Beyond: Two Souls, Performance Capture, and the Negotiatory Nature of Control

abstract:This article explores how Quantic Dream’s video game Beyond: Two Souls transforms questions surrounding gendered representation in digital media and performance capture by framing them around questions of control. The game establishes a complex relationship between technology, developer, the performance-captured body, gender, and the player to form a nexus of interlocking influences of control that players are both made aware of and asked to interact with via the act of play. These ideas of control are developed both in the game’s mechanics and in its narrative, causing the player to self-reflexively become an active participant in the game’s discourse.