In “Shooting to Kill,” Phillips engages the concept of “mechropolitics” to describe the politics of death in video games and the digital world and the ways in which these politics come to influence the perceptions of death in the real world. To start her theory of mechropolitics, Phillips’ invokes the the postcolonial theory of necropolitics, which describes the ways that death is a mechanism that means the “absolute punishment and state of life” for black bodies (137). Necropolitics marks certain bodies for execution and these bodies are continuously living in state of fear or living death. Phillips’ states that video games, in utilizing death and dying as gamic goals and technological processes, turn death and dying “into mechanisms and mechanics that structure activity of gaming” (137). Video game systems dictate who lives, who dies, and the way in which they live or die in accordance with “interlocking scripts of rules, procedures, and narratives” (137). Technology thus interweaves with the cultural, transforming death from mechanism into mechanism of representation (137). This weaving of the technological and cultural is also what changes necropolitcs into mechropolitics for Phillips–the bodies of video games are avatars that do not suffer from real violence like black bodies, they form part of technological structures that are part of Mbeme’s “death worlds,” as the technological is central to his theory of necropolitics. Technology also influences the wh a theory of mechropolitics, is to analyze the digital death worlds that video games create and determine how they influence our interactions with death in the real world.
In “Disrupting ‘all the familiar geometry,” Stauffer introduces the concept of “settler common sense” to describe the ways in which non-indigenous subjects of settler colonial societies come to construct a collective world framings that legitimates settlement as a given, unproblematic and unquestioned truth. These subjects use these framings as a way to assign value to and assess the world and its emergent issues. Stauffer engages the phenomenon of settler common sense in order to interrogate the socially organized denial of citizens of settler colonial societies. That it, the mechanisms by which these subjects come to deny the ongoing injustices that their nation-states commit, injustices that are ultimately necessary for the continuation of way of life. Critical to the structure of settler common sense is the notion of “perceptual tradition,” of how settler colonial ways of experiencing the world become naturalized, or “imbued with a sensation of everyday certainty” (5). Though the perceptual traditions held my settler colonial subjects appears unwavering, unquestionable, and commonsensical, it is fact socially constructed, fabricated though social, political, economic, and ideological processes and then repetitively chosen by people, thus continuing its existence. Perceptual traditions, in other words, are constantly recreated. Perceptual tradition is upheld by people accepting certain structures as unquestionable truths, as “just the ways things are.” Stauffer emphasizes that the key to breaking free of perceptual tradition, of considering new possibilities for relationships, politics, and ways of being and moving throughout the world, is realized that our world is historically constructed and can be deconstructed to create something new and more just. “Any tradition,” she states, “may be permeated and changed, and that is true at least in part because tradition is never monolithic, nor a forgone conclusion, not even concluded, but always underway and in process” (10).
Both Phillips and Stauffer are tackling issues that have to do socially organized perceptions. Stauffer examines the ways in which worldviews are built in order to explicate how these can harmful, but are transformable. Through her analysis of the head shot, Phillips’ text explores American perceptions about death and dying and shares how video games offer alternate perceptions about death and dying. The mechropolitical perception of death in video games makes death fun–in the case of player-controlled ragdolls, the body becomes the “playground of cruelty” (140). Despite this cruelty and violence, video games are still games, and players still perceive them as games. For Phillips, it is important to hold this serious and fun in tensions with one another. Phillips wants us to take these tensions seriously when thinking about the video games and the ways they influence our perceptions about death. In video games, the experience of killing is shaped by the ability to execute a headshot, which requires great skill. Indeed, the video games turned the head shot, an act of killing not generally found in hunting or military expeditions, “into a staple of virtual competition” (143). Phillips states that while gaming, feelings of satisfaction have less to do with killing than feelings of mastery. The perception of headshots in video games therefore represent a mechropolitical act because they combine “the mechanics of fun, death, and domination into one” (143). In a larger sense, Phillips wants us to think about the ways in which these perceptions can bleed over into the real world. In video games, head shots reward impulse, twitch responses and split-second decision-making and killing are riskless. In instances of police brutality, twitch responses, which are steeped in bias, are valorized by a growing segment of the population. As well, growing numbers think that head shots are the norm, “even a joy, of firearms practice” (147). In this way, Phillips calls us to think about the mechanics of death and dying in video games and the similar implications they have in the real world.