Video Games as Participatory Playgrounds for CivicImaginations on War: The Case of Laika: Aged Through Blood

This paper examines how video games can serve as participatory playgrounds for processing, rethinking, and representing war through a case study on Laika: Aged Through Blood (Laika; Brainwash Gang 2023).Gameplay is a complex process that encompasses both playing a game and playing with how its rules and fiction interact, including through meta-game engagement (Juul 2005;Lundgren et al. 2009; Mayra 2008).Laika players do not just "drive, jump, and fight [their] way" but also experience "the story about a tribe oppressed by occupant forces, and the personal story of a mother coyote warrior who descends on an endless path of vengeance to take back what her people lost" (official description, Thunderfulgames.com).Laika's gameplay exemplifies how video games can textually and ludically represent and contest the horrors of war while remaining as a space of play and escapism.Drawing on close-readings of Laika and surrounding texts, we analyze Laika's resistant deviance from the dominant representations of war in video game history (Godfrey 2022; Del-Moral & Rodriguez-Gonzalez 2020).Then, we contextualize Laika within world events and research on colonial violence and war effects on everyday life (Rodriguez 2011).We argue that Laika's whimsical fictional and visual design enriches its nuanced gameplay by providing intertextual pliability for diverse critical imaginations on "real-life" wars while suppressing exploitative, abstracted spectacularizations.Laika demonstrates how video games, as playgrounds for both developers and players, can serve as playful spaces for civic imagination (Jenkins et al. 2020) on war through immersive engagement with "real" and fictitious lived experiences, supplying subversive potentials for human-focused political meaningmakings to international communities continually exposed to wars within and beyond their borders.