: Invisible War-instantiates, in typical cyberpunk fashion, what appears to be a celebration of both subjective extension and cancellation. The human player, extending prosthetically beyond temporal-spatial limitations, can experience the vertiginous thrill of “becoming” Other, becoming the avatar whose armature, superior physical skills, and in the case of Deus Ex: Invisible War, cybernetically modified body, speak to a festishized, posthuman, desire for transcendence: the subject, now leaving the self behind, enters what Paul Virilio calls the “substitute horizon” (The Information Bomb, 14) of the game to become, in some senses, a “terminal citizen” (Open Sky, 21). And it is here, as a (temporary) liberation from subjective limitations unfolds, that a concomitant re-aligning of space occurs. More precisely, a re-aligning of the experience of space occurs. Because when in the game, the player is not “in” space: s/he is experiencing space; more precisely, s/he is experiencing space through an interiority (her avatar) that is both her and not her, him and not him. It is thus accurate to
describe this sense of space, space which is at once familiar and unfamiliar, as uncanny. Physics and graphics engines work furiously to reduplicate the “real” experience of space, and insofar as the experience of the digital space of the game is fully dependant on the repeated revisitations of the player (locations are revisited in Deus Ex: Invisible War as part of narrative requirements), the virtual flâneur-gamer is compelled to be, seduced to the point of being, at home in the virtual not-at-home that is the experience of digital space. At some level thus, the digital game instantiates materially what may be the primal posthuman fantasy of cyberpunk: to transcend the limits of human space and subjectivity, of subjectivity conceived as singular interiority.1
