Will Slocombe, "A 'Majestic' Reflexivity: Machine-Gods and the Creation of the Playing Subject in Deux Ex and Deus Ex: The Invisible War"

(In Digital Gameplay)

- Technological society as both freeing and controlling, dramatized in the Deus Ex series
- Not only Big Brother vs individual freedom; also "Little Brother," internalized ideology (or "programming")
- Digital games as "ideological tools that control how their players think."
- Meat vs machine (contested site of the nanotech-enhanced cyborg avatar)
- Enhancement of "natural" human abilities vs becoming-technological (different kinds of cyborgs)
- Control vs augmentation
- Deus Ex as cyborg game (generic hybridity)
- Player as the animating "soul" of the avatar
- God in the machine (a paranoid fantasy of a man-made machine-god)
- Technology as ideology
- Individual/player is invisibly interpellated as a function of ideology/the game system
- Playing subject is "forced into interacting with the game in set patterns, however loosely defined [...] the program within the player." (Somewhat problematic/partial formulation.)
- Aarseth as narratologist (an accurate assessment, I'd say)
- Games are "never truly interactive" because the computer dictates the rules (or is that the very essense of all interactivity, within parametres?)
- Ideology embedded in gaming extends beyond the game
- Illusion of defeating ideology by beating Deus Ex
- The hacker/cyborg figure seems to represent human freedom to manipulate technology, but in fact this is a function of the technological system (ideology erases itself)
- Deus Ex as reflexive but nevertheless ideological; the player is still constituted as a particular kind of subject