Theorizing the After-Human in Video Games

Game studies’ engagement with the phenomenology of Maurice Merleau-Ponty has until this point been used to produce an account of the experience of video game play. This article demonstrates a different orientation toward phenomenology, using it as a critical apparatus to articulate a speculative historical materialism and philosophy of interrelation that we call the after-human. Through comparative close readings of two video games that follow the end of the human species—Backbone (EggNut, 2021) and SOMA (Frictional Games, 2015)—we articulate this concept using the Merleau-Pontian concept of “flesh,” or the simultaneous production of the subject and object, to levy a critique of (post)humanism and offer a futurist vision of solidarity through the intersubjective after-human.