Shattering the windshield: Buñuel, blindsiding and consent in first-person and third-person perspective video games

This article explores consent in video games through the self-referentiality of the eye. Specifically, it focusses on instances where assaults on vision provide little to no time for players to gird themselves. Examining seven games – God of War III (), Dead Space 2 (), BioShock Infinite: Burial at Sea – Episode Two (), The Tender Cut (No, Thanks Games 2014), The Town of Light (), Prey () and Call of Duty: Black Ops Cold War () – it considers how the blindsiding of players with disturbing elements such as ocular penetrations, eye gouging and transorbital lobotomies serve not only to offend player sensibilities but also test their supposed ethical detachment as simultaneous participants and observers. Comparing these perceptual challenges to precedents in film, such as the infamous slicing of a woman’s observing eyeball in Luis Buñuel and Salvador Dalí’s surrealist short film, An Andalusian Dog (1929), the article argues that attacks on the spectating eye in games function analogously, complicating, precluding and ending the very act of spectatorship. The article draws upon existing scholarships such as Carol Clover’s work on the masochistic gaze in horror cinema and Braxton Soderman’s criticism of flow to suggest that such attacks via the eye on the player’s private viewing experience concomitantly violate a basic aspect of the generic contract between player and game; namely, that the latter will entertain the former unproblematically. In doing so, it strives to highlight the constraints such blindsiding operates within as well as how games characterize the relationship between the eye which is violated on-screen and the player’s eye which has no option but to watch.