the digital review

This experimental video essay theorizes the feral glitch, a technical rupture within video game engines that opens possibilities for playing, making, and imagining games beyond the normative structures of dominant video game culture. Instead of assuming that ferality is synonymous with randomness, the essay understands it as a condition of technical indeterminacy emerging through contingent relations among bodies, hardware, software, and nonhuman forms of agency. It takes transgender artist and game developer Jamie Faye Fenton’s Digital TV Dinner (1979) as a historical point of departure. Created through the intentional misuse of a Bally Astrocade console, Fenton’s cascading glitches transform technical malfunction into an embodied encounter between artist, machine, and computational error.

Drawing from queer game studies, materialist feminist media theory, and animal studies, the essay considers how glitches can operate as queer mechanics of failure and persistence while unsettling tidy distinctions between humans, machines, and nonhuman animals. At the same time, it complicates the politics of ferality by considering how visibility, animality, and wildness are shaped by histories of marginalization and settler colonialism. Extending these questions into contemporary game engines, the essay examines Brent Watanabe’s San Andreas Streaming Deer Cam (2015–16) and Alice Bucknell’s The Alluvials (2023), two works that transform Grand Theft Auto V and its RAGE engine into spaces of nonhuman wandering, ecological speculation, and alternative modes of play. Through its own fragmented, collaged, and glitch-based form, the essay ultimately proposes the feral glitch as both an aesthetic practice and a mode of relation where video games might be played and inhabited otherwise.