Humanities

This article examines Split Fiction, a cooperative video game that engages with themes of authorship, creativity, and artificial intelligence in the digital age. The game presents aspiring authors whose creative ideas are extracted by a corporate machine—a metaphor for contemporary generative AI systems. Through its mandatory two-player cooperative mechanics and genre-shifting gameplay, Split Fiction explores tensions between human creativity and automated generation, individual authorship and corporate extraction, and procedural rhetoric versus narrative meaning. We analyze how the game’s mechanical variety, intertextual references, and meta-narrative structure comment on the current landscape of AI in creative industries, particularly as director Josef Fares’s ambivalent statements about AI complicate straightforward readings of the work as purely anti-AI critique. The game ultimately offers a nuanced exploration of creative labor futures in an age where the boundaries between human and machine authorship grow increasingly uncertain.

Despite the censorship imposed by the GHQ in postwar Japan, the period saw the launch of numerous fetish magazines featuring explicit sexual expression. These magazines sometimes complied with the censorship of sexual expression and sexual norms and resisted it at other times. This niche print culture enabled the emergence of Japanese gay magazines like Sabu (1974–2002), the primary focus of this paper. Although previous studies have described Sabu primarily as a hardcore SM magazine, this paper argues that it also functioned as a space for articulating gay identities and resisting social discrimination. Through a close analysis of the magazine’s reader correspondence sections, the study demonstrates how Sabu emphasized personal acts of coming out and expressions of solidarity in response to the AIDS epidemic. Furthermore, it shows that Sabu sought to diversify stereotypical representations of gay men by attempting a crossover with the male–male romances created by and for women. By examining Sabu as a case study, this paper re-evaluates the magazine’s place in the history of Japanese gay magazines and explores how such publication employed erotic representations as a medium for the articulation and strengthening of minority identities.

This article examines Daniel Suarez’s techno-thrillers Daemon (2006) and Freedom™ (2010) as works of speculative fiction that critically engage with themes of posthuman identity, algorithmic governance, and ecological agency. Rather than portraying artificial intelligence as a dystopian threat, the novels imagine the Daemon, which is a self-replicating system launched upon its creator’s death, as an infrastructural force that reorganizes global systems of power, labor, and survival. Through a posthumanist reading, drawing on thinkers such as Donna Haraway, Karen Barad, Rosi Braidotti, and N. Katherine Hayles, this article interprets the Daemon not as malevolent code, but as an ecological actor embedded in material networks, capable of fostering adaptive forms of life and governance. By reading Suarez’s fiction through the lens of posthuman ecocriticism and infrastructural media theory, the article offers a model for understanding freedom, not as a static right, but as a relational capacity earned through participation in sympoietic systems. It argues that speculative fiction can function as a cartographic tool, mapping not only future technologies but future ontologies.

This article addresses the way Frostpunk’s saga highlights the semiotic nature of video games by establishing an aesthetic and ethical link in its ludonarrative mechanics and storytelling, which, in turn, may engage with the player in a debate where the identitarian discourses of both the fictional entities encoded within the game and the player (that is, of both functional and fictional agents) are put into question and thus may be reconfigured. To understand this connection between aesthetics, ethics, and identity, affect is central: through affect, players establish empathic links towards the encoded agents (including, but not limited to, the encoded citizens, the encoded setting, and the encoded avatar of the player within the game world), which in turn allows them to interact with them as if being real, at least while the playthrough is active. To achieve this, this article will first offer a theoretical review of the terms mentioned above (identity, affect, aesthetics, ethics), and then will apply them to 11Bit’s saga, Frostpunk. The article finishes with some conclusions regarding the semiotic nature of the video game and the universality of these analyses.