Death at the Crossroads of Subjecthood in Happy Wheels (Fancy Force, 2010)

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.