Abstract

This paper uses The Cult of the Lamb (2022) as its case study to interrogate biopolitical management of populations. The role-playing game that sees the player responsible for running a cult, managing its members (including sacrifices and punishments) and ensuring the flock stays faithful. With reference to Foucault’s work on governance, surveillance and management of people, this paper explores the ludic-mechanics enabling the subjectivity of the cult members. Foucault defines biopower as the political power to objectify human biology (Kocurek, 2022, p.23) and biopolitics as "to ensure, sustain, and multiply life, to put this life in order" (Foucault, 1976, p.138). Biopolitics has come to portray the struggle of societies and democracy in an economy of auctoritas (Cox-Palmer-White, 2011, p.33), generally meaning that governments have greater concern over life rather than death, and this leads to policies regarding health, illness, reproduction, diets and housing (Foucault, 1981, p.25). This paper interrogates the player as an enabling force of biopolitical systems.
The player must also kill monsters to appease the cult from rebelling. The player is positioned as normative, fighting those who are othered as “monsters are frequently coded as social undesirables – as racial or ethnic minorities, as sexual deviants, as those living on the margins of society” (Kocurek, 2015, p.86). Monstering is a byproduct of othering (Matthew, 2021, p173) with recent Gothic scholarship focusing upon identity, subjectivity and therefore ‘othering’ (du Coudray, 2006, p.44). This autoethnographic approach will further tackle the populism underpinning biopolitical management (and biopolitical exclusions).