Keywords: Doom Eternal, Digital Culture, Social Self-Understanding, Societal Contradictions, Violent Revolution
Social Self-Understanding in Digital Culture – Critical Notes on Doom Eternal
Abstract
While video games as a whole have made headway into mainstream and academic culture, supposedly “low-brow” iterations remain underestimated and understudied. In this article, we analyze the latest instalment of the Doom franchise – Doom Eternal – through the lens of critical theory. For while Doom has gone down in video game history as a technical innovation, little attention has been paid to its narrative. We suggest that the plot of Doom Eternal, centered on a demonic invasion of Earth through the forces of Hell, can be fruitfully interpreted as an allegory for suffering, exploitation, and injustice in late-stage capitalism. We close by bringing into focus the protagonist of the series – the Doom Slayer or Doom guy – as a personified and contradictory symbol of violent revolution. We thereby aim to contribute to the further development of an expanded and updated concept of social self-understanding under digital conditions.
1. Introduction
While cultural attitudes towards video games are slowly changing in Western societies, digital games as a whole are still frequently seen as (at best) a form of philistine, mainstream entertainment and (at worst) a potentially dangerous time-waster for children, adolescents and adults. Extreme forms of such attitudes have recently been somewhat alleviated: The rise of indie game culture (think of games like Stanley Parable (2013), Papers Please (2013), Life is Strange (2015), or Journey (2012)) is only the most obvious indication of this, a kind of flagship for the medium's potential to be more artful and playful – much like arthouse movies, which illustrate these possibilities particularly well while not always being the best crafted movies. And as with movies, there are plenty of productions in the in-between space – between a more aesthetic and a more entertainment approach – that have already attracted some academic attention (and at the same time could use so much more of it, because they are exposing a new kind of aesthetic experience that is continually evolving on the ground of an unfinished and even disruptive medium). The Mass Effect trilogy, for example, falls into this in-between category, and might be grasped a piece of art (following Feige’s 2015 approach) precisely because it entertains so well.
Against this background, we would like to understand our engagement with the unlikely object of Doom as a two-fold exploration. First, it is about a field that is under the prejudice of being of little (or less) cultural value. Secondly, we will investigate whether and which theoretical considerations may be found in it, and thereby arrive at critical theory in Doom. As social and practical philosophers, we are primarily concerned with finding and uncovering theoretical contents as part of a wider context of social narratives and societal self-understanding. As a consequence, the interests of this paper are not aesthetic in the narrower sense (i.e. not about the beautiful). By way of analogy, consider developments in Film Studies of the past few decades.[1] Video games, specifically those often considered philistine, low-brow like Doom, can similarly serve as cultural products from which important lessons can be extracted. They are pieces of cultural self-understanding processes and as such potentially interesting for a philosophical and sociological inquiry.[2] Long story short: the question is not whether Doom is an aesthetically excelling video game. Through an analysis of its (neglected) narrative, we aim at showing instead that it can be conceived as an element of cultural self-understanding by taking up ‘critical’ motifs in a specific way.
The recently released, hugely successful Doom Eternal (2020) is perhaps a prime example of a game that qualifies as ‘low-brow’ entertainment: a gory Triple-A first-person shooter with a simple good-evil dichotomy driving the plot, developed and published by industry giants specifically designed to appeal to a mass audience. Yet, even this constellation of clichés conceals more interesting phenomena worth unearthing. Doom (1993) marked the beginning of one of the most influential and popular video game franchises, renowned for its then revolutionary 3D graphics and fast-paced gameplay. The recent instalment slash remake Doom in the year 2016 (henceforth simply called Doom 2016) has re-invigorated the series after the relatively lacklustre commercial success of Doom 3 (2004).
The Doom series never had a well-fleshed out or intricate story compared to some other games, and it did not need to have one as the revolutionary first-person shooter gameplay was its main appeal in addition to its relatively simple, yet very effective and exciting setting: there are demons from Hell, you have to kill them, now rip and tear. Accordingly, Doom 2016 and Doom Eternal, too, are mainly lauded and critically acclaimed for their fast-paced, action-packed shooter-style gameplay which rewards quick thinking and resourcefulness. Yet, Doom 2016 has – more or less surprisingly[3] – changed up the tradition of sparse storytelling by introducing a more cohesive narrative which is subsequently expanded upon in Doom Eternal, set after the events of Doom 2016.
Figure Doom Guy
Some Triple-A game developers claim that some of their obviously political material is not political at all, as it were (Chalk 2019, Game Informer 2019). Doom Eternal, on the other hand, does make use of overt political elements. Even before the game was released, Doom Eternal and its developers were criticized repeatedly for the game’s ironic usage of the fictional PC-speech term “mortally challenged” and “welcoming” the demons in our world although their sole purpose is to kill us. Rather than reiterating such worn-out points, we are (more fundamentally) interested in the time-diagnostic elements underlying the fantastical, literally incredible events of Doom Eternal. The approach thus follows the long tradition that interprets aesthetic practices as instances of social self-understanding processes (cf. Hegel 1998). Even a video game like Doom Eternal is then also such an instance which articulates certain things in a certain manner. Our thesis is that Doom Eternal processes fragments of that family of theories often referred to as emancipatory or critical in a way that is both video game-specific and tentatively time-diagnostic, which is why a critical theory lens can shed new light on its aesthetic commitments.
By Doom Eternal being a game that offers grounds for a diagnosis of our times, we mean that theoretical elements in the broadest sense are taken up and aesthetically interwoven. Doom makes use of those elements that used to play a role in critical political and social philosophy, while at the same time giving them a particular twist that (also) derives from the medium and its narrative affordances. While games like Doom are often viewed as experiences that appeal to motor skills and cognitive athleticism rather than trying to convey a narrative experience, we suggest that both the quality of aesthetic experience and the cultural relevance of video games are rather measured by the way in which interactive mechanics and narrative structure intertwine. In simple words, it makes a difference even here that you are not aiming at geometric shapes, or grouse, but fighting demons.
After a very focused summary of the events and lore of Doom Eternal (part 1), the paper first draws the relation between exploited labour and Hellish suffering as the first dimension of the allegory (part 2). This is followed by Doom’s critique of corporatism (part 3) and its always sardonic, often hilarious critique of mere liberalism (part 4). We finish by reading Doom Guy himself as a contradictory metaphor for violent revolution, tying up some loose narrative ends of this reading.[4]
2. The (Abridged) Story of Doom Eternal
Figure Hell on Earth
Figure Samuel Hayden
Over the course of Doom Eternal, much new background information is revealed about the origins of hell and Doom Guy himself. As it turns out, Doom Guy once was human, then through circumstances not entirely clear yet, was transferred to the alien world of Urdak (at times also called “Heaven” in the lore) where he was chosen by the Khan Maykr as one to join the Sentinel Military Force. The Sentinels are the military arm of the ancient xenos race of the Argenta, originating from their homeworld of D'Nur. The Khans are an ancient, technologically extremely advanced alien civilization whose existence long precedes that of humans. Doom Guy obtained his superhuman powers in the Divinity Machine during his time as a Night Sentinel through a “blessing” of the Seraphim.
Progression in the game also discloses that the Khan Maykr orchestrated the invasion of earth by the forces of hell, the Hellpriests themselves being former Sentinels. As it turns out, the world of the Khans suffers from (a yet unexplained) shortage of energy necessary to run their empire. Their technological advancement however allows them (in a, too, yet unexplained manner) to trans-dimensionally access different planets (“worlds”, in the game’s language), one of them being planet Earth. We also learn (through the voice of Samuel Haydn) what happens with humans killed by demons and dragged to hell: humans are tortured for an unfathomably 
Figure 4 Khan Maykr in full armor and mask
3. Hell on Earth: Exploitation, Suffering, Demonification
We start with the most obvious aspect in which Doom Eternal can be viewed as an allegory to early and late-stage capitalism: exploitation. The invasion of Earth through the forces of Hell can be read as the exploitation of the working class under capitalism as such.
Figure 5 Khan Maykr unmasked after her defeat
The result of the seemingly endless suffering in Doom Eternal – once human victims are dragged to hell – is the extraction from the soul of the man or woman which creates Argent Energy (gr. “energeia” as “work”, “result”). That soul extraction process is a process of demonification which, at its end, turns the human (i.e. the worker) into a demon, by definition a “soulless” being. This recalls or might even reveal itself to be a pictorial (and very trenchant) variant of the thesis, which, starting from Lukacs, was to lead to the formation of a New Left. Adorno's Minima Moralia (1978), to give just one (famous) example, revolves around the damaged lives of those who suffer not from the emptiness of the stomach, but from an impoverishment of their hearts and minds. Adorno’s (and Horkheimer’s) analysis on this point is multifaceted. The section on Odysseus and the Sirens in their Dialectic of Enlightenment can be grasped as its birth scene:
“He [Odysseus] knows only two possibilities of escape. One he prescribes to his comrades. He plugs their ears with wax and orders them to row with all their might. Anyone who wishes to survive must not listen to the temptation of the irrecoverable, and is unable to listen only if he is unable to hear. Society has always made sure that this was the case. Workers must look ahead with alert concentration and ignore anything which lies to one side. The urge toward distraction must be grimly sublimated in redoubled exertions. Thus the workers are made practical. The other possibility Odysseus chooses for himself, the landowner, who has others to work for him. He listens, but does so while bound helplessly to the mast, and the stronger the allurement grows the more tightly he has himself bound, just as later the bourgeois denied themselves happiness the closer it drew to them with the increase in their own power.” (Horkheimer & Adorno 2002, 26)
The recourse to mythology here serves, to say the least, as a formulation aid for the various theoretical strands that come together. At this point, only this much: The thesis implies that an inadequate engagement with the environment – a regress against the potential, i.e., against what would be possible – leads to consequential damage; to the path of ignorance or sophisticated alienation (in the sense that Odysseus can only receive the promises of art without participating in them). In the condensed consideration on the Genesis of Stupidity, Horkheimer and Adorno argue furthermore that
“Stupidity is a scar. It can relate to one faculty among many or to them all, practical and mental. Every partial stupidity in a human being marks a spot where the awakening play of muscles has been inhibited instead of fostered … Such scars lead to deformations. They can produce ‘characters,’ hard and capable; they can produce stupidity, in the form of deficiency symptoms, blindness, or impotence, if they merely stagnate, or in the form of malice, spite, and fanaticism, if they turn cancerous within. Goodwill is turned to ill will by the violence it suffers.” (Horkheimer & Adorno 2002, 214)
In this sense, labour ‘hurts’ the ‘soul’, namely leaves behind psychological scars. Such scars are meant to metaphorically denote points at which mental activity could not unfold and therefore became ‘askew’ somehow – an unfortunate, ill-fated learning process, if you will, in which a precarious self-identity goes hand in hand with maladaptive problem solving. Just as Horkheimer and Adorno assumed for capitalism, ‘labouring’ in the world of Doom can obviously cripple both the “soul” and the body.
Who profits from this process? In real-life, it would be first and foremost those who possess capital and the means of production, and those closest to it, commonly just subsumed under the catch-all term “bourgeois”. In Doom Eternal, the Khan Maykr (as a pars pro toto for the Khan race) personifies and represents the bourgeois as the one who ultimately profits from the energy extraction of souls in the process of demonification, gaining the Argent Energy to prolong their own existence. This cruel image unfolds a narrative momentum of its own. It cannot be mapped neatly onto real-world developments. Neither to physical attrition nor to more subtle, psychological consequences of alienated labour (as a paradigm of the so-called New Left). Nevertheless, it is clear that it aims at contexts of this kind and processes them aesthetically into an allegory that might seem obvious to those exploited.
Interpreting this constellation, we must ask conversely: what does it mean to – allegorically – tap into the soul as a source of energy? For instance, it has been largely established that poverty is a significant predictor for early death and chronic disease (Brown 2000). Perhaps more devastatingly, poverty, due to the manifold stress it causes, dramatically decreases cognitive power, measurable as a dip in IQ by 13 points which is roughly the equivalent of missing a full night of sleep (Mani et al. 2013). Against common condescending stereotypes,[7] poverty drastically and unequivocally reduces one’s quality of life. Thus, just as the Khan Maykr unleashes Hell on Earth to be provided the energy to further passively thrive, Marx states that the bourgeois are on the upper part of the system under which the worker creates wealth through labour which mainly the bourgeois benefits from.[8]
At the end of the process of the soul extraction, Hell gains a new soldier who is subsequently released upon people to further torture, enslave, and kill. A tortured soul becoming a demon can thereby also be read as a chiffre for ideological indoctrination: capitalist production processes are accompanied by neoliberal ideologies of self-sacrifice and self-entrepreneurship with the implicit promise that anyone can ‘make it’. The demonification process represents the process of explicit and implicit education through which we come to accept a contradictory system parts of which entail human suffering as institutionalized ‘collateral damage’. The devoured soul, now a demon, has become a soldier for the machinery of exploitation which mangled him or her in the first place, a literal, violent soldier in the game, a figurative, ideological soldier in the real world. Thus, Hell and the suffering it inflicts is an endless cycle: Hell creates the suffering which fuels its machinery to create more suffering; or conversely: capitalism is a self-sustaining machinery depending on exploitation.
The difference between pretense and reality of the Khan Maykr (viz the bourgeois) is seconded by its dual aesthetics. At the surface, then Khan Maykr is a tall, slender, Angelic 
Figure Spider Mastermind (Doom 2016)
Another parallel can be derived from the fact that the mask of the Khan is not only not ugly, i.e., it hides its actually deterrent appearance. Rather, it is supposed to be a holy apparition or at least a reminiscence of the holy. It not only hides something, but itself holds an aesthetic-religious quality. Just as ‘sacrifice’ would historically have been not only socially enforced, but subjected to an apotheosis (Adorno & Horkheimer 2002, 40), the Khan appears literally angelic.
4. Corporatism and the Energy Crisis
Figure Arachnotron
The allegorical analogue here is fairly obvious: the late capitalist system of which corporatism is one aspect has created circumstances under which the incentive to gain is paramount, no matter the cost. Even if it means literally turning Earth into Hell. From the history of critical theories, we know a multitude of variations of this central motif. In what is probably its most classical form, it is entitled Critique of Instrumental Reason (Horkheimer 2004). With a modernized vocabulary, a distinction is often made today between internal and immanent critique (cf. Jaeggi 2019). Internal is then used to characterize the normative frame of reference: An existing norm is violated or not satisfied. For our case, this means: One-dimensional profit optimization is the object of internal critique, insofar as one-dimensional optimization can achieve its goal (the optimization of profit) at best in the short term. Once the whole forest is cut down, there is no profit to be made at all anymore.
There certainly are cases where it is not the appropriateness of the means that is in doubt, but the appropriateness of the underlying ends. Here: Is profit maximization a morally sound, i.e. “good”, goal at all?
Things become more complicated when practices and norms are in a more entangled relationship: when, for instance, norms are constitutive for a social practice, but are realized in this practice in a contradictory or deficient way. Contemporary discussion conceives of this constellation as immanent critique. For our example case, it means: There are reasons that something is wrested from nature; and that this happens in such a brutal way does not come by chance (but from other factors like a competitive society etc.).
The forest is, but is not only to be described in terms of the unit of useful meters of wood. It is also a reservoir for research, the lungs of our planet, a place of recreation and a potential opponent of climate change. In these respects, an instrumental perspective is not only ineffective, but completely mistaken in its one-sidedness. Earth is turned hell for profit maximization, but what do earthly riches matter in the devil's kingdom? This is where that one-sidedness becomes very clear in Doom.
5. “Mortally Challenged” – The Ideology of Liberalism
We already mentioned the theme of ideology in relation to the process of demonification, i.e. the idea that sufficiently tortured souls are turned into demonic ‘soldiers’ for the very same forces that beget their suffering in the first place. There is, however, a more straightforward way in which Doom Eternal consciously engages with the topic of ideology. Most strikingly, Doom Eternal viciously relishes in mocking the ideology of liberalism and sanitized politically correct corporate speech through holographic depictions and voice messages of the UAC representatives who propagandize the demonic invasion and torture through demons not as a deadly threat, but as a matter of tolerance and welcoming (“welcome our new friends into our home”).
“Please assemble in an orderly fashion and move towards the nearest harvesting zone. Thank you!”
Figure The UAC representative hologram
“Remember, ‘demon’ can be an offensive term. Refer to them as ‘mortally challenged’”.
“The UAC. Your blood sacrifice today makes for a better tomorrow.”
“See new sights. Make new friends. Soar to new heights. Join the official mortally-challenged visitor welcoming committee, today!”
“See Jessica in HR and sign up now for the UAC Mortally Challenged Blood Drive. Be generous. Give your blood. Give ALL of your blood.”
“Death is really simple. So why do we make it so complicated?”
“Have you ever wondered if there is life after death? Join the UAC and find out, now!”
“Welcome to Hell! Brought to you by your friends at the UAC.”
“My brothers and sisters, let’s help to make our friend’s transition into their new world a comfortable one.”
“Earth is the melting pot of the Universe.”
“Do not run from our mortally challenged guests. Be a good host to our new friends.”
These are just about half of the 25 holographically transmitted propagandistic messages the player comes across over the campaign of Doom Eternal. The developers have been criticized as xenophobic, racist, or anti-immigration (Babar 2018, Tsiro 2018) based on such sardonic use of sanitized “inclusive” vocabulary like “mortally challenged guests” or “melting pot”. To us, this seems like an uncharitable reading. Rather, these phrases are a blend of all-too familiar corporate, TED Talk-esque euphemising surrounding self-optimization, ‘inspiration’, new age allures, yet in this case all in the service of softening up humanity up to the idea of being tortured and suffered by the demons. Now, if we take this in the context of the construed allegory, the UAC Spokesperson simply becomes a chiffre for ideology as such in late stage capitalism, that is, the whole of deceptive false consciousness that is purposed to make people embrace their chains and exploitation. Once we untangle the plot of Doom Eternal not as driving a fear against the ‘Other’, but rather as a critique of economic and ecological exploitation, it becomes clear that the all-too familiar liberalist focus on sanitizing and euphemizing language cannot cover the tangible reality of exploitation. Instead, in the obvious presence of unfathomable brutality and suffering, the ‘liberalistic’ language aims to bizarrely distort undeniable aspects of reality. Thus, without rubbing it into the player’s face, Doom Eternal manages to put their mocking finger tightly on the ideological imagery of neo-liberalism.
6. In Lieu of a Conclusion: The Messianic Revolution goes Rip and Tear
How does Doom Guy then fit into all of this? As Doom Guy processes in the story – killing demons, liberating the Earth from invasion – the UAC spokesperson switches up the kind of propagandistic indoctrination we just looked at:
“You believe the Doom Slayer will save you? Your salvation lies with us, not with him.”
Understanding the dire urgency of their situation, i.e. the UAC losing, the spokesperson starts to desperately curse the Doom Guy, suggesting his supposed powerlessness faced with the armies of Hell. This quote is telling as it suggests that Doom Guy is, in fact, a messianic figure at least in one way: the only one capable of bringing salvation (simply reversing the UAC’s obviously ideologically motivated rhetoric). On the other hand, the campaign entails a resistant scientist’s audio tape stating that Doom Guy
“represents humankind’s rage, our will to persevere, to overcome that which would threaten our survival. He is an uncompromising, relentless being of violence, and shows none of the hesitation shared by politicians and other leaders in our time of judgement.”
The focus on the violence of enforcement makes it sound more fascist than messianic here, alluding the idea of a “strong”, “pragmatic” leader. Read more charitably, Doom Guy as the violent revolution personified, that is, as a kind of revolution that remains uncompromising in the face of suffering, resists sedation through ideologically charged language, yet by paying a (huge) price. He is the collective, reified, hypostasized subject of revolution. His maniacal hatred of demons, i.e. the personification of exploitation, is expressed in his catch-phrase (brilliantly delivered by voice actor Matthew Waterson) “Rip and Tear” and his iconic crazed mumbling: “must… kill… all demons”.
This illustrates that Doom Guy strives for a kind of ‘solution’ to social problems that would probably hardly deserve the name “solution”, at least for modern democratic sensibilities. For example, Shakespeare's white wizard Prospero wants to reimpose harmony and misuses his magical means (e.g., against Caliban). Doom Guy, unlike Prospero is not such a (more or less) subtly ambiguous figure. In the face of violence Doom Guy unleashes and embodies uninhibited violence. The contradictory fiction of a Doom Guy emerges from a situation that is not only contradictory but is aesthetically extrapolated to the point of total contradiction: Doom Guy as a caricature of humanity, yet to save it at the same time. When the term contradiction is applied here (in a broad sense), it refers to the fact that what appears as a potential solution must at the same time appear as part of the problem. Doom is concerned in many places with experiences of violence (such as the extraction of souls), but has nothing to oppose it but counter-violence. Doom Guy is almost a demon himself. And whoever plays him goes along with all this.
Doom Guy’s identity might appear to have symbolic value if he is read as a messianic figure of salvation on the one hand, and as the personification of economic and social revolution on the other hand. This is because Doom Guy is originally human, yet turned into a sentinel bestowed with superhuman powers with the help of Argent Energy, i.e. with the kind of energy refined from human suffering in hell. The Doom Guy is the only life form which can harness directly the Argent energy of Hell which he uses to slay the monsters of hell. In Doom 2016, it powers his Praetor Suit as well as some of his weapons. Doom Guy is thus a unique hybrid between the three different worlds present in the Doom lore, i.e. Hell, Urdak (roughly equivalent to “Heaven”), and Earth. This interconnected hybridity is reminiscent of the traditional Marxist promise that the state of capitalist production carries within it always already the conditions for its own demise: Just like that, the forces of Urdak produce the means and conditions which empower the Doom Guy with the force of Hell – i.e. the force of violently extracted labour –, thereby making him more than human, to ultimately become their demise.
Marx had developed this thought along his reception of Hegel. One of the important concepts here is that the confrontation with the world forms the self; thus it can face the world more successfully [“Bildung”]. At the same time, possibly deforming effects of certain “formations” (e.g. monotonous types of work) can also be described with (a critically read) Hegel. In the aesthetically extrapolated setting of Doom, however, Doom Guy himself appears so deformed that it is questionable whether he could ever find his way back to humanity. He has incorporated Hell to withstand it. As a ‘hero’, he didn't just have to make tough choices that hardened the character (like Odysseus). Odysseus, in a violent outburst, shoots everyone who had courted his wife Penelope in his absence. With the Doom Guy, it is so drastic that he almost becomes a demon himself. The notion of some sort of “corruption”, if you will, is further exacerbated, so that the situation seems even more aporetic in a certain way; for all the activism of the tireless, demon-killing Doom Guy.
From here, five final, concluding remarks:
Firstly, the examples given are meant to demonstrate that even in unlikely subjects like Doom 2016 and Doom Eternal, there are contents that can be interpreted as elements of social self-understanding. They exhibit thoughts we have unfolded here primarily in dialogue with analytical resources of critical theories.
Secondly, we have suggested that this dialogue is relatively complex. Neither do theoretical elements (about the state of society, its problems, potentials etc.) appear completely incoherent, nor simply taken over from a particular academic theory. Doom works with, but also on, these elements.
Thirdly, we have selectively shown how the video game does this, in which directions interpretations are shifted and developed. Most striking here is certainly the way in which religious and also emancipatory motifs (of salvation) are taken up, while at the same time they are dissolved into delimited violence.
Fourthly, this has led to the notion of a contradictory constellation. Doom especially plays with revolutionary motifs, but drenches them so deeply in a bath of bitter satire of late capitalist conditions, that the possibility of a profound transformation seems possible on the one hand, but intrinsically corrupted on the other.
Following those aspects, further research could investigate why this is actually the case, i.e. why Doom is pursuing this path: Whether Doom is an example of its own, or whether there are several cultural narratives that point in a similar direction. And if Doom’s contradictory perspective should not be considered an isolated case: What does it say about the state of our society that such narratives reach a mainstream audience, provide entertainment and distraction? Doom extrapolates a world so corrupted that its saviour is on the verge of becoming a demon himself. As a player, you are actually doing what Doom Guy’s catch phrase is suggesting: rip and tear.
References
Scholarly Work:
Adorno, Theodor W. (1978): Minima Moralia, transl. E. F. N. Jephcott, Verso.
Luc Boltanski, Ève Chiapello (2007): The New Spirit of Capitalism. London / New York: Verso.
Brown, E. Richard (2000): “Income Inequalities and Health Disparities”, Western Journal of Medicine 172 (1), 25.
Ellerbrock, D./Koch, L./Müller‐Mall, S./Münkler, M./Scharloth, J./Schrage, D., and Schwerhoff, G.: Invektivität ‐ Perspektiven eines neuen Forschungsprogramms in den Kultur‐ und Sozialwissenschaften, in: Kulturwissenschaftliche Zeitschrift, 2. Jahrgang 2017, Heft 1, 2‐24.
Feige, Daniel Martin (2015): Computerspiele. Eine Ästhetik, Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp.
Habermas, Jürgen (2018): “Pre-Political Conditions of the Constitutional State?”, in: Habermas, Between Naturalism and Religion, Cambridge: Polity, 101-113.
Hegel, G.W.F. (1998): Aesthetics: Lectures on Fine Art, 2 volumes, translated by T.M. Knox, Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Horkheimer, Max (2004): Eclipse of Reason, London: Continuum Press.
Horkheimer, Max & Adorno, Theodor W. (2002): Dialectic of Enlightenment. Philosophical Fragments, Stanford University Press.
Jaeggi, Rahel (2014): Alienation, New York: Columbia University Press.
Jaeggi, Rahel (2018): Critique of Forms of Life, Cambridge, M.: Harvard University Press.
Lichtenfeld, Eric (2007): Action Speaks Louder: Violence, Spectacle, and the American Action Movie, Wesleyan University Press.
Mani, Anandi; Mullainathan, Sendhil; Shafir, Eldar & Zhao, Jiaying (2013): “Poverty Impedes Cognitive Function”, Science 341 (6149), 976-980.
Marx, Karl (1977): Capital, vol. 1, transl. Ben Fowkes, New York: Knopf Doubleday.
Purse, Lisa (2011): Contemporary Action Cinema, University of Edinburgh Press.
Journalistic Work:
Alter, Adam (2014): “Do the Poor have more Meaningful Lives?”, The New Yorker, https://www.newyorker.com/business/currency/do-the-poor-have-more-meaningful-lives, 03.09.2020.
Babar, Abdul Rehman (2018): “Doom Eternal Racist Controversy offends Social Justice Warriors”, SegmentNext, 16.08.2018, https://segmentnext.com/2018/08/16/doom-eternal-controversy/, last viewed. 03.09.2020.
Chalk, Andy (2019): “Infinity Ward says Modern Warfare Isn`t Political”, PC Gamer, https://www.pcgamer.com/infinity-ward-says-modern-warfare-isnt-political/, 03.09.2020.
Tsiro, Rania (2018): “Why People find Doom Eternal Offensive”, VGR, https://www.vgr.com/why-people-find-doom-eternal-offensive/, 19.08.2018, last viewed. 03.09.2020.
Ludography:
3909 LLC (2013). Papers, Please. [video game][Windows, macOS, Linux, iOS, PlayStation Vita], 3909 LLC.
DontnodEntertainment. Life is Strange. [video game][PC, PS3, PS4, iOS, XBOX360] , Square Enix.
Galactic Café (2013). Stanley Parable. [video game][PC] Galactic Café.
id Software. (1993). Doom. [video game][CD-ROM][MS-Dos], List.
id Software. (1994). Doom II. [video game][CD-ROM][Microsoft Windows], GT Interactive Software.
id Software. (2016). Doom. [video game][various][Microsoft Windows, PS4, XONE, Nintendo Switch], Bethesda Softworks. [informally called: Doom 2016]
id Software. (2020). Doom Eternal. [video game][PC, PS4, Stadia, Xbox One], Bethesda Softworks.
Johnson, Chris (2013). Moirai. [video game][Windows, macOS, Linux], Chris Johnson.
Team TNT. (1996). Final Doom. [video game][CD-ROM][Microsoft Windows], id Software.
Thatgamecompany (2012). Journey. [video game][PC, PS3, PS4, iOS], Sony Interactive.
Videography:
Star Wars: Episode 3 – Revenge of the Sith, dir. George Lucas, distr. 20th Century Fox, prod. Rick McCallum, 2005.
“Is Call of Duty: Modern Warfare a Political Game? Here’s Infinity Ward’s Answer”, YouTube, Game Informer, 08.08.2019, https://www.youtube.com/watch?time_continue=61&v=87Jb5Qj5JPM&feature=emb_logo, last viewed 03.09.2020
Pictures:
Figure 1: https://sm.ign.com/t/ign_de/screenshot/default/blob_qfyn.1280.jpg
Figure 3: https://doomwiki.org/wiki/Samuel_Hayden
Figure 4: https://doom.fandom.com/wiki/Khan_Maykr
Figure 5: https://doom.fandom.com/wiki/Maykr
Figure 6: https://guides.gamepressure.com/doom/guide.asp?ID=36512
Figure 7: https://doom.fandom.com/wiki/Arachnotron/Doom_Eternal
Figure 8: https://www.behindthevoiceactors.com/video-games/Doom-Eternal/UAC-Spokesperson/
[each accessed August 2021]
…which are concerned with “low brow” movie genres, particularly action movies and Blockbuster Hollywood cinema (Lichtenfeld 2007, Purse 2011). ↑
Examples like Life is Strange (2015) tend to be more overt in their claims to “arthood” in the sense of having some kind of aesthetic or political value. In this text, on the other hand, we have deliberately targeted a more unlikely candidate. ↑
This may be surprising in view of the franchise’s tradition, but it actually only reflects the evolution of video game’s aesthetics. Fast, and in a way uncompromising action, combined with an impressive presentation was a unique feature that entailed immersive effects as if by itself. Nowadays this is obviously to be supported by a narrative embedding. ↑
There is obviously more to the lore of Doom and Doom Eternal than we present here. For example, one may speculate about questions whether Samuel Haydn once was the Seraphim who gave Doom Guy his supernatural powers, or question how Doom Guy received his spaceship, the Fortress of Doom. Many of these lore-elements, however, are not relevant to bring out the elements of laden social critique operative in the narrative of the game. ↑
Cf. the manifold works of the Collaborative Research Centre 1285: Invectivity. Constellations and Dynamics of Disparagement; for the conceptual starting point Ellerbrock et al. (2017). Here, we are alluding to an understanding of critique that involves rhetorics and practices aiming at dynamizing societal self-understanding. ↑
Cf. for a systematic reconstruction Jaeggi (2014); for an influential critique see Boltanski & Chiapelllo (2007). ↑
For example, Alter (2014) romanticizes poverty in suggesting that poor people lead “more meaningful lives” because having to forego “happiness in the short term” forces them to “focus on the relationships they have with their children, their gods, and their friends, which become more meaningful over time.” Assessments of this kind are deeply cynical and ultimately aimed at constructing a “Noble Poor” as a means to uphold economic power structures benefitting the already rich and powerful. ↑
This is perhaps the most crucial implication of the classical labour theory of value, Marx (1977). ↑
This denotes a well-known cultural topos both in the history of literature and in more recent pop culture: think of George Lucas’ Emperor Palpatine, for example, who becomes gradually disfigured over a life-time of engagement with the so-called dark side of the Force; his deformed, scarred face revealed the moment his true identity is found out during his battle with Mace Windu. ↑