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Tobi Smethurst

Ghent University, Letteren En Wijsbegeerte, Graduate Student

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Tobi Smethurst was a visiting professor of English literature at Ghent University. She holds degrees from Ghent University (PhD in Literary Studies) and the University of Newcastle upon Tyne (BA in English Literature; MA in Literary Studies). Her PhD thesis, “Playing with Trauma in Video Games: Interreactivity, Empathy, Perpetration,” investigated the under-theorized potential of video games to represent psychological trauma in ways that “traditional” trauma-fiction media such as novels, films, or autobiographies cannot. It argued that, because of the inter(re)activity which is unique to the video game medium, games are able to present a variety of ways of making the player identify and/or empathize with protagonists and, through them, to virtually experience traumatized perspectives or perpetrate traumatizing acts. The thesis conducted a series of close readings of games (The Walking Dead, Limbo, Spec Ops: The Line, and others) that integrate trauma aesthetically and mechanically; that is, both visually/sonically/thematically and on the level of the rules which govern the experience of actually playing and progressing through the game.
Supervisors: Stef Craps
Phone: +32 491 73 53 34
Address: Department of Literary Studies / Room 130.029
Ghent University
Blandijnberg 2
9000 Gent
Belgium

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Papers by Tobi Smethurst

Playing Dead in Videogames: Trauma in Limbo

The Journal of Popular Culture, 2015

Playing with Trauma: Interreactivity, Empathy, and Complicity in The Walking Dead Video Game

by Tobi Smethurst and Stef Craps

Just as books and films about traumatic events have become part of Western popular culture, so th... more Just as books and films about traumatic events have become part of Western popular culture, so the theme of trauma and its accompanying tropes have been seeping into video games over the last two decades. In spite of the discernible trauma trend within video games, however, and the potential they exhibit for representing trauma in new ways, they have received very little critical notice from trauma theorists. In this article, we argue that a trauma-theoretical study of games has much to offer our understanding of the ways that trauma can be represented, in addition to giving game studies scholars further insight into how games manage to elicit such strong emotions and difficult ethical quandaries in players. We demonstrate this by performing a close reading of one recent and much-discussed game, The Walking Dead: Season One, analyzing how it incorporates psychological trauma in terms of inter(re)activity, empathy, and complicity.

Playing with Trauma in Video Games: Interreactivity, Empathy, Perpetration

This thesis argues that due to the unique affordances of their medium, video games have the poten... more This thesis argues that due to the unique affordances of their medium, video games have the potential to work with psychological trauma in ways that more “traditional” trauma-literary media such as books or films cannot. After comparing how inter(re)activity, empathy, and perpetration function across game and trauma theory, I perform a series of case studies of video games in order to explain how each works with trauma. These include Dear Esther, Papers, Please, The Baron, Spec Ops: The Line, Limbo, and The Walking Dead.

Playing with Trauma: Interreactivity, Empathy, and Complicity in The Walking Dead Video Game

by Stef Craps and Tobi Smethurst

Games and Culture, 2015

Just as books and films about traumatic events have become part of Western popular culture, so th... more Just as books and films about traumatic events have become part of Western popular culture, so the theme of trauma and its accompanying tropes have been seeping into video games over the last two decades. In spite of the discernible trauma trend within video games, however, and the potential they exhibit for representing trauma in new ways, they have received very little critical notice from trauma theorists. In this article, we argue that a trauma-theoretical study of games has much to offer our understanding of the ways that trauma can be represented, in addition to giving game studies scholars further insight into how games manage to elicit such strong emotions and difficult ethical quandaries in players. We demonstrate this by performing a close reading of one recent and much-discussed game, The Walking Dead: Season One, analysing how it incorporates psychological trauma in terms of inter(re)activity, empathy, and complicity.

"We put our hands on the trigger with him": Guilt and Perpetration in Spec Ops: The Line

Criticism: A Quarterly for Literature and the Arts, 2017

In “Beginnings of the Day – Fascism and Representation,” Gillian Rose proposes the creation of a ... more In “Beginnings of the Day – Fascism and Representation,” Gillian Rose proposes the creation of a film “which follows the life story of a member of the SS in all its pathos, so that we empathise with him, identify with his hopes and fears, disappointment and rage, so that when it comes to killing, we put our hands on the trigger with him, wanting him to get what he wants” (50). At the same time, however, Rose also questions whether such empathy with an SS man is even possible, given that the audience would be aware of the identity of the protagonist from the start, and would therefore (in Robert Eaglestone’s words) be “unable to want what this evil man wants” (13). The solution, for Rose, is to withhold information from the audience regarding the true character of the protagonist, thereby allowing empathy to build for the character until the point when their villainy is revealed (as in Bernhard Schlink’s The Reader and Kazuo Ishiguro’s The Remains of the Day, after which Rose’s piece is named). This paper proposes a further solution to the question of how to encourage the audience to identify with the perpetrator’s perspective: making the audience complicit in the deeds perpetrated by the protagonist, through the use of interactivity in the videogame medium. I read Yager Development’s Spec Ops: The Line (2012) as a prime example of a videogame that manages to involve the player in the perpetration of atrocities through a slow process of coming to empathise with the character who commits them. Due to the interactivity which makes the game work as a game, the player must put their hands on the trigger with the protagonist, Captain Martin Walker, in order to proceed through the game, a fact which Spec Ops then holds up to the player as an example of their complicity in the game’s violence. Fascinatingly, by doing this the game essentially punishes the player for playing it, yet it remains compelling (indeed, it received near-universal critical acclaim among games journalism outlets) in spite of, or perhaps because of its attitude towards videogame violence. By demonstrating the extent to which a strong empathic link between player and perpetrator is possible, the videogame medium has the potential to radically alter our relationship with controversial memories of perpetration, working against the troubling, albeit understandable, tendency of memory studies to universalise the innocent’s perspective in the wake of violent conflict (Crownshaw).

Playing Dead: Trauma in Limbo

The Journal of Popular Culture, 2015

This essay argues that by experimenting with player agency and interactivity, videogames have the... more This essay argues that by experimenting with player agency and interactivity, videogames have the potential to work with psychological trauma in ways that more traditional media such as books or films cannot, especially with regard to guilt, anxiety, and perpetration. The essay introduces trauma studies to games by providing a trauma-theoretical reading of Limbo, a 2D indie platform game released in 2010. Limbo provides a recent and prominent example of a game that has achieved critical and commercial success by remediating some of the rhetorical tropes and themes found in more “traditional” (read: literary, filmic) types of trauma fiction. In the first part I look at how Limbo thematizes trauma through its distinctive aesthetic and narrative, and in the second part I address how Limbo conveys trauma through its “core”—the underlying rules and mechanics that allow the game to be played.

Embodiment and Artificial Intelligence in Valve Software’s Portal

Valve Software's first Portal game (2007) provides a locus for a variety of concerns about the po... more Valve Software's first Portal game (2007) provides a locus for a variety of concerns about the potential implications of AI and games as they impact on notions of embodiment and artificiality. Portal disrupts and intermingles the three distinct categories of player, player character (avatar), and artificial intelligence by deploying subtle self-referential cues and parody which call attention to the game’s artificiality. At the same time, this technique draws the player into an affective relationship with GLaDOS, the scripted AI construct who acts as the game’s villain. Moreover, the game repeatedly points to the fact that interacting with the game constitutes a cyborgic relationship. As the game proceeds, the player’s perspective is repeatedly shifted and reconstructed by these lines of rhetoric, and by the eponymous portals which form the game’s core mechanic. The cumulative effect is to cause the player to question what it means to be an embodied subject interacting with the game, to wonder what qualifies as “intelligence” (whether “artificial” or not), and to interrogate the extent to which our relationship with the game world makes us something more (or less) than human.

The Making of Torture in Pat Barker's Regeneration

Critique: Studies in Contemporary Fiction 55.4, 2014

This article examines the depiction in Pat Barker's Regeneration of Dr. Lewis Yealland, notorious... more This article examines the depiction in Pat Barker's Regeneration of Dr. Lewis Yealland, notorious First World War disciplinary therapist. I demonstrate how Barker attunes her novel to contemporary discourses of torture and witnessing in order to update a long tradition of opposing Yealland with his contemporary, Dr. W. H. R. Rivers, putting Regeneration at the intersection of lively debates about trauma, psychoanalysis, and the psychology of torture.

Phantasms of War and Empire in Pat Barker's The Ghost Road

ariel: A Review of International English Literature 44.2-3, 2013

This essay interrogates the nature, limits, and effects of the juxtaposition of Great Britain and... more This essay interrogates the nature, limits, and effects of the juxtaposition of Great Britain and Melanesia that takes place in Pat Barker’s The Ghost Road (1995), the final installment of the much-lauded Regeneration trilogy. Published two years before the handover of Hong Kong to the People’s Republic of China, which marked the unofficial end of the British Empire, and four years after the end of the neocolonial charade of the first Gulf War, The Ghost Road brings its readers back to the beginning of the twentieth century, cannily meshing a carefully researched portrayal of the First World War with its protagonist’s dreams and memories of a Melanesian society suffocating under the oppressive weight of colonial law. Drawing on Paul Gilroy’s concept of postcolonial melancholia, we read the success of the Booker Prize-winning novel as reflecting a deep-seated anxiety about the downfall of empire(s) that continues to characterize political life in the West. The novel’s strength lies in the way it highlights the insidious workings of class prejudices on the front lines, the complex matrix of sexuality, duty, and friendship that defined relationships between men in the trenches, and the reshuffling of traditional gender roles that the war brought about both at home and abroad. In spite of its merits, however, the transformative and challenging confrontation with the human cost of Britain’s imperial transgressions that The Ghost Road offers is consistently deferred and masked behind its more visible portrayal of the melancholic fantasy of a racially homogenous, tragic, and exclusively Western First World War.

Playing Dead in Videogames: Trauma in Limbo

The Journal of Popular Culture, 2015

Playing with Trauma: Interreactivity, Empathy, and Complicity in The Walking Dead Video Game

by Tobi Smethurst and Stef Craps

Just as books and films about traumatic events have become part of Western popular culture, so th... more Just as books and films about traumatic events have become part of Western popular culture, so the theme of trauma and its accompanying tropes have been seeping into video games over the last two decades. In spite of the discernible trauma trend within video games, however, and the potential they exhibit for representing trauma in new ways, they have received very little critical notice from trauma theorists. In this article, we argue that a trauma-theoretical study of games has much to offer our understanding of the ways that trauma can be represented, in addition to giving game studies scholars further insight into how games manage to elicit such strong emotions and difficult ethical quandaries in players. We demonstrate this by performing a close reading of one recent and much-discussed game, The Walking Dead: Season One, analyzing how it incorporates psychological trauma in terms of inter(re)activity, empathy, and complicity.

Playing with Trauma in Video Games: Interreactivity, Empathy, Perpetration

This thesis argues that due to the unique affordances of their medium, video games have the poten... more This thesis argues that due to the unique affordances of their medium, video games have the potential to work with psychological trauma in ways that more “traditional” trauma-literary media such as books or films cannot. After comparing how inter(re)activity, empathy, and perpetration function across game and trauma theory, I perform a series of case studies of video games in order to explain how each works with trauma. These include Dear Esther, Papers, Please, The Baron, Spec Ops: The Line, Limbo, and The Walking Dead.

Playing with Trauma: Interreactivity, Empathy, and Complicity in The Walking Dead Video Game

by Stef Craps and Tobi Smethurst

Games and Culture, 2015

Just as books and films about traumatic events have become part of Western popular culture, so th... more Just as books and films about traumatic events have become part of Western popular culture, so the theme of trauma and its accompanying tropes have been seeping into video games over the last two decades. In spite of the discernible trauma trend within video games, however, and the potential they exhibit for representing trauma in new ways, they have received very little critical notice from trauma theorists. In this article, we argue that a trauma-theoretical study of games has much to offer our understanding of the ways that trauma can be represented, in addition to giving game studies scholars further insight into how games manage to elicit such strong emotions and difficult ethical quandaries in players. We demonstrate this by performing a close reading of one recent and much-discussed game, The Walking Dead: Season One, analysing how it incorporates psychological trauma in terms of inter(re)activity, empathy, and complicity.

"We put our hands on the trigger with him": Guilt and Perpetration in Spec Ops: The Line

Criticism: A Quarterly for Literature and the Arts, 2017

In “Beginnings of the Day – Fascism and Representation,” Gillian Rose proposes the creation of a ... more In “Beginnings of the Day – Fascism and Representation,” Gillian Rose proposes the creation of a film “which follows the life story of a member of the SS in all its pathos, so that we empathise with him, identify with his hopes and fears, disappointment and rage, so that when it comes to killing, we put our hands on the trigger with him, wanting him to get what he wants” (50). At the same time, however, Rose also questions whether such empathy with an SS man is even possible, given that the audience would be aware of the identity of the protagonist from the start, and would therefore (in Robert Eaglestone’s words) be “unable to want what this evil man wants” (13). The solution, for Rose, is to withhold information from the audience regarding the true character of the protagonist, thereby allowing empathy to build for the character until the point when their villainy is revealed (as in Bernhard Schlink’s The Reader and Kazuo Ishiguro’s The Remains of the Day, after which Rose’s piece is named). This paper proposes a further solution to the question of how to encourage the audience to identify with the perpetrator’s perspective: making the audience complicit in the deeds perpetrated by the protagonist, through the use of interactivity in the videogame medium. I read Yager Development’s Spec Ops: The Line (2012) as a prime example of a videogame that manages to involve the player in the perpetration of atrocities through a slow process of coming to empathise with the character who commits them. Due to the interactivity which makes the game work as a game, the player must put their hands on the trigger with the protagonist, Captain Martin Walker, in order to proceed through the game, a fact which Spec Ops then holds up to the player as an example of their complicity in the game’s violence. Fascinatingly, by doing this the game essentially punishes the player for playing it, yet it remains compelling (indeed, it received near-universal critical acclaim among games journalism outlets) in spite of, or perhaps because of its attitude towards videogame violence. By demonstrating the extent to which a strong empathic link between player and perpetrator is possible, the videogame medium has the potential to radically alter our relationship with controversial memories of perpetration, working against the troubling, albeit understandable, tendency of memory studies to universalise the innocent’s perspective in the wake of violent conflict (Crownshaw).

Playing Dead: Trauma in Limbo

The Journal of Popular Culture, 2015

This essay argues that by experimenting with player agency and interactivity, videogames have the... more This essay argues that by experimenting with player agency and interactivity, videogames have the potential to work with psychological trauma in ways that more traditional media such as books or films cannot, especially with regard to guilt, anxiety, and perpetration. The essay introduces trauma studies to games by providing a trauma-theoretical reading of Limbo, a 2D indie platform game released in 2010. Limbo provides a recent and prominent example of a game that has achieved critical and commercial success by remediating some of the rhetorical tropes and themes found in more “traditional” (read: literary, filmic) types of trauma fiction. In the first part I look at how Limbo thematizes trauma through its distinctive aesthetic and narrative, and in the second part I address how Limbo conveys trauma through its “core”—the underlying rules and mechanics that allow the game to be played.

Embodiment and Artificial Intelligence in Valve Software’s Portal

Valve Software's first Portal game (2007) provides a locus for a variety of concerns about the po... more Valve Software's first Portal game (2007) provides a locus for a variety of concerns about the potential implications of AI and games as they impact on notions of embodiment and artificiality. Portal disrupts and intermingles the three distinct categories of player, player character (avatar), and artificial intelligence by deploying subtle self-referential cues and parody which call attention to the game’s artificiality. At the same time, this technique draws the player into an affective relationship with GLaDOS, the scripted AI construct who acts as the game’s villain. Moreover, the game repeatedly points to the fact that interacting with the game constitutes a cyborgic relationship. As the game proceeds, the player’s perspective is repeatedly shifted and reconstructed by these lines of rhetoric, and by the eponymous portals which form the game’s core mechanic. The cumulative effect is to cause the player to question what it means to be an embodied subject interacting with the game, to wonder what qualifies as “intelligence” (whether “artificial” or not), and to interrogate the extent to which our relationship with the game world makes us something more (or less) than human.

The Making of Torture in Pat Barker's Regeneration

Critique: Studies in Contemporary Fiction 55.4, 2014

This article examines the depiction in Pat Barker's Regeneration of Dr. Lewis Yealland, notorious... more This article examines the depiction in Pat Barker's Regeneration of Dr. Lewis Yealland, notorious First World War disciplinary therapist. I demonstrate how Barker attunes her novel to contemporary discourses of torture and witnessing in order to update a long tradition of opposing Yealland with his contemporary, Dr. W. H. R. Rivers, putting Regeneration at the intersection of lively debates about trauma, psychoanalysis, and the psychology of torture.

Phantasms of War and Empire in Pat Barker's The Ghost Road

ariel: A Review of International English Literature 44.2-3, 2013

This essay interrogates the nature, limits, and effects of the juxtaposition of Great Britain and... more This essay interrogates the nature, limits, and effects of the juxtaposition of Great Britain and Melanesia that takes place in Pat Barker’s The Ghost Road (1995), the final installment of the much-lauded Regeneration trilogy. Published two years before the handover of Hong Kong to the People’s Republic of China, which marked the unofficial end of the British Empire, and four years after the end of the neocolonial charade of the first Gulf War, The Ghost Road brings its readers back to the beginning of the twentieth century, cannily meshing a carefully researched portrayal of the First World War with its protagonist’s dreams and memories of a Melanesian society suffocating under the oppressive weight of colonial law. Drawing on Paul Gilroy’s concept of postcolonial melancholia, we read the success of the Booker Prize-winning novel as reflecting a deep-seated anxiety about the downfall of empire(s) that continues to characterize political life in the West. The novel’s strength lies in the way it highlights the insidious workings of class prejudices on the front lines, the complex matrix of sexuality, duty, and friendship that defined relationships between men in the trenches, and the reshuffling of traditional gender roles that the war brought about both at home and abroad. In spite of its merits, however, the transformative and challenging confrontation with the human cost of Britain’s imperial transgressions that The Ghost Road offers is consistently deferred and masked behind its more visible portrayal of the melancholic fantasy of a racially homogenous, tragic, and exclusively Western First World War.