Arno Görgen

Mental illnesses have long since been an integral part of popular culture. As a field of interdiscourse (Link 1996, 50), popular culture picks up on scientific findings, social norms and ideals and the respective othering of the mentally ill as deviants. Digital games are no exception to this. Their constructions of mental illnesses range from stigmatising tropes in horror psychiatries to attempts of (self-)empowerment in autopathographic games. As the focus when analysing digital games and mental health has for a long time primarily rested upon potential media effects, the intricate and increasingly diversified constructions of mental illness within the game texts have largely flown under the radar. While the construction of mental illness in other forms of mass media, such as television or movies, has been studied and criticised with increasing persistence since the 1990s,1 there are few quantitative and qualitative studies that primarily focus on constructions of mental health in digital games. Drawing from a currently ongoing PhD project as well as previous conjunct research, we are working on a typology with the goal to make constructions of mental illness in digital games accessible for analysis. Based on individual interpretations, i.e. deep readings, of games such as The Sims 4 (Maxis 2014), Amnesia: Dark Descent (Frictional Games 2010), Outlast (Red Barrels 2013), Depression Quest (Zoë Quinn, Patrick Lindsey, Isaac Schankler 2013), The Town of Light (LKA 2016), and Hellblade: Senua’s Sacrifice (Ninja Theory 2017) we wish to propose six types and elaborate upon their relevance in our talk: (1) quantification, (2) objectification, (3) subjectification, (4) somatic externalisation, (5) spatial externalisation and (6) actional externalisation. These categories are not exclusive and in itself interconnected. In this context, we understand illnesses in games as “functional disruptions” (Görgen 2017), as productive elements serving a narrative and ludic structure. Our goal in mind is to reach an overarching understanding of how the construction of mental illness in digital games works and to which degree it ties in with medical epistemology, social discourse and popular culture in a broad sense.

Panel 1 - Representation