Knee Deep in the Dread

The work started an investigation into the claustrophobic mechanics, worlds, and architectures of video games such as id Software’s DOOM (1993) and Remedy Games’ Control (2019) through the lens of Mark Fisher’s concept of the eerie—referring to absence of what should be, and the presence of what should not be. The project asks: how do contemporary video games elicit a sense of neoliberal claustrophobia? Neoliberal claustrophobia here refers to the experience of living within the shrinking boundaries of contemporary capitalism’s socioeconomic reality, wherein we find our souls at work and persistent precarity offering little time for the imagining of outsides or otherwises. This research focuses on the corridors that bind these infernal and all encompassing work spaces in which we find ourselves trapped, listening for echoes that bounce down them into game worlds and back again. The illegible mundaneness of bureaucracy is its most powerful tool of control.