Parables of the Posthuman: Digital Realities, Gaming, and the Player Experience by Jonathan Boulter (review)

Jonathan Boulter’s Parables of the Posthuman is a welcome addition to video game scholarship, moving beyond analysis of the techniques of gaming to consider how digital games can open up new approaches to critical theory. His central topic – the connections between posthuman subjectivity and video games – begins by discussing posthuman characters in game texts and gaming as a type of human–machinic bond, but takes this discussion further by considering how digital games could expand the ways we theorise posthuman identity.

Boulter’s analysis focuses on player experience as a type of posthumanity, noting that gaming can be an uncanny and intimate experience that flirts with transhumanist values of disembodied technological sublimity without uncritically reinforcing these values. As Boulter compellingly argues, digital games create spectacular parables for posthuman identity, allowing players to engage with temporary states of posthuman becoming mediated through repeatedly entering and returning from the world of the game. Playing as cyborg characters within futuristic societies allows the player to explore possible states of posthuman becoming as a temporary suspension of reality, an experience Boulter describes as inherently melancholic. In making this argument, Boulter draws on theorists whose work is not often considered within the canon of posthuman theory. Boulter takes Paul Virilio’s discussion of human bodies as sites of technological interface – the ‘body terminal’ (Virilio qtd in Boulter 10) – but complicates Virilio’s techno-pessimism with Hans-Georg Gadamer’s account of the phenomenology of play. Gadamer describes play as a temporary loss of self, an approach that Boulter connects to posthuman rejections of the human. In bringing these discussions of gaming and play together with posthuman theory, Boulter invites us to think critically about ‘material instantiations of the posthuman not just (utopian or other) theories of the posthuman’ (14). While Boulter is not alone in examining the lived realities of posthuman subjectivity, bringing this theory together with game studies opens up new avenues of thought for scholars of posthumanism.

To explicate these ideas, Boulter focuses on a handful of popular AAA video games. He returns again and again to discussions of the games Bioshock, Fallout 3, Half-Life 2, Metal Gear Solid and other large studio games with long-lasting franchises, all of which employ very standard first- or third-person shooter mechanics and feature visually stunning, often science-fictional, gameworlds. Boulter writes very engagingly about these games, balancing gameplay anecdotes and descriptions with his very clear discussion of posthuman theory – but it would be nice to see greater variety in his primary texts. Since Boulter is still able to make original arguments within this very slim book, I do not fault him for drawing on examples from such a specific subset of video games. However, I would have loved to see Boulter expand his reading of posthuman subjectivity, melancholy and archiving practice to consider how these ideas would play out in more formally experimental games, or games that employ a wider variety of platforms.

While Bouter’s writing style is clear and engaging, the book is oddly organised. The most substantial of Boulter’s arguments occurs in his central chapter on ‘Posthuman Subjects’, but this chapter is surrounded by much shorter and less fully developed sections that could have easily been full chapters in their own right. The book has both an Introduction and a Preamble, and ends with a Postscript and a Conclusion, all making interesting connections between digital games and posthuman theory. While these eight-to-sixteen-page snippets offer provocative and nuanced ideas about how video gaming expands our understanding of posthuman subjectivity, they could be more fully developed into their own chapters. I particularly wanted to see the sections on ‘Posthuman Melancholy’ and on archive theory in digital games expanded into full chapters. The book was clearly built around its longest chapter on ‘Posthuman Subjects’, and consequentially reads as an expanded version of an article more than a full-length book.

Nevertheless, Boulter’s...