ABSTRACT
This chapter considers two videogames about smartphones and secrets: the gothic mystery Silent Hill: Shattered Memories and Robert Yang’s Cobra Club, a gleefully bawdy game about explicit selfies with a serious message about government surveillance. These games advance very different understandings of privacy and subjectivity, understandings that can help us to unpack what is at stake in critical debates about the circulation of personal information online. Where Shattered Memories cleaves to a notion of the deep individual subject whose psyche hides shameful secrets, Cobra Club is more interested in how networked communities construct collective identities. Both games, however, use metaleptic twists to highlight the fact that the platforms we use to play games are now entangled in dizzyingly complex, worryingly leaky user surveillance architectures. If the popularity of platforms like the Wii and the iPhone has encouraged videogame designers to experiment with new means of reading players – from cameras and microphones to gyroscopes and infrared grids – these games affirm that, in an age of spying, hacking, doxxing and data mining, videogames can help us to understand who can see us and on what terms.
