Freddie Sanders: Game Engines, Masculinity, and Digital Decay

Freddie Sanders is a London-based artist who works with video game engines to explore themes of masculinity, nihilism, and labour. His practice focuses on moments when frictionless digital technologies falter - becoming stuck, broken, or misused - and reframes these disruptions as experiences that are both paralysing and liberating. By embracing failure and dysfunction, Freddie considers cultural obsessions and trends concerned with engagement, productivity, and optimisation.

His recent work, the interactive video game “The Castle”, reflects on the history of a castle in North East England - built six hundred years ago as a display of power and wealth, yet never seeing battle. Now slowly eroding into the sea, the castle serves as the backdrop for a game that deliberately disrupts smooth gameplay with glitches, incessant loading screens, and the gradual erasure of player control. “The Castle” induces a growing sense of powerlessness, commanding players to “kill the deer” - an act that is deemed impossible in the game.

Interested in the typical associations of video games with misogyny, pro-violence and escapism, Freddie explores contemporary anxieties around masculinity and societal alienation through the medium, and attempts to reckon with the growing sense of brokenness felt within male identity as well as the current British political system.

Freddie's work seeks to balance a feeling of both stasis and becoming. Through his games, he evokes symbols of hope interlaced with dynamics of powerlessness and futility, speaking to online “doomer” trends, but equally hinting at the sincere efforts of self-development and wellbeing communities. He believes these dualities and the complexities of their intentions capture the wider concerns playing out in contemporary digital and emotional landscapes.

Varvara Uhlik was part of Face-to-Face: Arles Edition 2024.

Check out her Artist Feature Sunshine, How Are You?