After agency: The queer posthumanism of video games that cannot be played

A deer roams the streets of Los Angeles

The premise of San Andreas Deer Cam is simple: Mod Grand Theft Auto V to remove the human player-character that would normally be at the center of the game and replace him (all of the game’s playable protagonists are male) with a three-dimensional model of a deer. Rather than being controlled by a human player, have the deer’s movements be decided by a computer, giving the system parameters for randomly cycling through different forms of movement, like standing still, wandering and sprinting. Then, set the deer loose on the cityscape of San Andreas, allowing it to roam the environment and trigger interactions with various NPCs, and see what kinds of scenarios and encounters result. Let the deer stroll by the many sights and neighborhoods of this pseudo-Los Angeles: the Santa Monica pier, the strips along Sepulveda and Westwood Boulevards, the forest of tall office buildings in downtown L.A. As time passes, both in and out of the game world, allow day to turn to night and night to turn back to day--all while the scruffy-haired, dewy-eyed deer (a buck in some versions of the broadcast, a doe in others; I refer to the deer here with the gender-neutral pronoun ‘it’) runs through or lingers in various corners of the city, stumbling into scenes of everyday human life and triggering altercations with the short-tempered inhabits of San Andreas. And, of course, live stream the whole thing on Twitch, so that viewers can watch and comment on the deer’s escapades as they unfold in real time.

San Andreas Deer Cam is part video game, part artificial intelligence simulation, and part live performance: a spectacle of serendipity that plays itself. It is inspired by a short sequence in Grand Theft Auto V in which the character Franklin hallucinates being a deer, but the deer cam drastically reimagines and extends this premise. Watanabe’s piece ran on Twitch intermittently between February and April 2016, and was watched by more than 200,000 viewers (BBC, 2016). For a brief period, San Andreas Deer Cam became something of an internet sensation. Multiple news sources (e.g. Rundle, 2016; Smith, 2016), mostly from the games media but also broader pop culture reporting, excitedly described the charming spectacle of the AI deer roaming the streets of Los Angeles. This reporting stressed the slapstick elements of Watanabe’s piece. Due to glitches in the mod, the deer would occasionally ‘teleport’ from location to location, suddenly appearing in unexpected locales. It would also get stuck on objects, causing it to flop or twitch in a manner unbecoming of an otherwise majestic creature. Most commonly remarked upon in these write-ups, however, was the deer’s functional invincibility (Plante, 2016; Gerwin, 2016): the fact that it could not be harmed or killed. When the deer crossed busy highways, cars stopped in its path; if the deer wound up walking through a gunfight, bullets whizzed through its body. Some viewers seemed particularly enamored with the charmingly improbable deer, going so far as to create a set of short-lived social media accounts for the deer itself. Other viewers, I suspect, tuned in to see how just much abuse a digital animal roaming a notoriously violent video game could take and still emerge unscathed.

In fact, far more than being just the stuff of internet buzz, San Andreas Deer Cam can be situated within multiple traditions of game design, game art, machinima, cinematics, and nature media. Chang, in her discussion of Watanabe’s piece, describes the deer cam as part of a growing phenomenon of ‘animal gameplay’: video games that feature an ‘animal perspective, in which as players we are joined with other species in a kind of deterritorialized becoming-animal’ (110). Chang also highlights the piece’s tongue-in-cheek sendup of both typical mainstream video games and digitally mediated depictions of nature, such as live animal webcam feeds broadcast from zoos and parks. Indeed, the Web site for Watanabe’s project boasts a pseudo-official National Park Service logo at its top, as if the deer cam were simply real-life footage of an animal in the wild. Watanabe brought his piece expressively into dialog with politics when he created a follow-up work in 2017, the San Andreas Community Cam, which followed human NPCs in GTA San Andreas who walked around the city crying in the wake of Donald Trump’s election and inauguration.

San Andreas Deer Cam could also be compared to other works of game-based new media art in which ‘any conventional sense of gameplay is obscured’ (Galloway, 2006: 118), often created with the goal of reflecting on what happens when human agents are removed from video games (as in Cory Arcangel’s 2002 Super Mario Clouds) or what forms of agency are enacted onto human bodies through games (as Peggy Awash’s 2001 She Puppet). With its cervine protagonist, we might alternatively group San Andreas Deer Cam with other video games about deer – like the wildly popular Big Buck Hunter (Play Mechanix, Inc, 2000–2018), the massively-multiplayer online game The Endless Forest (Tale of Tales, 2005), or the physics game Deeeer Simulator (Gibier Games, 2000) – as well as games about other deer-like animals, such as Coffee Stain Studios’s 2014 Goat Simulator. In addition, San Andreas Deer Cam holds a place alongside projects like Twitch Plays Pokemon (2014) that have similarly experimented with alternate manifestations of interactivity through live streaming platforms. Relevant too is Watanabe’s choice to use Grand Theft Auto V as the object of his intervention: a choice that might be viewed equally as intervening into mainstream video gaming or serving the sensibilities of hegemonic gamer culture.

Admittedly, analyzing San Andreas Deer Cam poses challenges. Because the piece was a live simulation that only ran for a limited time, it exists today only as secondary documentation, such as recorded videos and screenshots, recorded and maintained by Watanabe himself. The primary media objects I draw from for my analysis are two videos of the deer cam feed. The first runs slightly over an hour and was captured on 29 February 2016. It is currently featured on the Web site for San Andreas Deer Cam hosted by the artist; in this way, it serves as a sort of official record of the project (Watanabe n.d.). At roughly 30 min, the second video is shorter. This video is not publically available but was graciously shared with me by Watanabe for the purposes of this analysis. While these videos only represent a partial archive of the activities that took place in San Andreas Deer Cam, and while they cannot replicate the experience of viewing the deer’s adventures live, they capture many important elements of the piece. I also recognize that basing this analysis on Watanabe’s video footage means that my own analysis is skewed toward those elements of the deer cam that the artist himself deemed most notable. In a sense, however, no human analysis of a project like San Andreas Deer Cam can ever be complete or comprehensive. The procedurally generated nature of its content means that the deer’s escapades always exist as a set of possible occurrences rather than a specific or finite media object.

Within the context of game studies, this work is informed by but also seeks to break away from existing scholarship about non-player characters NPCs. The deer at the heart of Watanabe’s piece is, in effect, a non-player character gone ‘wild’: a pre-programmed artificial intelligence agent who has become the protagonist of its own video game. To date, discussions of NPCs have largely--though certainly not exclusively--focused on technical questions about how to make NPCs ‘believably’ human (see, for example: Brusk et al., 2007; Afonso and Prada, 2008; Mahmoud et al., 2014; Warpefelt and Verhagen, 2017; Simonov et al., 2019). San Andreas Deer Cam is radically uninterested in believability, and its relationship to the human is messy at best. The deer is not human, but it lives in a human world, and indeed it lingers on the edge of ontological humanness. This is partially a matter of projection. Players frequently humanize non-player characters, projecting onto them a sense of autonomous subjecthood and forming interpersonal bounds across the human and non-human divide, a practice that has been regarded as curious or even pathological (Coanda and Aupers, 2020). Here, by contrast, I embrace this projection as both a feature of San Andreas Deer Cam and a method for analyzing it. As a human viewer of Watanabe’s piece, it would be impossible not to project human traits onto the deer, reading the deer’s escapades as weighted with intention and feeling. This is, to an extent, precisely the point of San Andreas Deer Cam. In Watanabe’s piece, computation and randomization manage to produce a non-human entity that is simultaneously ridiculous and surprisingly human.

Queer posthumanism and posthuman video games

Posthumanism is a rich and varied area of thought with ties to both video games and queerness. Though the nature of posthumanism has itself often been contested, arguably raising more questions than answers (Sheehan, 2015: 245), it is worth pausing to briefly outline some of its core tenets so that we can identify them in San Andreas Deer Cam. First, posthumanism decenters human beings, focusing instead on other forms of subjecthood and animacy, as represented by machines, animals, plants (Tsing, 2015), and even materials like rock and metal (Chen, 2012). It seeks to move past an anthropocentric view of the world by challenging the assumption that humans are exceptional or that meaning should be made, first and foremost, from a human perspective (Badmington, 2011: 374). In this sense, the posthuman is always also about the non-human.

Second, posthumanism questions what it means to be human. Even as it moves beyond the human, posthumanism remains invested in human beings, in that it seeks to destabilize the category of ‘humanity’. This can be seen, for example, in the recurring interest in posthumanist scholarship and fiction in technological augmentation (e.g. cyborgs) and monstrosity: adaptations, transformations, or ‘perversions’ that move the body ‘beyond’ (Sheehan: 245). Lastly, posthumanism reflects an anxious relationship to technology, ‘progress,’ and the future. Science and technology are recurring concerns in posthumanism, with many lauding visions of high-tech advancements beyond the human and others cautioning against the ‘shallow optimism of advanced capitalism’ which often ‘market[s] as unproblematic the current post-anthropocentric turn’ (Asberg and Braidotte, 2018: 16). Posthumanism is simultaneously energized by visions of a world to come and mobilized by a fear of that same world: a post-apocalyptic sense that we may need to envision other, non-human ways of being because the human world as we know is quickly coming to an end.

The relationship between queerness and posthumanism is a complicated one. Queer studies scholars have lodged notable critiques against posthumanism. In ‘Has the Queer Ever Been Human?’, their introduction to the 2015 ‘Queer Inhumanisms’ special issue of GLQ, Dana Luciano and Mel Y. Chen describe the ‘palpable resistance by many critical race, feminist, and queer thinkers to posthumanism and/or the nonhuman turn’ (Luciano and Chen, 2015: 194). This resistance is founded on concerns that posthumanism’s universalism overlooks issues of identity and power, ‘neglect[ing] generations’ worth of scholarship on gender, race, and sexuality’ and demonstrating ‘an uneven attention to race and related axes of dehumanization’ (194). As Zakiyyah Iman Jackson has argued, when posthumanism calls for a movement ‘beyond the human’, it is imperative to ask: ‘What and crucially whose conception of humanity are we moving beyond?’ (2015: 215). Jackson explains the sense that there is something ‘amiss in the call to move ‘beyond the human’:… an attempt to move beyond race, and in particular blackness, a subject that… cannot be escaped by only disavowed or dissimulated’ (216). A parallel argument could be made about the implications of posthumanism for LGBTQ people. Any uninterrogated call to move beyond the human risks ‘disavowing and dissimulating’ queerness, rather than attending to the particularities of queer experience. This is especially worrisome in the context of game studies, where certain prominent scholars are already using a seemingly posthumanist emphasis on platform, code and object ontologies to problematically turn scholarly conversations away from identity (Anable, 2018).

At the same time, other queer studies and trans studies scholars have embraced posthumanism – or what we might understand as a queer interpretation of posthumanism – arguing for a connection between the posthuman and the queer. Eileen Joy writes: ‘The posthuman and the queer are, and always have been, importantly enmeshed with, and even coeval to, each other’ (2015: 222). For Joy, the connection between queerness and posthumanism can be traced to a normative cultural sense that queer people are themselves non-human. To reclaim posthumanism then is a response to this dehumanization, says Joy; it means engaging in a radical act by which one rejects humanity itself. She explains: So many marginalized groups have always been ‘less than human’ and there two ways… to deal with this: one is the activist path where you fight back for more rights as a fully fledged human, and the other is the (perhaps) more theoretical-academic (and risky heterotopic) path where you decide to take the marker of ‘less than human’ as an opportunity to finally bid the human adieu’ (222–3). This decision to ‘bid the human adieu’ also has parallels in foundational writing like Susan Stryker’s ‘My Words to Victor Frankenstein above the Village of Chamounix’ (1994) and Donna Haraway’s ‘A Cyborg Manifesto’ (1985), which locate trans and feminist power in accepting one’s position as non-human, as well as more recent work that has made ties between posthumanism and transness more explicit (Nurka, 2015).

This second approach to posthumanist thought, which recognizes its pitfalls but nonetheless values its resonances with experiences of gender and sexual non-normativity, can be described as queer posthumanism. The tenets of queer posthumanism are related to the tenets of posthumanism more broadly, but they also differ in key ways. Firstly, queer posthumanism remains invested in the body, even as it seeks to explore possibilities that lie beyond it. It rejects posthumanism as a ‘narcissistic exercise in abstraction’, as Noreen Giffney and Myra J. Hird write in their introduction to Queering the Non/Human, instead attending to the cultural particularities of power and privilege that are bound up in the body (2008: 4). Additionally, queer posthumanism is drawn to questions of non-human desire, intimacy and relationality, exploring interspecies connectivity. It revels in acts of what José Esteban Muñoz has described as queerly posthuman forms of ‘being-with’ radically incommensurable, unknowable others (2015: 209–210). Above all, rather than seeking to move beyond the human in some universalized sense, queer posthumanism seeks to move beyond the norms of human society. The ‘post’ in queer posthumanism is post-heteronormative, post-hegemonic (MacCormack, 2009: 111). For this reason, queer posthumanism often entails envisioning alternative worlds, echoing Afrofuturism and other forms of radical speculation, and revealing the world-making powers of video games to be uniquely suited for bringing the visions of queer posthumanism to life.

On the surface, the relationship between posthumanism and video games seems more straightforward than the relationship between posthumanism and queerness. Posthumanism has long been fascinated with the technological (Sheehan, 2015: 245), and video games--along with related technologies like virtual reality--have often been the go-to media form for illustrating how the digital might allow us to move beyond the constraints of our physical forms. Video games appear to offer players opportunities to become posthuman, to recall N. Katherine Hayles’ (1999) turn of phrase, but video games can themselves also be understood as posthuman: ‘exhibit[ing] nonhuman agency as a manifestation of software, hardware, and infrastructural processes… that go far beyond the human and even the living’ (Chang, 2019: 12). Indeed, we might ask, playing off the title of Luciano and Chen’s article: Have video games ever really been human? Yet, to understand video games as simply posthuman would be to overlook many of the cultural factors that complicate the interplays between posthumanism and video games. Even as they seem to move ‘beyond the human’, video games have often been conceptualized as fundamentally human, machines for the enactment of player agency. Video games also complicate the very divide between the human and non-human, as Paolo Ruffino (2020) describes in his writing on ‘nonhuman games’: games ‘made and played by nonhuman actors’ that often ‘play by themselves’ using artificial intelligence. Such games, says Ruffino, reframe the medium, challenging ‘false myths of agency, interactivity, and instrumentalism, and the masculinism inherent in these notions’ (11). In the analysis that follows, I take up this provocation from Ruffino – that a video game that plays itself might disrupt dominant norms related to gender and power in the medium – as a jumping off point, demonstrating how a game that cannot be played becomes not only posthuman but also queer.

San Andreas deer cam as posthuman

San Andreas Deer Cam offers a distinctly posthuman vision of video games. Posthumanism decenters the human and re-centers non-human subjects. Watanabe’s piece takes this tenet to heart. It quite literally moves human beings--in the form of both players and player-characters--out of the spotlight and instead swaps in a creature that is part animal, part machine. This is true both in terms what happens in Watanabe’s piece and what we see happening. Whereas Grand Theft Auto V positions the in-game, third-person, over-the-shoulder camera behind its human protagonists, San Andreas Deer Cam makes the deer the point of visual focus, guiding viewers through the cityscape of San Andreas with the deer always highlighted in the frame. San Andreas Deer Cam likewise decenters human agency through its play with the visual, transforming people from players into spectators who could interact with one another (via Twitch’s chat function) and who could choose to interpret the deer’s actions in various ways (as I myself am doing here) but who could not affect the deer’s progress. In San Andreas Deer Cam, the deer becomes its own player, or even its own live streamer: a posthuman figure who has no need of people. In this way, San Andreas Deer Cam crucially differs from other video games in which human players are invited to play as animals, partaking in what Marco Caracciolo (2021), like Chang, has recently described as an act of ‘becoming-animal’. Such games, as Tom Tyler has written (2013), arguably set out to blur the divide between animality and subjectivity. They can even, in Debra Ferreday’s reading (2011), be seen as trans experiences that queer the human/non-human binary. Yet, in San Andreas Deer Cam, the human does not become animal. Instead, if anything, the animal takes over the realm of the human.

The deer’s newfound centrality also transforms the human beings around the deer in the game world. In contrast to the deer’s silent, watchful skittishness, the human NPCs that populate San Andreas seem almost like hordes of extras in a zombie horror film: humans who are not quite human. In such one moment in Watanabe’s recordings, standing at the edge of the beach, the deer waits hesitantly before entering the city, as if weighing the pros and cons of stepping off the quiet beach and into the bustling city streets. Human characters stumble by, shouting or talking to themselves. A police siren wails in the distance. In the low light of the nighttime, all the figures seem shady, dangerous, unpredictable – an implication that is clearly racialized by the preponderance of characters of color (especially men of color) who amble ominously by. At other moments, the deer’s presence curiously reframes the human world by drawing out human beings’ own status as animals. The deer wanders around San Andreas observing people in their ‘natural habit’, like an ecotourist strolling through a wildlife park. NPCs working out on outdoor exercise equipment repeatedly call out, ‘See you at the gym!’ Their looping utterances, a common trait of NPCs, recall the repeated chirps of mating calls. Later, the next morning at daybreak, as the deer stands on the beach watching the sunrise, an airplane flies overhead, preparing to land at (what would be) Los Angeles International Airport (Figure 2). In this context, with the figure of the deer juxtaposed against the airplane mid-flight, the scene stirs up its own questions. Who is the ‘wild life’ here, the deer placidly watching the sky lighten or the massive, bird-like machine soaring overhead? At moments such as these, San Andreas Deer Cam has the quality of a nature show silently narrated by a deer in which we, the human inhabitants of Los Angeles, are the nature.OPEN IN VIEWER

Like posthumanism more broadly, San Andreas Deer Cam also brings into question what it means to be human. The deer is a non-human figure, and indeed its power seems to come from being unlike the human NPCs around it. Being non-human grants the deer immunity, even immortality, since the game world (driven by its underlying code) does not recognize and react to the deer (which has been coded and then re-coded) in the same way it would a human player-character. Yet, in other ways, the deer seems strikingly human, heavy with feeling. Standing in an empty parking lot as the sky turns to black, the deer gazes up at the glow of lit windows in a nearby apartment building, as if longing to connect with the warm, intimate lives of the people inside: a scene of mournful, interspecies desire. In another scene, this one in broad daylight, the deer navigates a busy city street. Curiously, rather than darting across to get to the other side (cars in San Andreas Deer Cam cannot hit the deer, so why not?), the deer trots gingerly to the crosswalk and waits for the light to turn in its favor, just like a human pedestrian obeying the laws of traffic (Figure 3). In such moments, the deer’s actions read as an attempt to pass for human and, by extension, to find human companionship. Scenes like this also serve as a reminder that San Andreas Deer Cam, despite its unruly and its occasional slapstick scenes, does not truly fit the mold of the ‘animal mayhem game’, a term that Caracciolo (2021) applies to video games in which animals wreak havoc in urban spaces. The mayhem here comes not from the deer, who is often careful and still, but rather from the human world around it.OPEN IN VIEWER

These attempts to build interspecies connections inevitably fail, however, and at times quite dramatically. When the deer walks through crowds, it is constantly confronted with the challenges and minor cruelties of everyday human social interactions. Inevitably, in its algorithmic meanderings, the deer veers too close to one person or another, brushing past a shoulder or standing in someone’s path. ‘You touched me!’ shouts one NPC incredulously. ‘You’re not worth my time’, another exclaims with disdain. No one seems to find it odd that a deer is walking down the street; indeed, they interact with the deer, as a coded object, much as they would interact with another human being. What bothers them is the prospect of someone (or something) not doing humanness right – breaking the boundaries of normative social etiquette and getting too close. In such moments, the deer seems both particularly non-human and particularly human. It fails to blend into the crowd, looking more ridiculous than ever in contrast to the ‘normal’ people who surround it. Yet, the upsetting experience of attempting to connect with others and being bitterly rebuffed is one that many humans can relate to. In this way, San Andreas Deer Cam blurs the divide between the human and the non-human through affect rather than the visual representation of difference. It presents us with a non-human entity having a decidedly human experience.

Posthumanism’s anxiety toward technology and the future is also made manifest in San Andreas Deer Cam. In an interview, Watanabe himself articulates how the piece comments on the environmental effects of technology: ‘To see this hapless deer wander in this gigantic environment, none of which is designed for it, I think is kind of sobering…. The piece touches on universal themes like longing and suffering… and what technology and human progress are doing to other creatures on Earth’ (CBC 2016). Yet, San Andreas Deer Cam also reflects an even broader concern about the world to come – or, perhaps, a world that is already here – which manifests through the work’s post-apocalyptic undercurrents. To read San Andreas Deer Cam as post-apocalyptic may seem strange, since the piece seems so situated in the present: set in a cityscape designed to look like present-day Los Angeles and broadcast live. Yet, in other ways, San Andreas Deer Cam is very set in an uncertain tomorrow: a world where animal-computers play video games and humans have become little more than set dressing.

Bolstering the piece’s post-apocalyptic implications are the many references to the end of the world, whether textual or visual, that dot Watanabe’s recordings of the deer cam. In one sequence, the deer stands by a row of handball courts in Venice Beach; the tall cement wall at the back of the courts has been graffitied with bold, black letters that read: ‘THE CLIMATE IS NOT CHANGIN. FACT!!’ (Figure 4). The deer lingers here, as if gazing at the words on the wall, which both call to mind and forcibly disavow the looming apocalyptic realities of climate crisis. At other times, the deer seems to inhabit a world that has already ended. Often, depending on the time of day, the deer ends up wandering through parts of the city that are eerily empty. From a dark beach, without a soul in sight, the deer looks out across a distant city skyline; trotting along a deserted boardwalk, the deer meanders alone under flickering street lights. Such moments spark a strong sense of kenopsia: ‘the atmosphere of a place that’s usually bustling with people, but is now abandoned and quiet… an emotional afterimage that makes it seem not just empty but hyper-empty’ (Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows, n.d.) This is hyper-emptiness on a grand scale, like the set of a post-apocalyptic film where a vast American city sits suddenly, hauntingly vacant, still, and silent. Sometimes, in Watanabe’s piece, the streets of San Andreas feel far too full, overflowing with people and cars. At other times though, it feels as if the deer is the last living creature on earth. The posthumanism of San Andreas Deer Cam is bittersweet. For the deer, moving ‘beyond the human’ is lonely work. It requires leaving the world as we know it behind to find another world, paradoxically embedded in scenes of the present, that comes after.OPEN IN VIEWER

An ambivalent queer posthumanism

San Andreas Deer Cam moves beyond the general tenets of posthumanism, coming to embody a form of posthumanism that is decidedly queer. Scholars from both queer studies and queer game studies (e.g. Chang 2017) more specifically have argued for an understanding of queerness that encompasses both queer identities and more conceptual modes of queer meaning. In this way, a queer analysis of a work like San Andreas Deer Cam can account for the non-normative gender and sexual elements of what we see on screen (its representational queerness) and for the ways in which the work’s very structure resists the heteronormative standards of game design. San Andreas Deer Cam’s queer posthumanism – as well as the queer posthumanism of other game works that similarly resist normative expectations around player agency – is likewise twofold. The characteristics of this queer posthumanism manifests through what it depicts and also through how it is structured, through its queer scenes but also through its systems of queer play.

As outlined above, one key tenet of queer posthumanism is its ongoing investment in the body. Indeed, San Andreas Deer Cam heavily features one body in particular – and what I read as a queerly erotic body at that – the body of the deer itself. The deer’s body remains front and center in all the deer cam footage. Because the artists who designed the deer’s character model never intended it to be used as a player-character, watching San Andreas Deer Cam means watching the deer from an angle it was not intended to be seen: from behind. Since the in-game camera points in whatever direction the deer faces, the deer’s rump remains pointed squarely at the viewer. As a result, the deer’s backside, with its high haunches and its swooping round curves, become an ongoing point of visual focus (Figure 5). It twitches sensually as the deer trots; at its center, there hangs a thick, fleshy, phallic tail that wags gently, always just-quite-covering the dark area at the top of its legs where the deer’s anus would be. I do not mean to suggest that we should ourselves find this deer butt sexy, but rather that San Andreas Deer Cam itself, in effect, presents it as so, coloring the piece with a kind of queer embodied erotics triggered by the sight of the plump, swaying, luscious, decidely non-human backside.OPEN IN VIEWER

Queer posthumanism is also invested in desire, intimacy, and relationality that bridge the divide between human and non-human. These too are recurring elements in San Andreas Deer Cam. One of the curious side effects of wandering through the world of Grand Theft Auto V as a deer, it turns out, is the proliferation of moments of sexual misrecognition. The game is full of NPCs walking around talking to themselves, which is primarily represented diegetically as people chatting loudly on their cell phones. When these NPCs move within a certain radius of the deer, their voices are projected at full volume. Often, it sounds as if they are addressing the deer directly—before it becomes clear, sometime later, they are actually on the phone. In these moments, the human inhabitants of San Andreas say some surprisingly sexual things. A woman in a pink string bikini calls out in a sultry tone, ‘Hey, stud. How are you doing, honey?’ She moves closer to the deer, only to walk on past, the phone pressed against her ear now visible. Elsewhere, on the sidewalk, a man strides up close to the deer from behind, hollering out, ‘What’s that? You’re super wet? I’ll be there in ten, babe!’ The deer stops in its tracks while the man, like the woman on the beach, walks by to reveal that he has been talking on the telephone. It is, nonetheless, a jarring moment. These comments are technically intended for someone else, but they read and feel very much like catcalls: humans on the street cooing sexual innuendos at the deer, calling it ‘stud’ and asking if it is ‘super wet’.

Such moments imbue San Andreas Deer Cam with an aura of queer sexual desire, a kind of ‘inappropriate longing,’ to draw from Mel Chen’s definition of queerness (2012: 104), that ruptures the divide between the human and the non-human. These moments are ‘mistakes’, in that the NPCs’ comments are not actually intended for the deer, but they are also not mistakes, since they have been triggered precisely by the deer’s presence. Encounters like this make the streets of San Andreas into a sexually charged space: queer in its longings, perhaps, but also abrasive and rarely consensual. Indeed, the same pre-programmed instinct that leads some NPCs in San Andreas Deer Cam to make sexual exclamations in the deer’s vicinity are also the ones that lead other NPCs to call out threats. Whether it sparks sexual excitement or a longing for violence, this deer seems to get everyone riled up.

In San Andreas Deer Cam, we also see the drive of queer posthumanism to move beyond dominant norms of human society. This manifests in Watanabe’s piece, for example, through reconfigurations of the ‘wild.’ In his 2020 book Wild Things, Jack Halberstam describes wildness as disruptive and implicitly queer: ‘a chaotic force of nature, the outside of categorization, unrestrained forms of embodiment, the refusal to submit to social regulation’ (Halberstam, 2020: 3). Notions of wildness are also explicitly linked to the erotic – a sense of ‘going wild’ and acting with sexual abandon. Who and what is wild in San Andreas Deer Cam? In a piece that features a deer walking around a major metropolitan center, the answer might initially seem obvious. After all, the deer in Watanabe’s piece is an interloper in the human world, familiar yet alarming, the non-threatening cousin of the real-life mountain lions that regularly wander out of the mountains to prowl Los Angeles’ various hillside parks. The deer in San Andreas Deer Cam is also wild in a computational sense: it is the result of a glitch, if functional, hacked mod that, in its own way, embodies an artist’s unwillingness to ‘submit to the social regulations’ that dictate the forms of mainstream AAA video games like Grand Theft Auto V. In these ways, San Andreas Deer Cam can be seen as representing something like the return of the wild. The animal emerges from the forest to reclaim the developed cityscape. The polished, black-box code of the original game goes feral.

Yet, as wild animals go, the deer in Watanabe’s piece is pretty damn tame. Maybe, living as it does alongside the human world, it was never wild at all. Its diminutive face shape and fluffy fur make it look, at certain angles, less like a deer and more like a long-limbed sheep. For its part, the deer appears entirely unperturbed by the presence of people: far more domesticated or even domestic than wild. By contrast, the deer’s unflappably chill demeanor (it has none of its often scripted dialog prompts) often makes the humans that populate San Andreas seem wild. They are the ones who hurl insults, who wield guns, who furiously honk car horns when they encounter the shortest delay. For this reason, even as San Andreas Deer Cam appears to push beyond various societal norms, such as the norms that divide the human from the ‘wild,’ it pauses to reflect on where chaos really lies. In effect, by casting the human inhabitants of San Andreas as wilder than its wildlife, the piece suggests that so-called wildness may not be so transgressive as queer studies is prone to think. What we often call ‘wild’ may in fact already go hand in hand with heteronormativity and hegemony.

Indeed, ultimately, San Andreas Deer Cam proves itself to be deeply ambivalent about the radical potential of queer posthumanism. The deer, as a queer posthuman figure, is simultaneously powerfully transgressive and tragically powerless. This becomes painfully clear at the end of the longer of Watanabe’s two recordings of the deer cam live stream. Here, we are confronted with an alarming final sequence that drives home both the importance of queerness for making sense of San Andreas Deer Cam and the precarity that goes along with that queerness. The sequence begins when the deer, having walked too close to a passing NPC, triggers a loop. As a result, the NPC, a young white man with short-cropped hair, gets angry and tries to initiate a fight. He shouts at the deer, clenching his fists and rocking back and forth on his feet, preparing to throw a punch. Meanwhile, by some fluke of the randomized algorithm that tells the deer when to pause and when to run, the deer stands stock still. In fact, the deer will remain entirely motionless from this moment until the end of the video – a total of roughly 13 min, by far the longest ‘scene’ in the recording. Because the deer neither moves nor responds (as a human player would), the NPC too gets stuck, continuing to taunt and intimate the seemingly paralyzed deer.

Shortly after the first NPC begins to antagonize the deer, another passerby also gets caught up in the loop: a second young white man, this one in a red baseball cap. He too wants to fight, but, unlike the first NPC, his programming allows him to lash out without the player-character throwing the first blow (Figure 6). He punches the deer repeatedly: in its side, its neck, its head. Technically, the deer cannot be harmed, but little splatters of blood still burst forth each time the NPC’s fist connects with the deer’s body. Meanwhile, the NPC throwing the punches shouts homophobic insults at the deer, calling the animal ‘cocksucker’ and ‘you fucker’, and howling at the deer to ‘get fucked.’ This hate speech, spit out in a venomous mock ‘gay’ voice, is repeated ad infinitum as the scene goes on and on for what seems like an impossible stretch of time. In the game world, broad daylight turns to sunset which turns to night, then morning breaks and it is day again. The whole time, a steady flow of witnesses stride by on the sidewalk. They see the deer being attacked, hear the homophobic slurs, look down at their cell phones, and keep walking. In the world of San Andreas Deer Cam, which foregrounds the non-human, even human characters ultimately prove themselves to be something other than human: cruel, inhuman attackers and indifferent bystanders whose inaction is shockingly inhumane.OPEN IN VIEWER

This brutal scene is made all the more brutal because, I suspect, it is supposed to be funny. Here, the implicit queerness of the deer is made explicit by the words and actions of his gaybashing attackers, whose haircuts and clothing call to mind white supremacist hate groups. Though the sequence has been randomly generated by the interplay between a set of computational conditions, to an LGBTQ person, it feels all too real. No one helps the deer, and the NPCs’ broiling anger seems infinite. It lasts so long that the clip eventually just fades to black, leaving the viewer to wonder whether this anti-gay abuse would have gone on forever if the artist had not intervened. What I find particularly upsetting, as someone who admires San Andreas Deer Cam, is that this particular footage was chosen to be featured on Watanabe’s Web site as representative of the project. This act of selection and framing transforms the scene of algorithmic gaybashing from an unfortunate random occurrence into a homophobic joke. It becomes one of the ‘crazy’, laughable things that can happen when an AI deer is unleashed in the streets of San Andreas. I began by saying that San Andreas Deer Cam is often misinterpreted as simply comical. Perhaps, it is more accurate to say that it is a mistake to read the piece as comical without stopping to reflect on the nature of its comedy. If San Andreas Deer Cam is funny, that humor comes at whose expense?

And yet, there remains a glimmer of queer possibility even in this sequence. By staying insistently still for the full 13 minutes, the deer enacts a kind of pacifist resistance. In a fittingly posthuman vein, we can see the deer take on a radical object-ness: abandoning its algorithmic animacy and becoming-thing (to call back to the notion of becoming-animal), unmoving and unmovable. When queer studies scholars like Luciano, Chen and Muñoz write about queerness beyond the human, we might envision this scene. For queer subjects, there is no such thing as going ‘beyond the human’, in part because living a queer life means coming up against the day-to-day human realities of discrimination and suffering (as well as community and joy) that are part of queer experience. The queer posthuman subject, exemplified by the deer who seems to transcend the game world even as he endures a violent attack, likewise does not have the luxury of abandoning the material present. It does, however, have the opportunity to reimagine what it means to live in that present, transforming oneself into the non-human and thereby setting oneself apart from an unjust human world.

After agency: Video games that cannot be played

To conclude, I want to return to the unplayability of San Andreas Deer Cam and highlight its implications for queer posthumanism as we might locate it in the medium of video games more broadly. Much of what makes the piece posthuman, queer, and queerly posthuman lies in the tensions it sparks around interactivity and agency. I mentioned above that San Andreas Deer Cam fosters queer relationalities between human and non-human entities – for instance, by presenting scenes in which human characters appear to proposition the deer for sex or by drawing visual focus to the deer’s own body in a way that eroticizes the relationship between the deer and its viewers. At the same time though, San Andreas Deer Cam fosters a kind of queer non-human relationality between viewers and the ‘game’ itself. By making Grand Theft Auto V unplayable, Watanabe turns the original video game into something hard, impenetrable, and unknowable. It requires that those who view it engage in a queer form of being-with, relinquishing the expectation that they can interact with the work and instead only accessing it through the surface of its image. The unplayability of the piece is precisely at the core of San Andreas Deer Cam’s queer posthumanism. In this way, Watanabe’s work prompts us to reconsider what a video game is, why we assume that human agency is central to the definition of a video game, and what queer possibilities lie in games that are either designed to be unplayable or that refuse to be played – at least, they refuse to be played by us.

San Andreas Deer Cam both is and is not a video game. It hinges on this tantalizing, infuriating tension, which simultaneously teases and forecloses on opportunities for human interaction and control. In Watanabe’s piece, what was once a playground for humans (the original Grand Theft Auto V) has become something other: a display of agency not so much lost as transferred, human agency rendered posthuman. At the same time, since its decision-making parameters have been pre-programmed, the deer’s own agency remains questionable. Does the deer decide its own path, or should its choices be chalked up entirely to randomness? Or is there a third option, a kind of animal or even computational agency that is, as Muñoz suggests, unknowable to human beings? Whichever way we interpret the deer, San Andreas Deer Cam prompts us to reconsider the most fundamental thing we think we know about video games: that they are interactive, that they give players control, and that control has a clear meaning. I have described the posthumanism of Watanabe’s piece as post-apocalyptic. Yet, we would do well to understand the piece as offering not so much a vision of the post-apocalypse in video games as a vision of a post-apocalypse of video games. In San Andreas Deer Cam, the end of the world as we know it is synonymous with the end of video games as we know them. If video games are a medium defined by agency, this is agency’s end.

In this sense, San Andreas Deer Cam takes us not only beyond the human but beyond play itself. The deer – a queer, defiant, Bartleby-esque figure who would simply ‘prefer not to’ – often refuses to act at all. It inhabits Grand Theft Auto V but it does not play through its narratives or missions. It has full access to all of San Andreas (which is in fact rendered around him in bits and pieces as he moves, and an effect of the procedurally generated nature of the game world). Yet, it often chooses to stand still. Above all, it refuses to ‘work’ in the ways that an animal in a video game is supposed to: to work like a bit of computation should, functioning as intended within a larger machine; to work as a set piece in a world designed for the human players of a video game that epitomizes the dominant norms of AAA video games and their imagined straight, cisgender, male audience. If this is a video game, it is a video game after the collapse of video game culture: a vision of a time when deer roam the parts of the earth that once belonged to humans and when computational media itself no longer cares about the people for whom it was created. Certainly, San Andreas Deer Cam is far from the only example of a video game that cannot be played or what Sonia Fizek calls ‘self-playing games’: games that, in one way or another, play themselves (Fizek, 2017). Yet, this impulse to refuse player control becomes all the more potent when it is set in a game world that has been designed to give players the utmost control, the utmost agency. By turning Grand Theft Auto V specifically into a video game that cannot be played, San Andreas Deer Cam models how the very medium of video games can become fodder for challenging the centrality of the human: a deeply queer endeavor.

This queer posthumanist reading of San Andreas Deer Cam offers us new ways of finding meaning in other game-related art designed to be intentionally unplayable. In addition to pieces such as those by Awash and Archangel, we would do well to think of more conceptual works like the ‘game ideas’ of Pippin Barr (2015–2018) or Mattie Brice’s EAT (2013): design propositions intended as poetic thought experiments that would be impossible to play, recalling Dora Garcia’s list, scrawled on the walls of the Louvre, of ‘100 words of impossible art’ (2007). These games are all, in their own way, posthuman. By being games, they hail the human, suggesting that people might play them; by being unplayable, they rebuke the human, becoming sovereign entities onto themselves. The value of San Andreas Deer Cam as I have interpreted it here lies, in part, in its capacity to draw attention to the inherent queerness of these games – as well as the queer potential of other moments when the medium of video games, typically defined by its very interactivity, becomes insistently non-interactive. Video game developers and players have long held as self-evident and sacred the expectation that the medium should strive to make game worlds more real and game players more powerful within them. San Andreas Deer Cam models a different way forward, a queerer way, one in which dominant norms are upended, control is relinquished, agency becomes unknowable and the non-human creatures who populate our game worlds come to claim them for their own.