anthropocentrism

How do videogames imagine diegetic and extradiegetic posthuman agents? In a sense, videogame play is already posthuman. The player of a videogame is redistributed in an interrelational assemblage of human and non-human agents (Braidotti 2013); of physical world, player, technology, player character, and virtual environment (Taylor 2009).

Thus, videogames, by their very “nature” should allow us to play out versions of breaking away from anthropocentric idealism and experience what new modes of subjectivity and agency might entail. 

One such attempt is found in the 2017 videogame NieR: Automata (PlatinumGames 2017), lauded as a work of existential nihilism and post-humanity (as “after-human” as well as “beyond-“ or “more-than-human”). NieR: Automata is a role-playing action adventure videogame set in a post-apocalyptic version of Earth where androids and machines are caught in an eternal war. The player “controls” the android 2B, and later other androids and drone companions, to fight machines on behalf of humanity.

The director, Yoko Taro, has explained that the videogame intentionally avoids asking, “What does it mean to be human?” in favor of asking questions about what is left when we are gone (Muncy 2018).

The videogame more than nods at the posthuman in its narrative and gameplay, as it rejects standardized perception (Gerrish 2018) and traditional depictions of characters (Wright 2020) for machines interacting outside of the human sensorium, and idiosyncratic narrative structures (Backe 2018; Jaćević 2017).

Yet even if the humans behind the conflict are revealed to be long gone, their traces linger as machines and androids are struggling with concepts of human society such as gender, race, and human language. What happens to the posthuman stance of videogame play when machines are breaking away from humanism’s restricted notion of what being human is while continuously performing versions of it?

This presentation investigates how NieR: Automata consolidates reversing an anthropocentric view with firmly situating the human in the network. Through conceptualizing the posthuman as an interrelated agent (Braidotti 2013; Hayles 1999; 2017), the videogame presents oppositions to the humanist fantasy of autonomy on several fronts, especially in the final scene of the videogame. Here, the player has to shoot (and by extension, kill) the credits with names of the developers.

After removing the creators, the player can choose to “release” the player characters by deleting the videogame’s save file, thus stopping the perpetual circle of war, dying, and rebirth that the videogame presents. Is this part of the posthuman agent? Ultimately, in the tension between accelerating and inhibiting agency, in joining and distributing perspectives, in prompting continuation and condemning it, NieR: Automata imagines a paradoxical posthuman future of a human present.

What makes us human? Descartes believes it is the cogito – the rational mind, or the soul. “Reason,” he writes in the Discourse on the Method, “[is] the only thing that makes us men and distinguishes us from the beasts.” This categorical distinction between the human species and all other living things is embedded in the western philosophical tradition which has held, since antiquity and even before, that man has a privileged position in the natural world. Human life is endowed with intrinsic value, while other entities, such as animals, plants or minerals, are resources that may justifiably be exploited for the benefit of humankind.

If humankind’s core characteristic is intelligence, and the body (to quote Katherine Hayles) may be seen as a mere accessory, then the transference of intelligence to a different kind of body – let’s say, a machine – may create an even more perfect and entitled being. This is the underlying premise of post-humanism. Post-humanism envisions a condition in which humans and intelligent technology are becoming increasingly intertwined. It focuses on function rather than form and defines a species by the way it operates – in other words, processes information – rather than by the way it looks. The post-humanist worldview dethrones the human subject from his privileged status and transcends the boundaries of the human to include other intelligent systems, such as machines, animals and even aliens.

Trans-humanism does not aspire to transcend the boundaries of the human but rather to overcome its limitations. It seeks to enhance the functions of the human body via implants and prosthetics, and to modify human brain power and longevity with the help of technologies such as bio- or genetic engineering. While the post-humanist perspective denounces anthropocentrism, which celebrates the exclusivity and hegemony of the human species, trans-humanism may be described as “anthropocentrism on steroids”, because it centers on the enhancement of the human.

Both post-humanism and trans-humanism address the question of what makes us human, but offer two different answers. A third answer is suggested by the concept of the ecological self, coined by the Norwegian philosopher Arne Naess. We tend to confuse our self with the narrow ego, he argues, but “human nature is such that with sufficient, comprehensive (all sided) maturity we cannot help but identify our ‘self’ with all living beings.”

This is the attitude apparently adopted by the protagonist of The Vegetarian, a novel written by the South Korean female author Han Kang. Winner of the 2016 Man Booker prize, it describes a young woman who refuses to eat meat, repudiates her body and her very humanity and yearns to become a tree. The taboos she breaks, the transgressions she commits and her shocking and spellbinding transcendence of the human are the topic of this paper.