A Quest for the “Missing People”: Posthuman Affect in Where the Water Tastes Like Wine

The narrative-adventure game, Where the Water Tastes Like Wine (2018) is “a bleak American folk tale about traveling, sharing stories, and surviving manifest destiny,” whose objective is to introduce the player to voices formerly overshadowed or muted by the mainstream myth of the American dream. Players are tasked to find “the greatest stories,” that is “the ones people will tell you about their own lives,” meeting marginalized characters, like the migrant Mexican worker or the Navajo woman, as well as well-known figures of resistance, like Beat author Neal Cassady.

Relying on Aubrey Anable’s definition of video games as affective systems, the article demonstrates that the player’s non-linear, rhizomic wandering results in a more accurate, affective cartography of the USA and provides the opportunity to tap into the experience of becoming posthuman via a marginalized avatar. Where the Water Tastes Like Wine thus aligns with the objectives of Rosi Braidotti’s critical posthumanism: it facilitates a different, more democratic future achieved by actualizing as political subjects of knowledge the “missing people,” who did not qualify as fully human according to the humanist idea of “man.” (IB)