Mutual Incorporation: On Eating and Being Eaten in Bugsnax(2020)

This extended abstract contributes to the growing sub-fields of Game Food Studies (Westerlaken, 2017; Stang, 2021; Waszkiewicz, 2022) and Eco/Green Game Studies (Tyler, 2022;Chang, 2019), building on Waszkiewicz's landmark food game survey text.In doing so it implements Annemarie Mol's approach of phenomenological analysis 'as' and 'from' the position of eating in Eating in Theory (2021) for what it can reveal not only about eating in games and how games both move us (Isbister, 2016) and move 'through' us.Employing phenomenological and affect theory driven analysis (Keogh, 2018;Anable, 2018) alongside close textual reading of Bugsnax (Young Horses, 2020) as its case study, I aim to complicate Calleja's model of incorporation with a game that takes 'incorporation' as its literal object.A comedic body-horror game set on an exotic fictional island and based around the sourcing and feeding of hybridized bugs/snacks to NPCs, its players play with an exaggerated model of how food becomes the body by recomposing limbs as foodstuffs.A captured Charmallo bugsnack might turn a nose into a marshmallow; a Cinnasnail can coil a leg into a pastry.Here I argue the game enacts a critique of traditional ideas of corporeality, and complicates the conventional role of the player as dominant consumer of the environment in sympathy with Mol's critique of traditional whitehetero-patriarchal models of the body in phenomenology as a unitary, unchanging subject moving through the world (Merleau-Ponty, 1958;Ingold, 2010).As she argues, eating is the, often elided, messy precondition of relating to the world and demands we attend to how the world moves through us (Mol, 2021).While Chess has argued that eating in games lacks many sensory pleasures (2017), Bugsnax, like other food-oriented games, prioritizes the synesthetic articulation of proximal senses over the visual in a departure from normative ocularcentric 'video' games.Through its cute food aesthetics, animated eating, and crunchy sound design we feel food.We shrink bodies with preservatives, sling sauces to manipulate livestock, and toy with presentation in a character creator interface for NPCs where we can make sure (for example) that some 'snax' really do go straight to the thighs.While players do not consume bugsnax themselves, we prepare, feed and recompose bodies, as well as experience the feel of food when frozen or burned by bugsnax (through haptic feedback and mechanical loss of control), and are part of the biosphere as a vector in what we learn is an enveloping parasitic relationship.Bugsnax here forces us to unpack the power-dynamics and process of eating which