Cruelty Squad: Masochist Gaming as a Subversive Practice

The unique status of video games as a medium ranks among the most valuable observations concerning contemporary popular culture. First, games enjoy a growing popularity among various demographic groups, thus ceasing to function as a marginal form of entertainment.¹ Second, their genealogy has capitalist roots: video games spring directly from the main technology of their contemporary society – in this case, capitalist society. This relationship applies to games more than to other media, perhaps except books. Born in the nuclear simulations era, games emerged from the machine-based reality, namely from the computer as the crucial device of power and postwar capital’s profits. As derivatives of military research, games still offer the testing ground for futurist experiments regarding artificial intelligence, affective neuroscience, and other fields of inquiry. Initially, computer games may have seemed an innocent entertainment medium. However, their subsequent development revealed other functions: providing adjustment to work in a specific production process and offering a laboratory for testing the fantasies of developed technocapitalism.²

Therefore, analysis of video games from the broadly understood science fiction current seems an interesting endeavor which reveals the double relationship between games and capitalism. First, these two spheres remain linked on the medium level, with high-technology capitalism as the only known environment. Second, they connect on the content level, where technological progress and its depictions form the crucial area of interest.

This intimate entanglement with the capitalist reality provokes the following question: can science fiction games still offer an affirmative critique³ of this system or provide space for digital activism? In fact, numerous projects have made such attempts through the culture of hacking, modding, or developing entire games. Against their background, one title stands out in particular: Cruelty Squad (2021), a first-person shooter (FPS) released by the Finnish independent studio Consumer Softproducts, managed by the multimedia artist Ville Kallio. The game depicts a peculiar, extremely brutal capitalist dystopia. In this virtual world, biology no longer limits human life processes: owing to biotechnological development, bodily functions depend solely on the market logic and the global capital network. The specific character of Cruelty Squad emerges both through the narrative and the aesthetic aspect: its aggressively kitschy design floods the player with sensory overstimulation.

Cruelty Squad seems to carry a promising subversive and radical potential. First and foremost, while offering an artistic and gaming experiment, this FPS evades the trap that has already consumed numerous other projects with similar critique-related ambitions. Kallio and his team managed to transcend the boundaries of a mere symbolic regime or a purely visual critique. Cruelty Squad serves as an accelerationist laboratory yet remains a safe and prudent experiment which avoids causing a collapse or plunder of the whole system. Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari warn their readers against such consequences in the context of “making yourself a Body without Organs.”⁴ They write:

Could what the drug user or masochist obtains also be obtained in a different fashion in the conditions of the plane, so it would even be possible to use drugs without using drugs, to get soused on pure water, as in Henry Miller’s experimentations? … Doubtless, anything is possible.⁵

In other words, one provokes or generates extreme conditions and experiences within the controlled framework of a computer game to test the logic of pursuing desire even in it’s most brutal variants. Since the digital environment guarantees a certain level of safety, one thus vivisects one’s own desire without engaging in dangerous actions. Therefore, the stake of analyzing Cruelty Squad exceeds an ordinary interpretation or determination of meaning, as those would merely offer a social commentary. A demonstration that the game allows its users to escape the overwhelming reality into imagined worlds also proves insufficient. Instead, I wish to present Cruelty Squad as a tool that enables an escape of the world itself – a real escape, not one in the symbolic or imagined sense. This way, the game blasts the pipe that determines the flow of desire,⁶ or the conditions in which the desire operates. Xenofeminists express this phenomenon as follows: “If nature is unjust, change nature!”⁷

To clarify the above reflection, let me mention certain other projects, which pledged subversiveness but failed to keep their promise: Doom and BioShock. The Doom franchise resembles Cruelty Squad in terms of gaming intensity, but its message proves banal. Doom reproduces the classical theological dualism of good versus evil. Its critique of capitalism emerges in the narrative, which tells the story of fighting the demonic hordes unleashed by a cosmic corporation. Doom also repeats the perspective of individual heroism which can confront the evil single-handedly and ultimately achieve a victory. Such a narrative eliminates any subversive potential because it relies on fundamentally nonsubversive and obvious cliches. Doom simply offers another historical variant of the conservative narrative about messianic emancipation. But digesting even such a banal storyline proves difficult, as the intense gaming dynamics within the described world order overshadows any remains of the possible political reflection.⁸

In turn, the first game of the BioShock series seems to offer a more refined narrative. A universally acclaimed FPS, BioShock depicts an ecologically damaged dystopian world produced by a combination of capitalist greed with the eugenic and biotechnological desire to create a society resembling the biblical paradise. This way, the game directly provokes a reflection on the neoliberal world and American free-market fundamentalism.⁹

Problematically, such productions remain deeply embedded in the symbolic order, and their more or less visible contestation of the system finds expression only through reflection. Crucially, beside their lack of the affirmative aspect, these games conceal specific interpassivity. Following Slavoj Žižek, we can assume that interpassivity relates to meeting the subject’s needs by observation how others meet theirs. When watching a movie, the viewer passively observes the unfolding plot, yet they derive pleasure and satisfaction from an imagined transfer of their own activity onto the symbolic representation, such as the movie’s protagonist. In other words, observation creates a feeling of taking action and satisfying one’s real needs and fantasies alike.¹⁰

Video games reinforce this mechanism through interaction. According to certain gaming magazines, projects such as Doom or BioShock can offer reflection on “ideology, contemporary geopolitics, and the culture of fear,” while remaining “rough and brazen first-person shooters.” Similar analyses clearly show that the potential political resistance in these games permits easy capture and commercialization.¹¹ Therefore, game companies satisfy the players’ desire twice: first, they meet the need for consumption by selling a game, and second, they transform the wish to change the real world into an imagined, nonsubversive implementation of that change in the game’s virtual reality.

Cruelty Squad does the opposite. Instead of moralizing, the game reminds the player that “desire can never be deceived.”¹² Among other things, late capitalism produces consumerist subjectivity. Therefore, we may assume that the player has never ceased to crave consumption. By undertaking single-player gaming, for example in BioShock, one locks themselves in a private world of consumer pleasure. This enclosure precludes exerting any influence on the public sphere or the society.¹³ Such gaming entails an interpassive performance of a peculiar anti-capitalist stance which exhibits distance, irony, or cynicism. As long as one believes that capitalism is evil, one can participate in the capitalist exchange and unpunished consumption. In more abstract terms, ironic distance toward the money allows for its fetishization in everyday life.¹⁴ Everybody desires consumption, and the latter equals reproduction of the capitalist system. Gaming allows one to repress this inconvenient fact and renounce the pleasure of consumption only within the virtual world. This process brings absolution and prevents developing an internal tension. Consequently, the player only stages a protest, and the anti-capitalist postulates they pursue in a game entail no expectation of their accomplishment in the real world.¹⁵ Mark Fisher remembers this phenomenon as he repeats Deleuze and Guattari’s words: “To reclaim a real political agency means first of all accepting our insertion at the level of desire in the remorseless meat-grinder of Capital.”¹⁶

Instead of staging the objection against capitalism, Cruelty Squad wishes to join this protest. The Protagonist, or MT Foxtrot, is a homeless person who struggles with serious mental disturbances, probably depression or posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD). During a period of depression naps and stonefaced showers,¹⁷ MT Foxtrot receives an offer to join the eponymous Cruelty Squad as a hitman. This way, he enters an endless spiral of schizophrenic violence, where profit comprises the only value. Players can trade in the victims’ organs – including speculation – and targets include persons who hinder smooth circulation of capital. The game sometimes winks at the user, for example when the description of the Fishing Rod suggests than angling seems The Protagonist’s true vocation. Another item, the Tattered Rain Hat, facilitates catching certain fish; “You’ve never seen it before but it feels nostalgic,” the game states. Such remarks reinforce the associations with the hauntological discourse, which concerns the promise of a utopia free from capital-mediated relations. Although unrealized, the promise in question has left shreds and traces of unaccomplished alternatives of the future.¹⁸ But even in this case, Cruelty Squad pushes the player into the brutal capitalist regime of commodification: skillful angling remains the most effective way of gaining profit within the game.

Importantly, Cruelty Squad relies on generating frustration. Initially, the game repeatedly confronts the player with death, punishing even the smallest mistakes. Several such deaths cause degradation to a lower level, although appropriate actions can reverse this status. First, however, the degraded player receives the following message:

Due to your wasting of company resources by hogging the genetic recombinator, you’ve been selected to participate in an experimental biological enhancement program. All your debt is cleared and from now on your body will regenerate by itself. Can’t say I envy you though.

Importantly, this message partially reveals the game’s structure in the context of its diegesis. Although included in the story’s logic on the narrative level, rebirth does not simply suspend the rules of death to enable smooth play. Instead, rebirth stems from advanced biotechnology, which has eliminated death and conditioned its occurrence on the logic of capital. If The Protagonist’s health bar level drops to zero or below zero, keeping him alive any longer becomes unprofitable. Therefore, the employer activates the hitman’s Intracranial Explosive Device, causing his “temporary” death.

This way, Cruelty Squad generates a masochist feedback loop. As the first experience in the game, continuous losing reveals a perspective where punishment constitutes a precondition for the subsequent accomplishment of desire. Rather than causing pleasure, the pain of consecutive losses becomes necessary to achieve that pleasure.¹⁹ This phenomenon partially relates to Jesper Juul’s paradox of pain and the art of failure, namely the problematic question of why we perceive losing as an important element of games. On the one hand, in line with ahedonism, one may interact with a work for other purposes than to seek pleasure or avoid suffering, as human desires may prove contradictory.²⁰ On the other hand, losing creates a space which forces the player to analyze their own errors and continue learning so as to eliminate mishaps.

Moreover, the interactive nature of games provokes the player’s responsibility for their actions while gaming. This way, the player regains agency, or influence,²¹ which does not necessarily require an interpretation through the lens of neoliberal atomization and personal guilt. We should rather speak of performing an iteration which can ultimately force the player to change their position as the subject or at least to modify its frame. Guattari states that “‘computer-aided design’ leads to the production of images opening on to unprecedented plastic Universes.”²² As a new form of art, the game can create germs of alternative manners of experience.

As explained above, the interpassive perspective confronts the player with image, which offers only passive representation. This allows the player to transfer or invest their desire into the digital sphere. Conversely, the game itself can become “a vector of subjectivization.”²³ The player as a masochist expresses the training axiom, which encompasses the destruction or replacement of their instinctive forces.²⁴ In turn, Michel Foucault believes that training serves to socialize an individual toward normative functioning in a labor regime.²⁵ Therefore, the game does not direct the player’s drive toward immediate gratification and consumption, which entail instant pleasure and constitute the factors responsible for human addictions in the contemporary system. Instead, the player allows for an alternative experience: as an aesthetic means of resistance, the game can assist in distinguishing new subjectivity again and generating other ways of experiencing the world through new “becomings.”²⁶

As shown above, masochism occurs on the game’s storyline level, when the player perversely contributes to an intensification of capitalist law. This masochism reveals its specific logic: adherence to law becomes so extreme that it begins to disclose the law’s absurdity.²⁷ Instead of feigning indignation at the capitalist commodification and its brutality, the player both transforms into a commodity by accepting the role of a hitman and succumbs to violence. In Cruelty Squad, violence affects players in several ways: within the narrative, by affective overstimulation by the aggressive visual layer, and through the initial consecutive losses. The player accepts capitalist violence as the precondition for realizing their desire; in other words, they remain painfully faithful to their desire. The ironic or post-ironic distance of a late capitalist consumer gives way to masochist humor which reveals the paradox of law that begins to consume itself.

We find a good example of this logic in the sixth mission available in Cruelty Squad. “Apartment Atrocity” instructs the player as follows: “kill your landlord and escape.” This mission shows how law succumbs to subversion and how consistent adherence to the rules ultimately inflicts suffering on the law’s chief beneficiaries. At the same time, when a masochist requests humiliation, they do so as part of atonement for their resemblance to the father’s image. Therefore, in masochism, the father receives rather than delivers a beating.²⁸ Analogically, the violence in Cruelty Squad affects the player as Homo economicus, not as a private person.

Mainstream or commercial productions such as BioShock or Doom seem to replicate capital on multiple levels, which classifies them as neurotic games. Conversely, Cruelty Squad is a perverse game, in the sense that Deleuze and Guattari discern in Franz Kafka’s Letter to His Father. In this text, Kafka performs a shift regarding his desire – from a neurotic Oedipus to a perverse one.²⁹ Instead of interpreting Kafka’s letter through resentment, Deleuze and Guattari adopt an extremely positive lens: in their view, the rebellion against the father appears as a comedy, not a tragedy.³⁰ This approach renounces perceiving Kafka’s oeuvre as one that reproduces the image and function of a normative family or society. Consequently, we notice that Kafka actually attempts to interrupt the Oedipal transmission, and this breakage ultimately shatters the ossified norms imposed by the system.³¹

In the Letter, Kafka refrains from accusing his father of the violence that the latter inflicted upon his son. Instead, he puts forward a hypothesis of fatherly innocence and despair, the latter shared with the son. This way, Kafka can disburden his father of the guilt and redirect responsibility to the whole world. However, this gesture ultimately intensifies the accusation, raising it to the nth power. In such situation, one can no longer blame anybody – but one can increase the guilt to absurd levels, thereby imparting absurd proportions also to the father’s image/“photo” together with his law.³² Consequently, we may courageously approach Kafka as a proto-accelerationist who demands a global and total deterritorialization of Oedipus instead of reterritorializing oneself in Oedipus and the family.³³ Still, rather than to escape his father, Kafka aims to find a solution where his father failed to find one.³⁴ Kafka himself states: “Strange how make-believe, if engaged in systematically enough, can change into reality.”³⁵

Cruelty Squad achieves the same goal by extending the image of capital onto the entire world. Depicted in this manner, capital becomes so monstrous that it devours everything: morality, imagination, and even organic life, having eliminated death for its own purposes and further expansion. This enormous absurdity floods all the game’s aspects: the storyline, the gameplay, the code, and the interface. For example, while loading the content, the game displays waving images in aggressive, acid-like colors. Immediately afterward, the player sees incorrectly formatted start screen graphics with wrong proportions. This device generates an impression of snatching the player from the safe framework of an apparently coherent and transparent system already at the level of architecture and visuals.

Further instances of incorrect image calibration appear already in the game’s code. For example, one can change the gameplay mode – and hence the difficulty – in the resolution settings panel. The available options include interaction with a spherical object during a gaming session. Unlocking the path leading to that object requires donning the Holy Scope – an implant traceable only in one of the game’s last missions. Alternatively, the player can enter the game’s settings and select the 640 × 480 screen resolution.³⁶ These options allow for session modifications from within several orders, as though Cruelty Squad repeated the famous sentence from the beginning of Anti-Oedipus: “Hence we are all handymen: each with his little machines.”³⁷ In contrast to numerous mainstream products, Cruelty Squad transcends the mere reproduction of a typical gaming image. In this game, the player can capture a code fragment³⁸ while pursuing the subjectivity’s new modalities. These include a situation where aesthetic consumption can creatively contest reality rather than merely offer its “processing.”

In this peculiar manner, Cruelty Squad affirms the glitch, which the player can exploit or intercept. The game actually provokes these actions by transforming an error into a performance or event.³⁹ Interpreted in this manner, the error undermines trust toward permanent structures and rules, thereby confronting the player with the elementary instability of the environment. Such an error generates unsteadiness; as an event, “it moves in both directions at once and so far as it fragments the subject following this double direction.”⁴⁰ Consequently, the player loses their sense of a stable identity, which guarantees the continuity of cognition.⁴¹

In Cruelty Squad, the glitch transforms from a negatively perceived fault to the foundation of the game’s mechanics. This process blurs the traditional, clear boundary between intended elements that form the mechanics and unintended occurrences represented by glitches. We should remember that Cruelty Squad depicts a hyper-capitalist reality, where the prefix “hyper-” denotes a technologically intensified variant of an already intense phenomenon, namely late capitalism. In such a world, money enacts the only laws. Unsurprisingly, then, the game’s mechanics also relies on capital. One of the most potent weapons, the ZKZ Transactional Rifle, conditions the number of inflicted injuries on the sum of virtual money the player has earned by killing, speculation, or fishing. Evidently, the enormous power of exuberant hyper-technocapitalism abolishes all the previously binding laws and restores them in a manner that serves its own purposes. Deleuze and Guattari discuss a similar image of capitalism as a machine that decodes and reestablishes market axioms:

In brief, there where the flows are decoded, the specific flows of code that have taken a technical and scientific form are subjected to a properly social axiomatic that is much severer than all the scientific axiomatics, much severer too than all the old codes and overcodes that have disappeared: the axiomatic of the world capitalist market.⁴²

In short, capitalism remains an omnipresent phenomenon and the only reality available. Consequently, one can escape capitalism only within its own frames. Cruelty Squad shows that we should intercept the capitalist logic rather than try to oppose its force. For example, using the ZKZ Transactional Rifle proves the most effective way of killing one’s own CEO – hence the demand to fight capitalism through its “overheating” rather than its “cooling.” Nick Land states: “Always decode … believe nothing, and extinguish all nostalgia for belonging. Ask always where capital is most inhumane, unsentimental, and out of control.”⁴³ In this vision, capitalism appears as an automatizing, nihilist vortex which neutralizes all values and replaces status and meaning with money and information.⁴⁴ However, the glitch does not reveal the system in entropy, which would lead to a better understanding of its actions.⁴⁵ Instead, the glitch presents the system as entropy, in which the mechanics and the glitch itself become indistinguishable. Although seemingly counterintuitive, the affirmation of such state of affairs may bring liberation.

This important aspect shows that in Cruelty Squad, capitalist entropy no longer fulfills a purely symbolic function, especially within the visual layer. In fact, this entropy utilizes the full potential of the game as a multilevel and interactive medium. An apt example of entrapment in visual representation appears in Disco Elysium, where the protagonist encounters a person so rich that his mere presence abolishes the laws of physics. The space around the billionaire begins to curve and creates an optical spiral by refracting the light around him. Although this effect certainly serves mocking and critical purposes, it reduces entropy and the glitch from the player’s direct experiences to mere symbols.

A similar problem affected the culture of modding, in which the players hack or modify a game. Alexander R. Galloway describes modding in the context of countergaming – an avant-garde movement which opposes the mainstream.⁴⁶ The mods he analyses served as forms of artistic and political expression. Unfortunately, they prioritized aesthetics over gameplay.⁴⁷ As a result, their use made a game progressive in terms of visual experiments yet merely reactive in terms of play.⁴⁸ These mods either aestheticized the glitch or turned it into a means of aestheticization, but thus modified products actually ceased to function as games.⁴⁹ For example, em>Super Mario Clouds by Cory Arcangel removed all sounds and visual elements from Super Mario Brothers – except the clouds. Consequently, the player could not interact with the game at all.⁵⁰ In turn, the famous mod untitled game by the artistic duo JODI produced two effects of sending the code stream in real time: either the code generated few to no visual representations or the game completely ignored the code. The latter situation generated kaleidoscopic graphics which affected one another.⁵¹

These instances of glitch art reflect their own era, as their creators frequently faced considerable limitations in terms of capacity and technological availability. Unlike modding, the development of entire games typically remained inaccessible to persons from outside the gaming industry. At the turn of the 1990s and the 2000s, mods served as popular means of creative expression, from fan groups to artists. Fans usually aimed to enhance a game’s existing concept, while collectives such as JODI pursued aesthetic and conceptual changes. Consequently, the artistic mods functioned as performances which showed the nonstandard possibilities of using or experiencing a game.⁵² This way, however, they eliminated the interaction required in actual gameplay, turning games into experiments akin to movies and animation. Ultimately, thus modified games simply proved apolitical.⁵³

Countergaming only realized its full potential, including the playability issue, after the democratization of engines used to develop entire games. Free-of-charge and open-access tools such as Twine required minimum equipment and made game development accessible also to the industry’s outsiders. This new chapter gave rise to productions remaining on the fringes of the commercial circulation and thus carrying a greater subversive load.⁵⁴ Cruelty Squad, developed using the Godot engine, perfectly exemplifies this novel type of games.

As a project, Cruelty Squad represents much more than just a caricatural, hyperbolic calque of capitalism which reproduces its intensified image. The masochist necessity of repetitions within the game does not respond to the trauma of an extremely commodified reality. Typically, such a response transfers the existing painful emotions to the digital environment of a game, which skillfully revives these feelings.⁵⁵ However, Cruelty Squad refrains from emulation in its popular meaning; the player can actually intercept the code together with its surplus value.⁵⁶ This nature of the game adds value and enables “a veritable becoming.”⁵⁷ To paraphrase Galloway, instead of simply playing a futurist simulation, the player explores and internalizes a multilevel global algorithm. Playing the game equals playing its code, and winning denotes knowledge of the system.⁵⁸ Rather than as a calque which dooms the player to reproduce capitalism, Cruelty Squad serves as a space where one can experiment⁵⁹ – that is, reinterpret the world as well as reconnect its fragments, redistribute their dispersal, and redirect their function.⁶⁰

This approach differs from the postmodernist simulation, which Jean Baudrillard perceives as a radical negation of the sign as a value, or as an implosion of meaning.⁶¹ Cruelty Squad seems closer to the Deleuzian simulation, produced by the action of a simulacrum as a machine that enthrones the forces of anarchy – subversively and “against the father.”⁶² In this masochist laboratory, one can safely perform accelerationist experiments, which aim for a revolution through increasing the pace. Tellingly, when assessing Cruelty Squad on the Steam platform, one player states: “my depression got cancer.”⁶³ Indeed, Cruelty Squad attempts to fight brutal capitalism using its own weapons – that is, to perversely pathologize the pathology rather than merely express it with powerless irony.