What are your hands doing right now?
And yet, hands are far more than just tools to get a job done.
Some of them reach out to us over a historical distance of nearly 10,000 years.
Theres something both mysterious and mundane, distant and intimate about this sight.
The Cave of Hands made its way into several video games,Psychonauts 2and Genesis Noir among them.
Theyre far from the only games to show appreciation for hands, and handprints in particular.
Death Strandingtakes this obsession with handprints several steps further, making them a central symbol of its narrative.
Even on the skin of our protagonist Sam, theyve left their marks.
Sometimes, this ambiguity is resolved beyond a doubt.
Video games have made this visual language a part of their own.
Remove the human agency from the hand, and what remains is something horrifying and uncanny.
Take away the humanity, and it becomes an empty husk, threatening our identity as a species itself.
Elden Rings Two Fingers encapsulate some of the ambiguity within hands.
Persistently did they wriggle, spelling out mysteries in the air.
This is the hand as other and potentially threatening.
What happens if the hand is our own?
On the other hand, destruction, no matter how prevalent, is only part of the story.
Its no coincidence that avatars are less embodiments of our bodies and rather of our hands.
Thats doubly true for VR games with their focus on translating real-life movements into the game.
Every other part of the body would only get in the way.
It is implied, and that is enough.
Some games seem to understand this better than others.
Bioshock is almost as single-minded in its focus on hands as Death Stranding.
For all intents and purposes, our main character is a pair of hands, and nothing more.
Everything is expressed through them in a manner thats as effective as it is unsubtle.
We only see whats necessary: their hands.
During her quest to avenge Joels death, Ellie loses two fingers on her left hand.
A more extreme example is Brothers A Tale of two Sons, in which we control two brothers simultaneously.
The left half of the controller is responsible for one character, the right half for the other.
Once we bother to look, we find handprints all over our games.
We shouldnt be surprised: hands are powerful.
They suggest and express.
They empower and victimise.
