Abstract

Introduction The 2022 video games Signalis and Citizen Sleeper invite players into artificial bodies and worlds. In both, gameplay prompts reflection on how artificiality induces integration between self and world, while also illuminating experiential awareness through features of gameplay and game environment that show the player and game as part of an ongoing process of mutual construction of self. This article first discusses how incorporation into artificiality has gradually become a central focus in video game studies as a condition of intellectual reflection, emotional response, and the pleasures of play. It then examines how recursive features of bodies and worlds in Signalis and Citizen Sleeper draw attention to the simultaneous and reciprocal constructedness of the player’s experience and the game’s artificiality. These illuminate intersubjective encounters with artificiality from which player experience emerges. The games reiterate that self-discovery in play comes from deep engagement with artificiality. Embodied in the Artificial: Immersion, Presence, Incorporation Signalis is a science fiction survival horror in which the player controls a marionette-style avatar of a “biomechanical person” called a “replika”. The player wakes on a crashed spaceship, progresses through the built environments outside of the ship, and then moves through otherworldly repetitions of environments she previously explored. She explores and fends off replikas that have degenerated from a malfunction in which illusions of memories of living beings, called “gestalts”, emerge in their minds. As the player moves with Elster (the player’s character) through increasingly horrifying environments, she picks up clues that seem to lead to the story of a love she shared with a woman named Ariane on the ship prior to its crash. Citizen Sleeper is a 2022 science fiction survival game in which the player wakes up in an artificial “sleeper” body and learns that the consciousness they inhabit was “emulated” from a scanned human mind. The rights to this mind were sold to the Essen-Arp corporation. The body attached to this organic mind is in a state of cryo-sleep at the corporation but the mind’s cognition now controls the elaborate frame of the sleeper, which must be sustained throughout the game on a “stabilizer” provided only by the corporation. Gordon Calleja has termed the artificiality through which bodies materialise in video game play as “incorporation”. He discusses incorporation as “an intensification of internalised involvement” in a game (169-170). Incorporation captures the mode of player involvement in artificial bodies and simulated worlds in games like Signalis and Citizen Sleeper. Calleja’s thesis on video game embodiment develops out of limitations of concepts of “immersion” and “presence” and he dispels notions of games moving towards fuller emulation of reality. The limitations of immersion—referring to an all-encompassing reality imagined in encounters with media—highlight how presence instead lays the phenomenological foundations of the involvement of players in a game. Presence is predicated on consciousness of the artificiality of media environments. Signalis and Citizen Sleeper are part of a number of new games that self-reflexively mark this artificiality by recursively returning to the game’s technologically constructed interface and manifold storylines. Writing on mobile gameplay interfaces of the early 2010s, Martti Lahti describes a teleological narrative of video game development “as a desire for a corporeal immersion with technology” (159). At a much earlier stage in the emergence of this desire, Frank Biocca stated in the 1990s that virtual reality would become so ubiquitous that users would eventually face a “cyborg’s dilemma” in which the human “body and mind adapts to … non-human interface” (24). Biocca predicted that virtual reality presented a “teleology to human-machine symbiosis” where “the mind becomes adapted to … an avatar, a simulation of the cyborg body” (24). In the case of games, Biocca stated that “total embodiment [in] forms of entertainment … [involving] the subjective experience of others is critical” (24). Biocca stated that the telos of this technos would be full “immersion” (24). As Seth Giddings has demonstrated, video games are not virtual spaces for interaction—that is, they are not cyberspaces “forming stages for the interaction of discrete bodies and objects” (428). Giddings explains that video game worlds are also more than mere simulations but instead best understood as “exemplars of the automaton-simulacrum” (428). Highlighting parallels with audience perception of illusion and verisimilitude in screen and media studies, Giddings returns to eighteenth-century French automata based on audience responses to “the technical apparatus of simulation” (427). Giddings references Fredric Jameson’s comments on Plato’s notion of the simulacrum to postulate that games consist of copies for which no original has ever existed (419). Video game worlds, Giddings writes, “simulate … themselves” (428). The pleasures of gameplay are thus the subjective experience of artificiality from within a simulation. In the process, the player is also produced as a simulacrum. Artificial features of video game worlds and bodies become instrumental in creating a common code shared between the player’s experience and the physical and cognitive constructs of the world of the game. Katie Salen and Eric Zimmerman have contested the idea that video game pleasures lie in the design and appear as a convincing reality, calling this assumption “immersive fallacy” (451-451). Rather than perceptions of reality leading to immersion, artificially induces integrated forms of presence in a mediated world. Video game design has increasingly engaged players through self-aware journeys into their surrogate selves. Lahti identified the early iterations of games of the early 2000s that integrated the body and mind of players. He wrote that “corporealization of the experience of playing” in these “games invite us to retheorize bodily experience through the corporeal coordinates of our subjectivity” (158). James Paul Gee points out the reciprocal nature of the simulation, writing that “video games, we play with life as if life were a toy” (261). Gee points out that being toy-like, or marked as artificial within a simulation, does not at all diminish our “desires, intentions, and goals”, but results in players projecting mental states into characters acting as “surrogate mind and body” (258). Much as toys mould themselves to users in shared simulated experiences, the Signalis and Citizen Sleeper establish bonds of surrogacy between artificiality and mind. Fostering self-realisations through play in mechanical bodies formed in relation to artificial worlds, Signalis and Citizen Sleeper exhibit that dreams of our future selves as cyborgs—Biocca’s “total embodiment”—still drive gaming pleasures. Yet, desires for symbiosis have been supplanted by a focus on the complexities of our simulated surrogates. More than a way to “retheorize bodily experience”, these recent games present incorporation into artificiality as a mirror held up to the player’s own subjective experiences, notions of self, and the construction of identity in worlds both in and beyond the game. Artificial Bodies in Artificial Worlds: The Game Body, Avatars, and Surrogates in Signalis and Citizen Sleeper Timothy Crick’s notion of the “game body” illuminates features of the game environment and interface of Citizen Sleeper and Signalis which engender player incorporation into artificial bodies and worlds. Crick develops the concept of the “game body” out of Vivian Sobchack’s description of the “film body” (263). Extrapolating from Sobchack’s description of the ways that “electronic ‘presence’” forms in the “fragmented … and dispersive” medium of cinema, Crick argues that “contemporary video games are phenomenologically experienced in a way that is as spatio-temporal, embodied, immersive … [as] animate as … the cinematic” (263). According to Sobchack, cinema reciprocally incorporates perceptions of spectators and perceptive apparatuses internal to film. Crick argues that such corporeality also is fundamentally interwoven into the video game experience: “through the player’s initial action of starting the game, its presence is made visible and thus available both intersubjectively and interactively through his or her interventions” (263). In Citizen Sleeper, the “initial action of starting the game” produces a choice of avatars: different “sleeper” frames linked to emulated consciousnesses. After this, the player wakes up to a series of scripted titles saying: “your self has spent many dark hours recalling what it felt like to be real … to be in a body that was indisputably yours”. Being “real” is a memory now distant from the “self”. Memory, as something common to machines and humans, is a bridge between the artificial and the natural in both Citizen Sleeper and Signalis. The titles continue as prompts: “Remember that body” or “Forget that body”. The titles end with a recursive exchange of intersubjectivity between the player’s body and the game’s avatar: “this is the moment to reach out, not curl inwards … even if it feels … like you traded one prison for another; smaller, colder”. The “prison” of the artificial body is the condition for the player to “reach out” into the universe. Signalis also begins with text on the screen that reads “wake up” and several alternate endings reinforce that the player’s involvement in gameplay was an extended dream state—a kind of fugue state—of an artificial being. After an animated cutscene of the artificial “replika” body of Elster, the player moves this avatar through a built environment of a spaceship that is quintessentially artificial. The spaceship consists of metallic walls and computer terminals. The character progresses through a story that first appears linear, in which the player ostensibly looks for the human pilot of the spaceship they were assigned to as a service unit. As they search beyond the ship, players encounter built environments that look highly artificial. These include the mining outpost Sierpinski Unit. The name is a reference to the Sierpiński triangle, a fractal pattern of triangles within triangles that is infinitely recursive. This is the first clue that the linearity of the story will split apart in forms of recursivity pointing back to artificiality as the site of the player’s presence in the game. The diegesis of the two games is foregrounded by the physical degradation of the bodies of avatars—the sleeper gradually dies without stabiliser injections and the contagious source of decay may infect Elster. The artificial bodies of Signalis and Citizen Sleeper produce what Rune Klevjer describes as an “avatar … a kind of proxy self that enables us to engage with electronic environments from the inside with a re-centred frame of reference”. He specifies this effect is strongest when avatars are “embodied extensions rather than disembodied personas or identities” (19). This feeling of extension and mutual imbrication leads Klevjer to call avatars “cybernetic toys”, “small totalities or organisms”, “engaged with from the outside” (118). The proleptic sense that the avatar bodies of the games will disintegrate instigates fear that is also attachment—creating forms of embodied reciprocity between the avatar and player. Both games' interfaces recall Ewan Kirkland’s description of “hypermediacy”, a heightened sense of mediation, through which the player cedes control of gameplay over to the subjective viewpoint of the game as a reminder of forms of subjectivity internal to the game. In these moments, what Gee calls “surrogacy” has flipped, and the desires and goals of the game are now projected into the mind of the player (258). In Citizen Sleeper, the avatar’s presence remains invisible but felt as materialised within the frame of the interface after the first menu screen. From this point on, the player floats through and above a three-dimensional rendering of the station. Kirkland suggests the map screen in survival horror games as a central example of hypermediacy. This is an effect and genre to which Signalis self-reflexively pays homage with a slightly convex monitor-like display. Kirkland writes that these augment hypermediacy by appearing as “a nondiegetic digital image” (121). Drawing further attention to this hypermediacy in Signalis, the player picks up a book detailing the functions of their avatar, essentially this is the instruction manual for both avatar and player. In one ending of Citizen Sleeper, hypermediacy is a channel for representing the mutual construction and absorption of the player and the game body. The sleeper enters “the cloud”, an area previously hidden from view, through an in-game “interface” that is described as “the tool of their emulation” (fig. 1). With the interface, the player can enter the cloud and there the player meets with a forgotten relic of an AI program called “Gardener”, created when the station was built to manage the station’s agricultural production. Gardener presents the option for the game to end with the emulated mind of the sleeper transferring into a “chorus”—an integrated mass of interfaces with neural properties that grow from electronic seeds planted by Gardener (fig. 2). The sequence, and game, end by synthesising the experiential in-game world of the player with that of the player experiencing the interface of the game. The player sees a scripted sequence in which they are told that after a “crossing” they are sitting in a chair and have “rich and detailed sensorium”. This is followed by a final title that tells them that they “wake up”. The “crossing” at the end of this branching storyline is the player joining their own mirror image in the game and merging with the intersubjective presence that is their counterpart in the game body. Fig. 1: The avatar given the interface that created their artificial self. Fig. 2: The game ends with the sleeper as part of the game body. As Elster searches for gestalt beings in Signalis, and cutscenes show lost memories or scenes of forgotten relationships that lead her into mysteries of her self and the game, recursive markers of artificiality absorb players into a horrifying version of the game body. The game environment rapidly deteriorates from metal and electronics environments into passages and walls of flesh (figs. 3-4). In this fleshy game environment, the player’s presence is glimpsed within Crick’s game body in a visible and material form. The digitised shapes of pulsing raw flesh call attention to the player’s perception that they are present in a boundary space between natural and artificial bodies that has suddenly split open—as well as the fact that incorporation in video gameplay comes from the ongoing mutual construction of natural and artificial. Figs. 3 & 4: The “game body” revealed in passages of pulsing flesh. Explaining the game body as intersubjectivity formed between the player and the artificial world of the game, Crick transforms the notion of presence from its earlier applications into a way of describing a conscious integration of consciousness into the mediated environment. Crick details the idea of game body as “presence … intersubjectivity … as a structure of engagement with the behavior of ‘other body-objects from which we recognize what it objectively feels like to be subjective’ [as cited in Sobchack, 2004, p. 316])” (Crick 263). The absorption of sleeper and Elster into the game body exhibits this self-recognition of the formation of in-game subjectivity between bodies and “body-objects”. Forms of mutually constructed subjectivity reroute video game players’ subjectivity through artificial constructs and bring to light new dimensions of subjectivity in the player. This effect, fundamental to video game incorporation, is discussed by Calleja through the notion of the “gestalt” described by George Lakoff and Mark Johnson. Calleja explains “gestalt” as past experience combined into composite experiential phenomena that will be applied to future situations (168). Calleja writes that games are constituted by the “experiential gestalts that inform being in everyday life” (168) and that “our awareness of the game world … [is] an absorption into our mind of external stimuli that are organized according to existing experiential gestalts” (167). Signalis develops the replicated artificial being that is the player’s avatar as both contrast and counterpart to the human player out of the same theories of language and experience that Calleja draws upon. The game reflects upon these theories of experientiality as existence by using “gestalt” in place of “natural” or “human”. “Gestalt” is defined in a dictionary found in the game as “a person that is not a … Replika”. Embedded in this tautology is a recursivity in which all gameplay returns the player to the site of their creation within the game—every feature of the game world will be a reexperiencing of their nature within the game as a replication of experience founded upon a split form the experiential gestalt of everyday life. The End: Of Memory and Experience in Artificiality As traces of the natural, the artificial, the body, the mind, experience, and copy, memory is the ultimate meeting point of player and game in Citizen Sleeper and Signalis. Through memory, the games signal commonalities between lived experience and technological forms of preservation. The loss and formation of memories are the starting points of the player’s artificial existence in the games. In one of the most memorable of the storylines of Citizen Sleeper, the Sleeper enters a world of the ruins of servers managed by previous administrators of the station when it was a hub where thousands resided. The sleeper accidentally uncovers a sentient being hidden in a broken vending machine. The character, who is later revealed to be an interstellar navigator with a beautifully translucent body, relays through the machine: “found this vessel. had to reduce memory to fit. amputate self. but survived”. The sleeper aids the navigator in finding a hard drive to transfer his partial consciousness onto and in, escaping the rogue agents hunting him in the station’s AI networks. The navigator’s plight is particularly haunting because it reminds the player that existence in the game and in the world comes down to the precarity of memory as medium. A leitmotif connecting birds, words, and madness in Signalis connects the game back to genre precedents in Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Raven” and the birds of Daphne du Maurier and Alfred Hitchcock. This leitmotif also parallels the cognitive decline of (all-female) replika units, suggesting that the game can also be viewed as a work within the lineage of female writers whose “ironic disturbance” of “mimesis-mimcry” prompted Luce Irigaray to critique Plato’s position of hysteria as an intrinsically female form of mimicry opposed to male-oriented mimesis (Diamond 65). The name of the character’s avatar, Elster, is German for magpie, and Elster’s unit type frequently appears with the Chinese character for this bird. The use of Chinese characters throughout the game exemplifies the many levels of the game's simulacra., specifically echoing Fredric Jameson’s idea that in late capital, signifiers—and specifically signifiers of “China”—only function as “connotation”, as repetition becomes a substitute for historical reference (17-18). Magpies possess an avian intelligence paralleling human intelligence. Here mimicry doubles as a questioning of the originality of intelligence and calls up ironic disturbances hysteria in which chains of endlessly repeat signifiers are indistinguishable from dream or memory. The centrality of memory to the conjoined life of player and character also entails that loss of memory (or of a memory) is a total loss—an ending more profound than that of mind or body. A devastating moment in one ending of Signalis fully captures this as Elster finally finds her beloved gestalt, Ariane, just awoken from a stasis that she is put into due to terminal cancer. Elster says to her, “It’s me, Elster” (fig. 5); to this Ariane slowly replies, “I’m sorry, but I don’t remember”, simultaneously signifying the end of memory, character, and game. Fig. 5: Elster speaks to Ariane who has lost her memory. References Biocca, Frank. “The Cyborg's Dilemma: Progressive Embodiment in Virtual Environments.” Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication 3.2 (1997). Calleja, Gordon. In-Game: From Immersion to Incorporation. MIT P, 2011. Crick, Timothy. “The Game Body: Toward a Phenomenology of Contemporary Video Gaming.” Games and Culture 6.3 (2011): 259–269. Diamond, Elin. “Mimesis, Mimicry, and the ‘True-Real’.” Modern Drama 32.1 (1989): 58–72. Gee, James Paul. “Video Games and Embodiment.” Games and Culture 3.3–4 (2008): 253–263. Giddings, Seth. “Dionysiac Machines: Videogames and the Triumph of the Simulacra.” Convergence 13.4 (2007): 417–431. Jameson, Fredric. Postmodernism, or, the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism. Routledge, 2016. 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