Anxiety in Suburbia: The Politics of Gaming in Neighborhood 3: Requisition of Doom

Abstract

Jennifer Haley’s innovative Neighborhood 3: Requisition of Doom (2009) theatrically depicts the increasing anxiety over the predominance of technology in our lives through amplifying the disconnection and estrangement of the prototypical suburban family. Utilizing the framework of a sophisticated augmented reality video game, Haley presents an ominously addictive world that fashions a digital neighborhood identical to the real one lived in by the teenager protagonists; however, in the game world, players have to kill zombies masquerading as their parents. Far more than a prescient take on the ubiquity of technology, Haley’s play utilizes the horror genre and its classic tropes (zombies, the rot within the suburbs, and generational disconnection) merging them with gaming culture through distorting the bounds of reality and reflecting the growing political anxiety of the indistinguishably between the digital and the real, the false and the true.