Year: 2025
Type: conference-paper
Abstract: This paper examines grammarised death mechanics and the moves of digital corpses in Happy Wheels (Fancy Force 2010) to point out how death is organised around a necropolitical mode of perception. It asserts that this grammarisation of death amplifies the real-life precarity of the deceased between subjecthood and objecthood by analysing how death is made into a spectacle with voyeuristic tendencies which verge on pornographic. By relating this to Giorgio Agamben's and Achille Mbembe's scholarship on bare life and the living dead, I ultimately propose that Happy Wheels, and other games in which game bodies are designed for destruction, entangle with real-life instances of denigration and subjugation of human lives.
Author: Heather Maycock
Institution: University of Dundee
Language: English
Topic: Digital Games and Media
Subfield: Sociology and Political Science
Field: Social Sciences
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: gold
OpenAlex ID: W4412008558