Because they're made in a time, in a place, and by people for an audience of players, the politics of games are inherent, even if they aren't expressed. The uncertain and unending conflict of "the political" emerges as the dominant mode of human activity and its meaning-making.Īll games, as products of culture and labor, have politics.
People live together because of politics, despite their disagreements over the political. Politics, then, is something like the ground-level manifestation of higher-order, political antagonism. On the contrary, Mouffe defines "the political" as "the antagonistic dimension which is inherent to all human societies" (p.2). The word "politics," according to political theorist Chantal Mouffe (2013), "refers to the ensemble of practices, discourses and institutions that seeks to establish a certain order and to organize human coexistence" (p.3). There is a difference between having politics and being political. Keywords: Night in the Woods, Mark Fisher, Lovecraft, weird fiction, horror, close reading, capitalism, politics, queerness, hauntology Introduction: Night in the Woods as a Political Game I have always longed to be a part of the outward life, to be out there at the edge of things, to let the human taint wash away in emptiness and silence as the fox sloughs his smell into the cold unworldliness of water to return to the town as a stranger. Finally, it examines the game's eldritch-capital antagonist in order to characterize the outlook of the game's protagonists as resolutely hopeful and reparatively queer in the face of an outwardly meaningless cosmos. Next, it examines how eeriness pervades the playable and political environment of the gameworld. This article first examines how a pathological sense of weirdness is internalized by main character Mae. To make its case, this article draws from the critical vocabulary of theorist Mark Fisher, whose notions of "capitalist realism," (2009) "the weird" and "the eerie" (2016) serve to identify explicitly and categorically much of what the game in question represents implicitly and aesthetically. Following literary critic Irving Howe's (2002) notion of the "political novel," this article demonstrates that Night in the Woods exists as a rare and audacious interrogation of Capital and its deleterious fallout in the rural United States. This article presents a close reading of the videogame Night in the Woods (Infinite Fall, 2017). Meet the New Boss, Same as the Old Gods: Reading Night in the Woods through Mark Fisher by Patrick Fiorilli Abstract
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