🌧️ Weathering the Rain World - Emergent Subjectivity and Transcorporeal Entanglements in Rain World's Playable Ecology

I wrote this paper for a posthumanism class as part of my research masters. It's about Rain World, a fantastic survival indie game which I'd highly recommend you play blind if you are able to. I found the experience of playing Rain World to be an incredibly unique one, and felt it related greatly to many of the themes covered in said posthumanism class. This was my first time writing an essay centered on posthuman discourse, but I was quite happy with how it turned out.

Weathering the Rain World | Emergent Subjectivity and Transcorporeal Entanglements in Rain World’s Playable Ecology

Introduction

The medium of video games is one that has grown to allow players to explore diverse subjectivities through game worlds that often destabilize the centrality of the human, and challenge anthropocentric assumptions through embodied, affective play. Rain World (2017) does just this, assigning the player the role of slugcat - an isolated, animal-like creature that must survive amidst hostile environments, surrounded by an autonomous, artificially intelligent ecosystem. Where Rain World differentiates itself from comparable games of the survival genre, is in how it decentres the player’s position of importance within both the game’s world, and narrative. Its hostile environment, lack of direction, and enigmatic world create an experience that dismantles the player’s position as protagonist, and instead submerses them into an affective series of embodied encounters with the game’s environment, ecosystem, and narrative. I argue that in doing this, the game creates a digital ecology of transcorporeality - a concept and theoretical framework theorized by Stacy Alaimo that positions the human body as fundamentally entangled with the material world, destabilizing assumptions of human essentialism. In controlling slugcat, the player is submerged into this digital ecology, and resultantly generates unique, affective encounters within its ecosystem. In enabling these encounters, Rain World invites players to explore its posthuman narrative and become naturally entangled in the world itself - offering a potential new mode of posthuman storytelling that resists centralized perspectives, and foregrounds ecological becoming.

Rain World’s Transcorporeality: An Affective Ecology

In order to examine Rain World’s model of emergent, posthuman storytelling, it is first crucial to understand Alaimo’s concept of transcorporeality, and how its theoretical framework applies to the ecology of Rain World. Alaimo describes transcorporeality as the implication that humans are “literally enmeshed in the physical material world” - expanding on ecocriticism and new materialism discourse by exploring how systems and substances that affect the natural world, in turn directly affect our bodies (Kuznetski and Alaimo 139). First arguing for its conception in Bodily Natures: Science, Environment, and the Material Self, Alaimo positions transcorporeality as a framework that diminishes the boundaries between body and environment, and invites new political and ethical considerations for how we consider nonhuman agents.

Alaimo’s research into transcorporeality is in part a continuation of the relational ontology explored by Karen Barad in Meeting the Universe Halfway: Quantum Physics and the Entanglement of Matter and Meaning. Here, Barad challenges the assumption that entities are considered to exist independently - instead suggesting that reality is made up of  “the ontological inseparability of agentially intra-acting components”, what she calls phenomena. This is core to her framework of “agential realism”, which argues that agency is a result of relational entanglements between entities rather than being assumed to an individual (26).

Transcorporeality expands on the framework of agential realism, extending its application from physics and philosophy to that of ecological and political contexts. Alaimo focuses on the embodied experience of material interconnectedness, and resultantly uses the framework as a means to explore how human agency is entangled with the environment, and to address ethical, environmental issues such as pollution and marine environment destruction.

Building upon this theoretical foundation, I apply Alaimo’s framework of transcorporeality to Rain World’s world and narrative. In order to survive as slugcat, the player must explore, forage, and hibernate - a gameplay loop which sees the player engage, and interact with a variety of other creatures and environments, who too interact with one another. This shared, adaptive ecosystem leads the player into a series of encounters which establish affective relations between themselves and others - exposing them to continued embodied experience of becoming entangled within the digital ecology of Rain World. In undergoing a close reading of Rain World through Alaimo’s framework of transcorporeality, I make a case for its game design being a site of embodied experience with an affective ecology - one whose environmental responsiveness and overarching narrative continually highlights how individual agency is fundamentally entangled with and dependant on relational networks of nonhuman others, and ecological interconnection.

In order to apply this framework of transcorporeality and affective ecology onto Rain World, I will be drawing upon affect theory in order to examine the relation between the player, slugcat, and the game environment as an entangled, embodied experience. Early research into the relevance of affect in games studies can be traced back to Ian Graham Ronald Shaw and Barney Warf in Worlds of Affect: Virtual Geographies of Video Games, where they highlight how virtual environments in games had become sites of emotional encounter for players, identifying an “affective link between video game worlds and bodies” (1338). Since then, an increasing body of scholarly work has continued investigations into the affective component of the video games genre - Audrey Anable for one has gone on to highlight that “bodies, images, and code are meaningfully entangled” within game worlds, and the process of play (19). These insights on the affective experience of play suggest that a certain level of emotional and affective immersion is achieved when engaging with digital game worlds and encounters. In Rain World’s case, these affective encounters are between the player and the digital environment, and in discerning the transcorporeal elements of the game’s gameplay systems and narrative, I aim to position affect as an experiential vehicle to allow the player, as slugcat, to become emotionally entangled in the environmental systems of the world as an emergent process of play.

Becoming Slugcat: Embodied Play, and the Vulnerability of Affective Entanglement

Central to the destabilizing experience of Rain World is the position the player occupies as slugcat. Introduced only briefly as a creature separated from its family, the player is immediately submerged into an unfamiliar and indifferent world, and left feeling alienated. Beyond basic controls, the player is offered no narrative instruction, goal or context - but is rather left to navigate, observe and survive through trial and error, embodying the slugcat’s own experience. This removes the player from any position of narrative authority or privilege, allowing a complete affective identification with slugcat’s vulnerability and lack of authority. Without direction, the player is left to learn the systems of the world by engaging with it materially - simulating an experience of transcorporeality as the player is no longer occupying a position of an independent, external operator, but embodying a porous, vulnerable entity entangled within the world’s environment.

Unlike other survival games, Rain World denies the player the ability to master the world and its mechanics, but instead forces them to attune and adapt to the world's natural systems. A central mechanic to Rain World is the lethal rainfall that floods the map at the end of each day, killing any creature who does not seek shelter in time. The player is not briefed on this mechanic, and instead discovers it procedurally, and must endure and adapt to it. In this way, the player's knowledge of the game’s mechanics does not emerge from a tutorial, but through affective experience. They are encouraged to adjust to this mechanic not through exposition, but through the bodily anxiety imposed on them via the encounter. This is yet another way in which Rain World destabilizes the authority of the player, and forces them to become enmeshed with the material conditions of the world. In Parables for the Virtual: Movement, Affect, Sensation, Brian Massumi equates intensity to affect, and suggests that “intensity is embodied in purely autonomic reactions” - that affective experiences can occur and be felt before being understood and processed (25). Understanding affective experiences this way, we can consider how the player’s encounter with the lethal rainfall can be understood beyond that of just a mechanic, but as a part of the worlds felt ecology - the intensity and anxiety being shared between player and slugcat undermining the player’s assumed position of authority, and decentralizing the player experience.

Core to transcorporeality is the entanglement between the human, and the “more-than-human world”, as Alaimo puts it - where humans are “inseparable from ‘the environment’” (1). In the case of Rain World, the player is forced into an entanglement with the games environment, sharing affective encounters between slugcat and the natural world - having to learn the mechanics of the game through this exposure. Rain World makes its material systems and ecology affectively felt as not just mechanical systems, but as experiences that move through the player. Alaimo describes transcorporeality as “the material exchanges across human bodies, animal bodies, and the wider material world”, and in engaging in an affective bodily entanglement with the game’s world through the identity of slugcat, the player is immersed into a shared embodied experience with Rain World’s environment (113). The player’s understanding of the world and the game’s mechanics only emerge through this bodily entanglement, and so in order to engage with, and play the game, the player must internalize these environmental conditions, and let them affectively guide them, just as they do with slugcat.

In navigating Rain World, the player will encounter a variety of autonomous creatures who are each embedded into the game’s ecosystem and capable of interacting with the player, one another, and the environment dynamically. These interactions unfold naturally as situational alliances or momentary entanglements - not indicated to the player, but discovered out of experimentation and necessity. Jetfish can be held to traverse through water, lantern mice can be picked up to be used as a light source, scavengers can be convinced to trade items, etc. None of these mechanics are made explicit, but are rather uncovered through natural entanglements and encounters within the environment. Even hostile predators can be manipulated into dealing with bigger threats. These encounters allow for moments of temporary interdependence, where the player’s progress is advanced through experimental and momentary collaborations with nonhuman others. This cross-species relationality and collaboration present in Rain World retains similarities to posthuman concepts such as parahumanity. The concept, coined by Monique Allewaert, explores pragmatic, embodied cooperation between human and nonhuman beings. Examined through Creole stories and Afro-American culture in Ariel’s Ecology: Plantations, Personhood, and Colonialism in the American Tropics, Allewaert  discerns how parahumanity recognizes “the horizontal relation and mutual dependance of life-forms” (110). Rooted in vulnerability and entanglement, parahumanity proposes affective alliances, and the interdependent, momentary collaborations between the autonomous creatures of Rain World echo this structure. The interactions between player and creature aren’t based on hybridity or dominance, but instead reflect the shared agency of entities in Rain World. Their horizontal entanglement undermines the player’s centrality, and positions them in an environment of shared and affective vulnerability, and negotiation. This again reinforces the transcorporeal features of Rain World, as the player, creatures, and environments are all equally entangled in moments of encounter.

A “Rat in Manhattan”: Decentered Agency in Rain World’s Emergent Ecology

What further solidifies the decentralization of the player within Rain World’s digital ecology, is the design of its autonomous, AI ecosystem. The vast array of creatures that make up Rain World’s ecosystem are designed to operate independently from the player, interacting with one another and the environment based on unique behavior design. These creatures aren’t static entities, but are dynamic, with a variety of personality types that influence how they navigate the world and respond to the player. Through the relationship, reputation, and lineage systems, these creatures' behaviours are modified based on their prior interactions and experiences, both with the player, and other non-player creatures. Resultantly, the ecosystem evolves in unpredictable ways, shaped by an accumulation of affective encounters and environmental happenings.

This creates an emergent gameplay experience, where the world continues to act, move and evolve regardless of the player's actions. Lizards will compete for territory and food, squidcadas will flock and play together if left alone by predators, and scavengers will set up tolls and trade centers. These events emerge out of Rain World’s procedural ecology, and mirror that of a living ecosystem. In this way, the player is not the center of this world, but one creature of many participating in a dense ecosystem that’s not authored, but created through moments of intra-action and play. Through this system, Rain World decentralizes anthropocentric modes of agency, and instead offers a playable digital ecology that embodies emergent subjectivity.

In “More Human than Non/Human: Posthumanism, Embodied Cognition, and Video Games as Affective Experience”, Lyons and Jaloza draw upon Deleuze and Guattari’s work on the idea of becoming, and argue that play might be read “as a continual process of becoming”, where players “inter/act with and [are] acted upon by any number of elements” (11). Through this lens, becoming is understood as an affective process that rejects fixed subjectivity and anthropocentrism - embracing fluidity and procedural transformation. The playable ecosystem of Rain World enables just this, but not just for the player. In Rain World’s digital ecology, both the player, and the non-player creatures are allowed the process of becoming and resultantly destabilises the player’s assumption of their position as the protagonist of the world, and instead forces an immersion into a materially affective relationship between the game world and the entities within it.

In an interview with VICE, Rain World’s creator Joar Jakobsson described that the central idea of the game was to position the player like “‘[a] rat in Manhattan’” who “knows how the subway works” but not the “social reasons why humans have built the subway station” (Priestman). This captures the game’s refusal of anthropocentric clarity - how the player is not intended to master the world, but to move through it. The world of Rain World does not exist for the player, but is an active, agential space in which the player is in constant material interchange with. This aligns with Alaimo’s argument for transcorporeality, which challenges the notion that the environment  “exists as a background for the human subject” and exposes the anthropocene’s “all too triumphant … presumed mastery over an externalized ‘nature’” (1-3). By giving the ecosystem of Rain World its own emergent agency, its digital ecology completely decenters player agency and gives way for the emergence of relational entanglements of both player and non-player entity within its gameplay systems.

Ruined Ascendence: The Inescapable Material Entanglement of Rain World’s Inhabitants

Reinforcing Rain World’s decentralizing gameplay and transcorporeal ecosystem, is an enigmatic, non-linear narrative that further deepens Rain World’s alignment with posthumanist thought. The environments the player explores throughout their journey are ruins of a fallen civilization, and through environmental storytelling, the lore emerges through fragments that the player must interpret meaning from. Central to Rain World’s narrative, are the fundamental cycles of its natural world. The mechanic that respawns both the player, and non-player entities after death, is an inexplicable phenomenon of rebirth that the game’s narrative revolves around. The player learns that the society which precede the game’s current ecosystem, known as the ancients, attempted to transcend this cycle in order to detach themselves from the processes of nature, and the cyclical oblivion of the world itself.

In their pursuit to escape the cycle of death and rebirth, the ancients discovered a mysterious liquid hidden deep beneath the earth known as void fluid - a substance believed to allow death without rebirth, severing one from the cycle. After failed attempts at using the void fluid resulted in some ancients entering a purgatory state between life and death, they began to seek other solutions, and created city-sized supercomputers known as the iterators whose goal was to calculate a solution to the transcendence problem. However, the industrial strain of these supercomputers would begin to produce immense amounts of steam, resulting in the lethal rainfall that would eternally succumb Rain World’s world into increasing cycles of death and ruin. In time, the ancients would disappear, leaving behind a ruined world, and the iterators - sentient, decaying mechanisms doomed to an eternal struggle of calculating a solution to an unsolvable problem.

The player can learn about these events by exploring the ruined world left behind, and in finding and conversing with the remaining iterators, can pursue the ancients’ transcendence plot and discover where the void fluid originated from - the void sea. By submerging into the void sea, the player can achieve the game’s ending, where they enact the same attempt at transcendence that the ancients once did. The slugcat descends into a reality warping abyss, surrounded by alien entities, and ascends alongside countless projections of themselves and other slugcats. The final image is an abstract, wordless visage of a vast, cosmic tree made up of slugcats - a moment that severs the slugcat from their individual identity, and suggests a becoming with a greater entanglement with the cosmos.

While enigmatic and abstract, Rain World’s ending and overall narrative echoes the posthumanist philosophy embedded in its gameplay systems. By attempting to overcome the natural cycles of the world, the ancients became only further enmeshed in it. Furthermore, they reinforced these cycles of death through their creation of the iterators, who in turn began to cause the lethal rainfall that would act as a constant enforcer of the world's cycles. Even through their use of the void fluid, the ancients became increasingly suspended in death, binding themselves to the material world indefinitely.

The repeated failures of the ancients, and their inability to detach themselves from the natural world, echoes Alaimo’s concept of transcorporeality, where she emphasizes how “the subject, the knower, is never separate from the world that she seeks to know” (8) This is further reinforced by the game’s ending, where after acquiring the ancient knowledge of transcendence, the slugcat is embedded into the cosmic make-up of the world itself. This reconfigures how the ancients considered their significance, as even the insignificant slugcat reached the same ontological outcome as they.

Alaimo argues that “elevated perspectives” are “problematic”, as they “[place] the human knower in a position above and beyond worldly entanglement” (7). Rain World’s narrative rejects this impulse, demonstrating how transcendence only leads to further entanglement. In this way, the game critiques human exceptionalism, and illustrates how impossible, and futile it is to attempt to position oneself above the material world.

Conclusion

Through its emergent gameplay systems and narrative critique of exceptionalism, Rain World offers a playable experience that allows the player to engage with, and consider posthuman subjectivity. The game resists traditional assumptions of player centralization, and immerses them into a digital ecosystem that invites them to reconsider their agency, and become affectively enmeshed in a digital ecology. Drawing heavily on Stacy Alaimo’s framework of transcorporeality, I argue that Rain World generates a unique, and emergent embodied experience of relationality - blurring the boundaries between player, creature, and environment. By forcing the player into moments of entanglement with the world, both mechanically and narratively, it offers an affective experience like none other in the medium. The player is mechanically forced through the same cycles of death as the world's inhabitants, and through their repeated failures and intra-actions, are invited to consider their own impulse to know and to master, and are allowed time to reflect on, and consider their place in Rain World’s world. Ultimately, Rain World offers players the means to affectively engage with an experience of transcorporeality through its emergent ecosystem - highlighting the potentiality of the medium in embodying posthuman experiences in ways unique from traditional narratives and gameplay systems. It offers players an opportunity to immerse into an emergent experience which rejects singularity, and embraces becoming. Rain World resultantly stands as a powerful showcase of video game potentiality, drawing into question not only how the medium can convey posthuman thought, but how it can invite players to embody it, in experiences which are inherently in flux, and entirely subjective.

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