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 bleakAmerican folk tale about traveling, sharing stories, and surviving manifest destiny,"whose objective is to introduce the player to voices formerly overshadowed ormuted 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 Navajowoman, 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 amore accurate, affective cartography of the USA and provides the opportunity totap into the experience of becoming posthuman via a marginalized avatar. Where theWater Tastes Like Wine thus aligns with the objectives of Rosi Braidotti's criticalposthumanism: it facilitates a different, more democratic future achieved byactualizing as political subjects of knowledge the "missing people," who did notqualify as fully human according to the humanist idea of "man."