Control (2019) and Concrete: The Haunting Thingness of Digital Assets

This abstract reads Control (Remedy Entertainment, 2019) through cultural-historical and new materialist lenses as a game concerned with the strangeness of things1.Textual analysis unpacks the historical-ontological resonances of concrete as agentic, ambivalent material omnipresent in the Brutalist iconography of Control. This is a game centered on a secretive federal bureau inhabiting an ineffably ancient and non- Euclidean concrete structure, ‘The Oldest House’, where everyday items contain spatio-temporal powers. Remedy’s output has been largely ignored by scholarship2, but represents a sustained interest in what Fisher (2016) calls ‘eerie’ opaque agency and ‘weird’ presences beyond the familiar (Alan Wake 2010; Quantum Break, 2016). Employing Visual Studies approaches and contextual reading that might redress this omission, this abstract uses its case study as a ‘cement-mixer’ to aggregate things and theory, contributing to nonhuman turn and representational Game Studies.