ABSTRACT
This chapter asks whether video games featuring animal avatars may open spaces of affective alliances with more-than-human others and thus challenge our traditional understanding of human-animal encounters. The idea that video games are potential vehicles for “becoming-with-many” is exemplified by discussing Bear Simulator (2016), a video game that promises players that they will experience life through the eyes of a bear. By combining Deleuze and Guattari’s notion of becoming-animal with phenomenological approaches to video game avatars and object-oriented ontology, this chapter suggests that Bear Simulator simultaneously expands and collapses the limits of the human body, allowing players to playfully explore the fusion of the human and non-human. Indeed, Bear Simulator rejects the fetishization of objectives and the telos obsession typical of video games and instead focuses on exploring and nurturing the relationship between the human player and the animal avatars.
