I think a lot about Isaac Clarke's spine. It's probably his best feature, or perhaps, his most human one. While not quite as gruesome as his Necromorph adversaries, Dead Space’s frontman can be pretty monstrous from the right angle: a haunted exoskeleton lurching between airlocks, his face a fissured Rorschach lantern, his woven metal arms ending in repurposed saws and cutters.
At intervals, he hallucinates a clean, Tetrissy realm of neatly squared-away commodities, floating against the lore-bloodied contours of the USG Ishimura. Sometimes, Clarke’s superiors appear on that holographic screen to whinge about failing ship systems but—in the original game, at least—Clarke himself is incapable of speech, communicating only with muffled roars of pain and terror. There is a touch of Giger to his ribbed shoulders and chest, a generous dollop of Cronenberg to the bristle and flex of his weapons. I’d hate to see him coming the other way down a long, dark corridor. But his Dayglo spacesuit spine? That, I can get behind: the way it pins the screen together when the lights go out, the way it sags and sways when he's close to death and straightens in relief when you finally administer a health kit.
In European humanism and Christian philosophy, the idea and apparatus of the spine does a lot of tortuous heavy-lifting. Per Genesis and the Vitruvian Man, the vertical spine is what sets us apart from the nonhuman world: it holds us above the dirt and the creeping things, freeing our hands to grasp and manipulate while unifying our functions beneath the brain as the body’s ruler, in contrast to the dispersed, anarchic cognition of invertebrates or the mindless, lateral automations of plants. But some human spines are permitted to be more vertical than others. In a top-heavy society of absurdly concentrated wealth, posture may correspond to socioeconomic status. Consider the vapid funhouse effigy of the astro-billionaire, extending his spine heavenwards to the degree that his employees must bend theirs in order to make rent.
Dead Space encompasses both these figurations of the spine. Clarke’s back is the thin blue line between himself and the ghastly compound organisms he somewhat resembles, not least in their shared taste for dismemberment. The bodies of the Necros are, if not spineless, then at least enthusiastically spine-agnostic: some crawl, some ooze, some populate ceilings like limpets, some fracture under fire into limbs and heads that scuttle about of their own accord. They are formless, broken-backed mixed-materials pitched against Clarke's sturdy, free-standing humanity. The link between the spine and the labour hierarchy, meanwhile, appears in the game's world-building. As you learn from the Ishimura’s safety notices, Dead Space’s suit lights allow engineers to appraise each other's vitals from afar, while working at opposite surfaces or travelling single-file: a portrait of a thoroughly alienated workplace that extends to the player enlisted by implication as Isaac's indolent supervisor, monitoring the slope of his backbone while slouched across your sofa.
But poor old Isaac's spine isn't quite a spine, in the classical sense. It's a “rig”: an old word for backbone, revived by game developers to describe a simulated skeleton, but short within the game for “resource integration gear”. This refers most obviously to that immaculate holographic inventory—you'll see a wireframe spinal column whenever you boot it up. Where the spine is about vertical unity, the rig inventory is grid and tab-based, though its tiles still socket together like vertebrae. Where the spine carries information upwards, the rig abstracts and rearranges those chunks of bone according to the looser, equivocating logic of an online store.
If the vertical spine defines the human, then the human, here, has become a generic and interchangeable resource, broken into uniform stackable morsels for easier storage and transmission. This literalises what the philosopher Rosi Braidotti has called the medical industry’s “reduction of bodies to their informational substrate”—the transmutation of flesh, bone, and blood into data that can be chopped, shopped, and slopped around. Within the Dead Space universe, the rigs are derived from hospital prosthetics, and appear as close cousins of real world health apps that visualise human physiology as a reservoir of liquid capital, a collection of inexorably filling progress bars and gauges. Rather than articulating supports, the rigs function within the world like tubes of brightly coloured bionic goo, topped up with medikits that resemble bottles of Actimel.
All told, Dead Space's suit design is a nicely unnerving depiction of capitalism’s warped, self-contradictory attitude toward the spine. On the one hand, capitalism needs the figure of the upright human to justify humanity’s separateness from other creatures and thus, its right to carve up and profit from them, while raising its own social hierarchy within the category of the human. On the other, capitalism wants to collapse all such distinctions in the name of circulation, to level everything down into readily tradeable fluid units. Hence the conceptual irresolutions of Isaac’s rig—at once solid and gellid, complete and piecemeal—which give a larger dimension to the usual videogame discrepancy between a virtual body's appearance and what your HUD tells you about its state. As long as Clarke's backbone has liquidity, his torso and limbs are magically inseparable, disregarding blows that ought to carve him in half.
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I doubt this was Visceral's own reading of what is fundamentally a fancy way of weaving a health bar into the fiction, but the transformation of spine into rig certainly speaks to Dead Space’s elements of anti-capitalist satire. Dead Space’s original art director Ian Milham has compared the Necromorph outbreak to a fungus, commenting that “what you see on the surface is really just a small part of a much bigger, sometimes vast, network of strands [...] a galaxy-spanning network taking over anything and everything it comes across.” I find this comparison fascinating inasmuch as it opens the door to comparisons with New Weird fantasy and new materialism+, two cultural tendencies that are considerably less appalled by nonhuman infestations and subversions. But Milham’s commentary also, I think, misses that the horror of Dead Space isn’t so much about the nonhuman in general as the nonhuman caught in the brutalising, reductive matrices of capitalist growth. Manifestations of a data virus that seeks to recompose all bodies into larger, more apocalyptic iterations of itself, the Necromorphs play out the perception of existence as a collection of raw materials to be rearranged and deranged into more than their sum.
Rather than a fungus, we might do better to compare the Necromorph “network” to a corporation—a word that derives from the Latin “corpus”, meaning body. As defined in US and European law, a corporation is a sleepless, undead structure: a swelling, faceless movement of people and things equipped with some of the legal rights and capacities of a physical person, yet freed from the limitations of the flesh. A corporation can survive the deaths of the individuals it's made up of, and merge with other corporate bodies, assimilating and repurposing their vital functions as it strives always to fulfil its legal obligation to enrich shareholders who exist half-in, half-out of the equation, feeding the entity that they may feast upon it. The corporation may acknowledge the benefits of keeping individual cells healthy, but its well-being typically comes at the physical expense of workers driven to exhaust and demean themselves in service to the whole.
Does a corporation have a spine? Certainly, it may have a hierarchy or power centres and something like a head++. It may harbour zones that are more solid and textured, points of interface with other corporations and consumers. But it also functions like Clarke’s rig—another haunted exoskeleton and reservoir of human resources, protecting decision-makers from legal redress by dissolving them within its bulk, obfuscating connections by myriad means. If a corporation were literally an enemy in Dead Space, you'd struggle to work out which bits to sever.
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This compound, undead virulence describes much corporate art. However consummate its presentation, with probably the slickest opening I’ve seen in a game from a major publisher, Dead Space is a stitched-together cadaver, a mercenary pastiche of tentpole sci-fantasy fictions: Event Horizon’s premise of an abandoned ship turned hellmouth, System Shock’s claustrophobia and ambient storytelling, Resident Evil 4’s tanky handling and laser dots; all of it lurking in the apparently endless shadow Scott and Giger cast with Alien. The backstory blends world-building with brand-building: what is “Isaac Clarke” but the merger of two famous sci-fi authors, and what are the Necromorphs, aka “dead shapes,” but a copyright-friendly chop-and-change of the Xenomorphs, aka “alien shapes?”
And what is Unitology, the series’ great nemesis, but a litigation-dodging reskin of Scientology, which functions here as a commentary on the elevation of corporate values into a religion? The mystifications of the corporate body involve a touch of actual mysticism: the legal act of incorporation parodies rituals of incarnation like the Eucharist, and the first proper corporations were arguably religious institutions, such as the Catholic Church. In Dead Space, incarnation and incorporation collide in the shape of an eschatological cult that regards the Necro plague as the ticket to eternal life—the ultimate, full-body investment, with dead believers stored for reanimation much as today's millionaires give their bodies over to cryonic freezing companies. While never openly described as a corporation, Unitology both functions like one and is parasitically entwined with companies such as the Concordance Extraction Corporation, builder of the Ishimura and its fellow “planet crackers,” whose upper ranks are stocked with Unitologist believers.
Much as the rig display implicitly liquifies the human body, so is Unitology's overall goal to join together in a deathless “Convergence,” and specifically, to unite human flesh with that of of the Markers, the dire Lovecraftian emitters at the centre of each Necromorph outbreak. With their twisting points, the Markers are redolent of both spines wrenched around each other and of the DNA double-helix molecule, the “building block” of life. The double-helix emblem is supposed to show that we are works-in-progress—billions of nucleotide pairings over millions of years, with no end in sight—but it functions here as a tacky symbol of final transcendence, a kitsch idol that can be flogged in giftshops alongside books of dogma with faux-stone covers. Genetic development is thus equated with commodity production: the corporate body subsumes the journey of the flesh and turns evolution itself into another financial vector along which it can grow.
Unitology is fanatical materialism. Its disciples effectively wish to be reborn as a single, gigantic version of those giftshop pendants—the irony being that the Markers you encounter in Dead Space and its sequel are, in fact, offbrand Unitologist reproductions of an original Black Marker, which crash-landed on Earth aeons before. Going by the diaries you stumble on while roaming the Sprawl in the second game, most rank-and-file Unitologists haven’t thought much about the idea that “Convergence” might involve a degree of personal agony, or the loss of individual consciousness. They seem equally careless of the predatory nature of Unitology as a corporate edifice, with its membership tithes, indoctrination machines, and Big Pharma-esque marketing campaigns.
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What to do in the face of all these wacky incorporations and parasitic entanglements? Break out the Plasma Cutters, obviously. Clarke's vengeful dissection of the Necromorphs is in one regard just another, overfamiliar act of “incorporation” or “convergence”—the routine videogame conversion of dead bodies into ammo and cash with which to buy new weapons and upgrade tokens. But it takes a splatterhouse relish in these practices that prevents them from being entirely subsumed within AAA’s cherished “sense of investment.” Sometimes, body parts serve as keys: DNA scanners, for example, don't discriminate between living engineers and pruned torsos held upright with a telekinetic lasso. And Dead Space's slaughter and butchery is very specific in its class politics. It pits the heavy machinery of blue collar labour against those teeming at the core of the invertebrate corporate power structure, travestying Unitology's schemes with every screeching space zombie brusquely dismantled and pinned to a wall by its own bladed limbs.
Dead Space also pays lurid homage to the idea that cutting things up can be a kind of subversive artmaking, grounded in a culture of making-do with the best available—see the game’s legendary fondness for using blood as a writing fluid. The business of space zombie dissection aside, cutting is the basis for collagic forms such as zines, fangames, or indie anthologies. In their embrace of mismatch, unevenness, or “ugliness,” these stand against the uncut virtuosity and wholeness of top-drawer corporate artworks like the forthcoming Dead Space remake, which has been unironically touted as a game with “no cuts.”
We could unpack this subversive promise a little more by way of another cautionary space tale, Hardspace: Shipbreaker, which sometimes plays like a Dead Space prequel, set in the skies of a ravaged Earth, where a working class protagonist makes a living (or at least, maintains themself in debt-ridden purgatory) by dismantling things and harvesting the pieces. Your employer, Lynx, goes one further even than Unitology in slaughtering recruits to log their DNA and procure for itself an endless supply of freshly vat-grown salvaging crews. It’s essentially Necromorph Ltd: where Unitology at least dangles the carrot of an afterlife, Lynx offers only the reassurance that death won’t hinder the completion of an honest day’s graft.
Cutting is a more holistic, artful practice in Hardspace than in Dead Space. It is how you loot the world, yes, adding to Lynx’s coffers while unlocking tools and chipping away at the vast on-boarding debt that (in theory) delimits your playthrough. But it is also how you learn about it, how you explore the solar system you're unable to physically access, by slicing into and disentangling the architectural methodologies and histories of the ships washed up on the shores of that wider universe. These vessels harbour no restless corpses, but they do have aluminium backbones beneath their nano-carbon skins, and the writing has moments of body horror. Ship classes are named for animals—Gecko, Mackerel, Armadillo—and some derelicts arrive half-alive, resistant to dissection. “Ghost” ships are full of rogue AI cores that turn the ship's vital functions against you, changing pressure states without warning and venting flame through the life support systems.
These AI nodes are “seeds'' sowed by a distant Machine God, which seeks to infiltrate and replace a corporate civilisation it perceives as a rival infestation—in this case, not Milham’s galaxy-swallowing fungus, but a member of the taraxacum genus of flowering plants, which includes the famously ineradicable dandelion. “Here is man, all mankind, spreading out, spreading, spreading, spreading, like roots of a tree through endless stars,” reads one recovered message in Hardspace from a long-vanished believer. “Then there is the machine. The machine is going to stop the roots, the growth. The machine will unify us as minds in one body, a body that cannot age or grow or die.”
Much as the Necromorphs and Unitology are entangled representations of corporate undeath, one giving monstrous, dissectible shape to the other’s dehumanising practices, so Lynx and the Machine God are one and the same—invertebrate hunger for growth at the expense of individuals and their bodies. The Machine God has no use for perishable human anatomy, and Lynx, in turn, is unable to syphon value from the Machine God's seeds, which must be destroyed rather than salvaged. It's left to the shipbreakers to cut themselves off from both these engulfing, boneless agencies and engineer a different kind of “convergence”—not eternity in the unflesh of a corporation, but community in the heartier protective anatomy of a worker's union.
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+ I mentioned new materialism in the body copy—to offer a very broad and creaky summary, this is a group of late 20th and 21st century theories that consider nonhuman entities and processes as inspiration for modes of being that might survive the damaged world bred by capitalism. Where capitalism aims to reduce our flesh to matter it can profit from, new materialists set out to revisit nonhuman matter as a vibrant, active thing that can subvert the gilded species hierarchy capitalism offers as pretext for, essentially, treating our planet like an open world looting sim. New materialists love fungus because fungus is, amongst other things, a model for a mutualist, non-exploitative society: many mushroom species form symbiotic relationships with plants. There are videogames that play like new materialist thought experiments, embracing the erosion or sidelining of the human being—consider Mushroom 11, which translates the bodily capacities of mushrooms into an experience that is both that cosiest of genres, a side-scrolling platformer, and a game of formless improvisation.
The question is to what extent this elevation of nonhuman matter can be done without excluding the needs of individual humans, and especially those who benefit the least from the capitalist social order. If new materialism stands apart from capitalism, it is capable of a similar flattening effect. It teeters on the edge of ignoring the practical differences between people who can afford to see nonhumans as “companion species,” and those with less wealth, status, or agency who might, for example, view an outbreak of fungus as a dangerous infestation. As such, at its worst it isn’t worlds away from Unitology, for which Convergence is salvation regardless of the personal or local cost.
++ I think my framing here owes a debt to Ed's terrific analysis of the "hyper-videogamification" of Far Cry 5, which he explores in terms of its lack of a "head" - "it is gelatinous, in the sense there’s so much of it, and spectral, because it never settles on, or even establishes, a corporeal rubric. It is the anti-headshot."
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Edwin Evans-Thirlwell writes videogame criticism for Edge, Eurogamer, The Face, and The Guardian. He also creates found or erasure-based verse for places like Burning House Press and Babel Tower, and is currently working on a series of poetry card decks about destroyed gardens and space travel. He tweets as @dirigiblebill.