[Pride 2022] The Legacy of Sander Cohen and Queerness in Horror Games

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At this point in games criticism and scholarship, there’s very little that hasn’t been said about Bioshock. It’s the game that launched a thousand conversations, and many academic careers into game studies, including mine. So, when the call for this year’s Gayly Helpful came through, and one of the things mentioned was queerness in horror gaming, it makes sense that this is the game that came to mind. But beyond its omnipresence in critical conversations, Bioshock is also significant because it contains one of the few instances of an explicitly queer character in mainstream AAA horror games in Sander Cohen. And while gaming writ large is slowly coming around to the idea of queer representation, horror games are still slow on the uptake, leaving us with Bioshock as one of the key examples of queerness in the genre.

So, let us examine the legacy of Sander Cohen. Cohen is a minor villain who controls one of the areas in the game’s underwater city setting of Rapture. Once Rapture’s premiere artist and leader of the cultural scene, at the time of the game Cohen had holed himself away and contented himself with making grotesque tableaus using the corpses of former accomplices/employees/lovers. In order for the player to progress in the game, they have to help Cohen in his artistic pursuits by killing specific enemies and photographing them so Cohen can add them to his latest installation. Aesthetically and in terms of vocal affect, Cohen is reminiscent of a sinister John Waters – thin, with a pencil mustache and a leer. He is depicted as having gone mad with the collapse of his empire, and the player eventually must confront and kill him. 

Cohen’s queerness is mostly set up by the nature of his affect – he is effeminate and easily offended, alluding to the stereotypical queer coding of the 00s. But it is also heavily implied – nigh confirmed – in optional audio logs that the player can pick up and listen to while tracking down and offing Cohen’s former associates. The men on tape allude to Cohen forcing them to do personally distasteful and perverse acts – “the things that man made me do,” one says while audibly repulsed. While it’s never outright confirmed, there is an easy avenue to a reading of Cohen as not just violent, but sexually domineering and abusive.

It’s easy to stop there, and simply point Cohen out as yet another example of villains being unnecessarily queer-coded to add another layer of Othering, so the presumably cishet-coded audience can feel secure in being Not At All Like the Bad Guys. But Bioshock actually takes the time elsewhere in its narrative to stake an explicit argument about morality and self-determination, and in so doing, makes the character of Sander Cohen more complex, although not more acceptable as an instance of representation. You see, the whole game is predicated on breaking down and refuting the philosophical ideas of Ayn Rand, who popularized Objectivism.

Objectivism, in a nutshell, is the idea that always acting in your own self-interest is actually the most moral thing you can do – see her book The Virtue of Selfishness for more information. Rapture, the city in the game, is an Objectivist paradise. There are no economic regulations, leading to unrestrained capitalist excess, and the population engages in (also unregulated) genetic modification of their bodies. These two things combined obviously led to the city imploding on a social and fiscal level when businessmen decide to start killing anyone who gets in their way – there are no limits to rational self-interest, after all. 

No offense meant to any Objectivists in my readership, but it’s clear that unfettered self-interest does not a well-functioning society make. But why is this important to our understanding of Sander Cohen? Well, because Cohen is himself an Objectivist, and he lives out Objectivist principles, up to and including engaging in any sexual conquest he so desires, regardless of the consent of the other party. If this seems like a reach, I’ll note that Rand herself romanticized rape in just about every one of her works of fiction, including having women fall in love with their rapists because of their raw power. So, by having Cohen be visibly queer and having him enact the logical conclusions of Objectivism in his relationships, Bioshock is in the untenable position of (perhaps unintentionally) villainizing queer sexual agency, by making the single liberated queer character out to be sexually violent. 

Bioshock was released in 2007, so some of this reading is a little par for the course in terms of what queer representation was like in gaming. And this is also not to say that writers cannot make a queer character a villain. But by having Sander Cohen’s queerness appear so integral to his character (as a perverse madman obsessed with preserving his former conquests), it also makes that queerness into something perverse, and ties it irrevocably to his madness and to his evil. And since mainstream/larger indie horror games post-Bioshock have largely not managed to engage more productively in queer representation, the genre still feels stuck in the past. 

Horror games have a double bind, as entries in two overlapping, often wonderful but also often toxic media communities (horror writ broadly, and video games writ broadly). Both horror and games are often exhorted by fans to be apolitical, and representation can be lambasted as “wokeness” by community members who prefer that their art reflect only a slim section of the world. But it’s important that we recognize that these games can and should do better, and to continue to hold legacy games accountable for their representation, while still keeping in them in the context of their release window. Because if we don’t, we may never see the queer horror games representation that we and future generations of queer fans deserve. 

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