ABSTRACT
As gamescapes become more and more limiting in the gameplay they conjure, they forge an increasingly complex relationship with the spatiality and contemporaneity of their audiences. Games, now, offer scope for neo-explorations of “other people simulators” which are characterized by a suffocating hypernearing of the experience of the dystopia (Lucas Pope).
This chapter is an exploration of two of these dystopian games that offer covertly disruptive gameplay through alienating, often disembodied, simulation as a strategy for playing and negotiating dystopia: Lucas Pope’s Papers, Please and Osmotic Studios’ Orwell. Closely engaging with issues of surveillance, digital governance, neurotechnology, illegal profiling, and ultimately, survival in a dystopia of technics, these games contain multiple endings and novel aspects of replay to understand gameplay beyond the structures of actuality and artifactuality. Caused by the smallest, seemingly most insignificant of differences in game interaction, this chapter looks at game(re)play which becomes crucial in both the understanding and the playing out of the neganthropocenic possibilities of negotiating dystopia.
