Media Analysis: An Interpretation of A Video Game

Octodad: Dadliest Catch is an adventure game developed by Young Horses and released in 2014. In the game, one operates the protagonist Octodad, an octopus who wears human clothes and lives with his human family in a nondescript modern suburb. In fact, he has convinced everyone around him that he is human, and the challenge of the game is to go about mundane everyday life without notice, completing tasks such as “bring your daughter a glass of milk” or “mow the back lawn.” 

This conceptually absurd game has more at play than just its goofy premise. Considering Jacques Lacan’s theory of the self, Octodad may be seen as a creative representation of the universal misrecognition of the self. Lacan theorized that from a young age, every human experiences a misrecognition, as one sees themself in the mirror as a unified entity, yet does not feel unified inside. One goes on to choose labels and identities for oneself, and attempts to display as such, so that one may be placed in our intricate and confusing world. Yet all one can ever be is a fraudulent misrepresentation, because ultimately no individual contains a singular essence.

Through this lens, Octodad may be seen not as an octopus, but as a human being who imagines himself as an octopus. Octodad is any and all of us; he is a coping mechanism borne out of the anxious rift between one’s inner self and outer self.

Lacan also believed that society imposes itself upon all humans and one must join the world of language and communication to survive. Because the condition of humanity is one of homeostatic entropy, life is a constant losing battle with needs and desires. One may never be fulfilled, because hours after eating one becomes hungry again, and because years after marrying one still wonders whether your wife truly loves you. This neurotic feeling of incompleteness is never resolved. Octodad is, and always will be, an octopus. He is destined to be on edge, continually flopping around his house, trying to govern his flaccid limbs without spilling chocolate milk all over the kitchen tile.

Finally, Lacan theorized that if one fails to have any recognition of the self at all, if one has no ego consciousness, then one is insane. Perhaps one looks in the mirror and sees an octopus staring back at you.

Fink, Bruce. “The Mirror Stage.” Écrits: The First Complete Edition in English, by Jacques 

Lacan, Éditions Du Seuil, 1996.