the international journal of volume 14 issue 2

computer game research December 2014

ISSN:1604-7982

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Ability, Disability and Dead Space

Diane Carr
by Diane Carr

Diane Carr is a Reader

Abstract:
in Media and Cultural
Studies at the UCL
Institute of Education, This paper focuses on representations of able bodies and disability
London, UK. within Dead Space. The method used is textual analysis. The inquiry is
Contact information: shaped by two essays in particular: Williams’s screen studies account
D.Carr at ioe.ac.uk of ‘body genres’ (1999) and Snyder and Mitchell’s disability studies
extension of Williams’s work (2006). In her essay, Williams describes
the pleasurably excessive and spectacular aspects of body genres.
Three instances of ‘excess’ in Dead Space are used to structure the
analysis. These are (1) the abject bodies of the game’s undead
monsters, (2) the colourful nature of the protagonist’s deaths and the
uncertainty of his existence, and (3) the extravagant amount of gore
and blood on offer. Through textual analysis, it is found that Dead
Space represents the idea of disability as threatening, and able-bodied
identity as conditional and precarious. Locales that are culturally
associated with positivism and corporeal assessment (clinical and
medical facilities) are tainted; contaminated by the intrusions of
uncontrolled, excessive and abject bodies. It is argued that these
aspects of the game contribute to the generation of sensations
associated with generic horror, including fear, anxiety and dread. At
the same time, the game offers players the opportunity to display
attributes that are culturally associated with able bodied status,
including accuracy, precision and control.

Keywords:

Representation, ability, disability, horror, abjection, excess, bodies, the

clinic.

Introduction

Dead Space (EA Redwood Shores/2008) is a survival horror game.

The game’s protagonist, Isaac Clarke, is able and yet unstable.
Despite his high-tech prosthetic skin, he is in constant danger of going
to pieces. The game features bodies that are marked as monstrous,
distorted, capable, and imperiled. What Dead Space offers - in
addition to compelling play - is an opportunity to explore the ways in
which the idea of disability is used in horror games to generate
generically appropriate sensations such as fear and dread. Dead
Space combines representations of disability as threat, with depictions
of able bodies, and opportunities to display and demonstrate ability.
These are the issues explored in this paper [1].

Popular texts reflect the cultures they emerge from, and in turn
become part of how identities and social groups are perceived,
experienced and articulated (Dyer, 2002). Many action-adventure
games feature representations of injury and monstrosity mixed with
depictions of ability and augmentation. Ability in terms of skills
acquisition has been discussed in the games and education literature
(McClarty, Orr, Frey, Dolan, Vassileva and McVay, 2012). The links
between ability and status in player culture have been explored (e.g.
Chee, 2005; Taylor, 2003). However, there has been little or no game
studies research focusing on ability and able bodies as
representations. Literature on representations of disability within
games also remains rare (Carr, 2009, 2013; Gibbons, 2013;
Champlin, 2014; Ledder, in press 2015) [2]. Yet as disability theorists
Snyder and Mitchell have pointed out, because “disabled people must
negotiate a finite repertoire of social meanings […] there are
significant stakes in the humanities-based analysis of disability”
(Snyder and Mitchell, 2006, pp 168-169). Disability theorists argue
that “disability tends to be figured in cultural representations as an
absolute state of otherness that is opposed to a standard, normative
body” (Snyder, Brueggemann and Garland-Thomson, 2002, p. 2).
From this perspective, “the ‘problem’ is not the person with
disabilities; the problem is the way that normalcy is constructed to
create the ‘problem’ of the disabled person” (Davis, 1995, p. 24). The
humanities-based digital games analysis that is featured in this paper
is informed by disability studies literature, particularly that which
draws on literary and cultural theory in order to investigate the social
construction of disability, and the ways in which disability as an idea
functions relative to notions of the neutral, normal and able bodied
(e.g. Thomson, 1997; Linton, 1998). More specifically, the analysis is
shaped by Snyder and Mitchell’s disability studies adaptation (2006) of
Linda Williams’ paper on cinematic body genres (1999).

Williams’ essay has already appeared in horror game analysis (see

Carr, Campbell and Ellwood, 2006; Perron, 2009). In ‘Film Bodies:
Gender, Genre and Excess’ (1999), Williams focuses on three film
genres (horror, melodrama and porn) that share low cultural status
due to their association with embodied sensation, that feature various
forms of excess, and that use bodies to provoke feelings and physical
responses in their audiences. Body genres feature “the spectacle of a
body caught in the grip of intense sensation” (Williams, 1999, p. 703),
as well forms of ecstatic excess marked as “uncontrollable convulsion
or spasm” (p. 703). For Williams, body genres combine visceral
manipulation and repetition, and they thrive because they function as
a form of cultural problem solving (p. 714). Popular genres are
popular, because “they address persistent problems in our culture, in
our sensualities, in our very identities” (Williams, 1999, p. 710).

In ‘Body Genres and Disability Sensations’ (2006, pp.156-181)

disability theorists Snyder and Mitchell adapt Williams’ account of the
ways in which female bodies are used in body genres, in order to
study cinematic representations of disability. They find “a similar
utility for explorations of disabled bodies as staple characteristics
within these popular formulas” (Snyder and Mitchell 2006, p. 162).
They argue that “body genres are so dependent on disability as a
representational device […] that each formula can also be recognized
by its repetitious reliance on particular kinds of disabled bodies to
produce the desired sensational extremes” (p. 162). In generic horror,
the authors propose, these bodies are monstrous and repellent, and
they “serve to cement longstanding associations of stigma with bodily
difference” (Snyder and Mitchell, 2006, p. 168).

Using these resources it is possible to explore depictions of able

bodies, abject bodies, excess, unease and anxiety in Dead Space. The
paper begins with an account of the methods used and a description
of Dead Space. The analysis itself is organized under three categories
of excess (abject bodies, overkill and spillage). It is argued that Dead
Space generates generically appropriate sensations by combining
psychoanalytic problems of identity and origins, with culturally
prevalent discourses of disability and ability.

Method

Forms of textual analysis have been used to study digital games for
more than a decade and when the topic is disability, textual methods
are particularly appropriate. Textual analysis offers ethical advantages
because it is a form of academic research that does not rely on
recruiting human subjects, which is an issue because “one of the
primary oppressions experienced by disabled people is that they are
marked as perpetually available for all kinds of intrusions” in the name
of research (Snyder and Mitchell, 2006, p. 187). Furthermore, “since
texts provide us access to perspectives that inevitably filter disability
through the reigning ideologies of their day, their analysis proves
tantamount to turning social beliefs into an object of investigation”
(Snyder and Mitchell, 2006, p. 201). Using textual analysis, it is
possible to hold a mirror up to mainstream culture in order to better
understand the ways in which said culture depends on, uses, and
remains appalled and fascinated by the idea of disability [3]. Here,
textual analysis is used to produce an interpretation of Dead Space by
a culturally situated player-analyst (Aarseth, 2003; Carr, 2009).

The process of analysis involved fragmenting the game, and using

these fragments to detect themes or threads. These threads were
then followed back through the game as a whole [4]. To produce the
analysis, Dead Space was played through once for pleasure. The game
was then replayed, allowing for a more focused exploration of its
rooms, objects, threats, obstacles, objectives, missions and
characters. Notes were made and screenshots taken. These were used
to identify threads running through the game (including gore, timing,
medicine, bereavement, babies, work). A section of the game where
these threads seemed to be particularly concentrated was then
identified: Chapter 5, ‘Lethal Devotion’. This chapter was played
though again while making more notes, and taking more screenshots.
All the notes and screenshots were reviewed, combined with
reflections on the experience of play, and considered in relation to
Williams’ body genre essay, and Snyder and Mitchell’s disability
studies adaptation of Williams’ work. The notion of ‘excess’ as
described in Williams’ essay was then used as a framework to
structure the analysis.

Williams’ essay brings together feminist film theory, theories of

spectatorship, genre and temporality, and various psychoanalytic
theories. Snyder and Mitchell adapt and discuss Williams’ work while
referencing Foucault, other disability theorists, and disability
documentary cinema. As this suggests, there will be a certain amount
of theoretical pluralism at play in the analysis that follows [5].

Introducing Dead Space

Before moving into the analysis it would be helpful to provide a short

description of the game. Dead Space is set on a marooned and
apparently abandoned spacecraft, the Ishimura. The Ishimura is a
mining ship engaged in a particularly destructive yet profitable form of
resource extraction known as ‘planet cracking’. Setting and story-wise
the game resembles science fiction films that incorporate elements of
horror, including Alien (1979), The Thing (1982) and Event Horizon
(1997). The playable protagonist, Isaac Clarke, is a taciturn engineer
who progresses from one broken machine to the next attempting to
repair the ship. Generally alone, Isaac receives video-link mission
updates from his two anxious crewmates, Kendra and Hammond.
Early in the game it is revealed that Isaac’s lover, Nicole (a senior
medic stationed on the Ishimura), is missing along with the rest of the
crew. Through logs and records, an account of recent, horrific events
begins to emerge. Human colonists had unearthed an apparently alien
artifact (the Marker) on a nearby planet. The artifact is implicated in
the spread of a form of psychosis. When it was brought aboard the
Ishimura, the contagion arrived too, with disastrous results for its
human crew. Isaac’s efforts to repair the ship, find Nicole and save his
crewmates are complicated by a demented medical scientist named Dr
Mercer, and by the efforts of undead monsters known as Necromorphs
[6].

The extraordinarily atmospheric Ishimura is divided into specialist

zones linked by long, ill-lit corridors. Many of these zones reference
bodies, medicine and technology. The structure of the ship itself
references the body. Tasks set in the bowels of the ship involve
ejecting waste matter through a circular exit. In the lung-like
hydroponics area there are problems with respiration and toxicity.
Isaac spends much of the game traveling down arterial corridors,
cleansing the ship of numerous infected and infecting undead. He
passes corporate propaganda and ‘health and safety’ notices. The
Biological Prosthetics Center, for instance, welcomes employees with a
promise to “keep you working” along with a notice reminding staff
whose injuries are not yet stabilized to “proceed to hospital wing of
medical deck”.
Figure 1. Anatomy. Dead Space screenshot

Like many survival horror games, Dead Space is composed of

sequential chapters, each built around a mission that is broken down
into a set of objectives. During a mission the player is presented with
a site-specific puzzle that must be solved using Isaac’s capacities and
tools in combination with any available resources (e.g. levers, keys,
flammable canisters or oxygen dispensers). For example, making a
necessary repair might first involve locating an access panel in order
to restore gravity. Isaac’s abilities are repeatedly tested,
demonstrated and performed (along with the player’s). Failure to act
effectively results in Isaac’s physical damage or death, and the
temporary removal of the capacity to act at all. While Isaac
occasionally dies by misadventure or industrial accident, most of his
deaths involve ambush by the undead Necromorphs. Isaac generally
defeats Necromorphs using a combination of temporal manipulation (a
stasis weapon) and ‘strategic dismemberment’.

Perron (2009a, p. 5) describes generic survival horror as “horror-

based third-person action-adventure games” that incorporate various
conventions from horror cinema, and that succeed critically and
commercially when they evoke feelings such as discomfort, anxiety,
fear and tension. In addition to being structured as an action
adventure game, and functioning as survival horror, Dead Space is a
science fiction. This is significant to Dead Space, and to discourses of
disability, because science fiction involves the mapping of “social
relations as they are constituted and changed by new technological
modes of ‘being in the world’” (Sobchack, 1993, p. 255). As a science
fiction, Dead Space depicts a particular social organization: it is set on
a mining ship owned by a corporation. It features themes of
knowledge and power, and it explores “the cultural attitudes and
competencies” associated with technologies (Kuhn, 1999, p. 3).
Science fiction content is common in games, and games themselves
have a particular relationship to technology. Gaming technology has,
for instance, been described as involving “seemingly perfected yet
constantly perfectible machines” (Therrien, 2009, p. 27). A similar
interest in perfectibility is present in Dead Space as upgradeable
weapons, tools and armour. It is present in the player’s need to
improve and progress, and reflected in Isaac’s role as engineer, finder
and fixer.

As noted, Williams’s concept of excess - when a body on screen is

“caught in the grip of intense sensation” or in “uncontrollable
convulsion or spasm” (Williams, 1999, p. 703), has been used to
frame the analysis that follows. There are times when the bodies in
Dead Space are gripped, seized and convulsed, and it is feasible that
these correspond to moments when its players might feel gripped,
seized or otherwise “viscerally manipulated” (p 705). However, limited
reference will be made to player experience as it lies largely outside
the remit of textual analysis. The first part of the analysis that follows
focuses on the excesses associated with the game’s monsters (“abject
bodies”). The second part addresses Isaac’s vulnerability (“overkill”).
In a third section, attention is turned to the Ishimura’s problems with
mess, gore and filth (“spillage”).
Abject bodies

The Necromorphs ensure that Dead Space functions as horror. Some

Necromorphs are relatively humanoid, whereas others mix human
features with arachnid qualities. Some wear human faces, and these
faces (while dead, in several senses) are frozen in screams or
grimaces - expressions associated with extreme emotion or trauma.
Necromorph bodies are assembled from the disparate parts of multiple
dead humans. Some are eerily agile, others totter or stagger. Some
are fixed to the Ishimura’s walls. The monsters roar and spasm while
disgorging toxic liquids. They burst (and dispense numerous smaller
monsters), or sigh and moan while leaking noxious fumes. If they
touch Isaac, his body is jerked, seized, flung, penetrated and shaken.

Figure 2. Necromorph specimen. Dead Space screenshot

The Necromorphs are hardly straightforward depictions of disability,

and yet the manner in which they function relative to Isaac, the
deviance of their bodies, their association with medical research, and
their spectacular ‘freakishness’ (Thomson, 1996) certainly evoke
discourses of disability. As Snyder and Mitchell have explained: “Quite
simply put: disabled bodies have been constructed cinematically and
socially to function as delivery vehicles in the transfer of extreme
sensation to audiences” (Snyder and Mitchell, 2006, p. 162, emphasis
in original).

What matters in horror, they go on to argue, is not the fact of bodies -

or the fact of physical variability - as much as the “social investment
in certain bodies’ presumed proximity to abjectness” (Snyder and
Mitchell, 2006, p. 163). Abjection (Kristeva, 1982) involves the
feelings of revulsion (spasm, contraction) that are evoked by
phenomena that threaten the boundaries that are necessary to a
sense of self (e.g. inside/outside, self/other): “It is something rejected
from which one does not part, from which one does not protect
oneself as from an object” (Kristeva,1982, p. 4). The abject
undermines and “disturbs identity, system, order”, it is associated with
the crossing of “borders, positions, rules” and with the “in-between,
the ambiguous, the composite” (Kristeva, 1982, p. 4).

In Dead Space the Necromorphs function as abject. They fuse

themselves to Isaac’s body in various ways including chewing him,
piercing him and infecting him. The Necromorphs are associated with
forms of psychic intrusion, including the generation of hallucinations
that blur the boundaries between life, death, past and present. By
combining hostile alien sentience, with human body parts, they ignore
any border between the human and the alien, and they over-ride the
boundaries between individual human subjects by recycling flesh. As
animated corpses, they are “death infecting life” and the “utmost of
abjection” (Kristeva, 1982, p. 4). Their bodies mix grotesque
swellings, or rapier like appendages, with bare, human feet. They are
composed of reanimated, reassembled dead flesh, and yet they are
capable of reproduction (dead bodies are fertilized or infected). The
Necromorphs are simultaneously dead, fecund and murderous.

According to Snyder and Mitchell, proximity to or distance from the

abject is indicated by a body’s capacity to perform according to
culturally determined notions of propriety, and by “one’s ability to
dissimulate actions or behaviors deemed aberrant and, thus,
unrespectable” (2006, p. 163). What the Necromorphs make clear is
that Isaac’s ability to avoid abject behaviors (loss of control, spasm,
convulsion, leaking) is conditional, and it can be compromised. This
precariousness will be further explored in the next section.

Overkill

Isaac wears a space suit. The suit updates the player on Isaac’s health
status and his available resources. It works as a second, thick skin.
Functioning as armour and life support, it protects him from giant
pincers, claws, teeth, tentacles, and various environmental hazards.
The suit enables Isaac to walk, jump and breathe in space. Isaac is
rewarded by new suits as he progresses. When the relevant schematic
is located as a pick-up it can be downloaded at a store. When a new
suit is purchased, there is a brief cut-scene during which Isaac steps
into a changing room. The door shuts and seals behind him. When it
reopens, Isaac emerges, upgraded. Each new suit is stronger and
more protective, offering increased survivability and a more capacious
inventory.

When Isaac’s suit is punctured or penetrated, he dies. He rarely just

dies. His deaths often trigger short cut-scenes that elaborate on his
demise, depicting drawn-out death throes, and providing gory details
of the Necromorphs’ monstrous appetites. At times Isaac suffers
multiple deaths-in-one: he gets stabbed, slashed and then suffocated,
or beheaded and then chewed, and then violated. Thanks to this
degree of overkill, Isaac’s deaths can be read as over-determined or
excessive: as the symptom of a problem that infuses the text, but is
not actually articulated. This problem is Isaac’s tendency to come
apart or fall to bits. What this problem suggests is that while the
obvious job of Isaac’s suit is to keep things out, its other significant
function is to keep things in. Isaac’s suit contains his body and when it
is breached, punctured or penetrated, Isaac’s body breaks, leaks or
bursts [7].

Snyder and Mitchell propose that in body genres such as horror,

disabled bodies are positioned as producers of trauma or as threats to
“the integrity of the able body” (2006, p. 163). This integrity is
precisely what Isaac’s suit is supposed to support. The potential loss
of bodily cohesion and control is threatening, and does persist, thanks
to “shared cultural scripts of disability as that which must be warded
off at all costs” (2006, p. 163). For Snyder and Mitchell, horror
generates sensation through spectacles of uncontrolled, excessive and
abject bodies that are outside of respectability, and that illustrate the
terms of acceptable physicality: “Bodies must remain within certain
boundaries, and their ‘leakage’ beyond such parameters violates social
expectations of propriety (i.e., the appropriate self-mastery of one’s
bodily functions, fluids, and abilities)” (2006, p. 164). The authors
discuss the representations of ability that circulate in culture, and “the
fantasy of bodily control [that is] deeply seated in the desire for an
impossible dominion over our own capacities” (2006, p. 163).
Referencing Foucault, they point out that one of the perceived
achievements of adulthood entails subjects becoming “responsible for
policing their own bodily aesthetics, functions, and controls” (Snyder
and Mitchell, 2006, p. 163) [8].

Isaac’s suit is a prosthetic that enables his survival, and thus his
visibility, at the same time that it renders his actual body invisible.
Excess is expressed in the physicality of the monstrous. Excess is also
present in Isaac’s myriad and multiple deaths, when the external,
penetrative threat of the monstrous combines with the difficulty of
containment posed by his own body [9].

In cinematic body genres, “fantasies of loss and dysfunction (maimed

capacity) are made to destabilize the viewer’s own investments in
ability” (Snyder and Mitchell, 2006, p. 165), but Dead Space is a
game, and what horror games can do, of course, is to offer a context
in which these fantasies of loss and dysfunction, and this
destabilization, become constituents of play. Isaac’s capacity to act is
conflated (visually, functionally and spatially) with the player’s
capacity to act [10]. The player is invited to demonstrate the attributes
associated with able bodies (control, responsiveness, accuracy,
effectiveness and precision). The game offers its players the
opportunity to perform ability within a fictional setting that is full of
disturbing threats and losses that are culturally associated with
disability.

The issue of ability will be further explored in the next section of this
paper. First it is necessary to ask how Isaac’s tendency to fall to
pieces coexists with the sinister call to “make us whole” or “make us
whole again” that runs through Dead Space. This phrase is sprayed on
walls, murmured by Isaac’s hallucinatory girlfriend Nicole, and
muttered by the deranged and undead. Williams situates horror film
within a broader category of filmic mode that incorporates spectacle
and “stylistic and/or emotional excess” (1999, p. 703). She then
associates this mode with feelings of melancholy, loss and regret. In
Dead Space these emotions could be linked to Isaac’s ill-fated search
for his lover Nicole. He also finds diary fragments and text logs
documenting desperate attempts by Ishimura’s crew to locate their
spouses. Various characters have hallucinations that feature dead
relatives. Using psychoanalytic theories of fantasy, Williams connects
such loss and belatedness to a “melancholic sense of the loss of
origins” (p. 712) and the “quest to return and discover the origin of
self” (p 713). In other words, she associates feelings such as
melancholia and loss in body genres, with primal scene fantasies --
that is, with fantasies of birth and conception [11].

This is suggestive because Dead Space does incorporate primal scene

imagery. As noted, when Isaac purchases a new suit, he is sealed in a
separate space and then re-emerges with his boundaries reinforced.
This is a beneficial, tidy, machine-based rebirth. Most of the birth and
conception imagery in Dead Space is stranger and messier. Monsters
burst and spawn. Dr Mercer makes repeated reference to “my
children” when describing the Necromorphs (as when he declares that
the future “belongs to the children. Be glad of the knowledge that
your death...will bring their birth!”). At his death, he offers himself to
that variety of Necromorph most associated with breeding. Isaac finds
a room full of foetuses growing in glass vats. He finds a text log listing
the names of newborns [12]. This interest in conception and origins is
echoed in references to archaeology (the Marker) and religion
(Unitology). It also suggests how the menacing offer to “make us
whole” functions as abject. For Kristeva, the abject “confronts us [...]
within our personal archaeology, with our earliest attempts to release
the hold of maternal entity [...] a violent, clumsy breaking away, with
the constant risk of falling back under the sway of a power as securing
as it is stifling” (Kristeva, 1982, p. 13, emphasis in the original) [13].

Isaac does have problems maintaining a whole, able and agentic body.
Yet, at the same time, the call to “make us whole” is threatening,
because it hints at an abject, obliterating assimilation that would
render Isaac’s able-bodied masculinity, his agency and his
individuality moot.

Spillage

In this final section, attention is turned to another form of spectacular

excess in Dead Space, that of blood, gore and gunk. This spillage is
considered in terms of location, especially its accumulation in (and
contaminating of) clinical and medical areas. This contamination will
be considered in relation to the issues raised thus far, including the
representation of disability as threat, and of ability as a provisional
and vulnerable state. The relationship between these representations,
and the pleasures offered by the game’s ludic structures will then be
discussed.

A remarkable amount of gore is smeared across the Ishimura’s walls

and piled in its hallways. It is a mix of human blood, human bodies,
and bits of human bodies. It is concentrated in areas where the ship’s
crew had sought aid. Blood trails in hallways lead to clinics. There is
evidence that bodies have convulsed, popped, splashed and
fragmented in the vicinity. Dead Space is littered with bio-waste bins,
blood soaked gurneys, anatomy posters (including one of a pregnant
woman), anatomical models and flickering x-rays (of adults and
infants). This gory chaos contrasts against the surviving signs of
clinical order and routine: “Please proceed to waiting room. Please
speak to a clinic technician before taking a seat”. In addition to
waiting rooms and signage (“Welcome to the UGS Ishimura clinic:
Healing away from home”), Isaac encounters medical logs and patient
observation records, therapeutic spaces, and evidence of prosthetic,
diagnostic and cryogenic technologies.

At the beginning of Chapter 5 (‘Lethal Devotion’), Kendra advises

Isaac that the atmosphere aboard the Ishimura is becoming
increasingly contaminated, and that targeting the giant Necromorph
responsible will entail mixing a compound that contains an alien DNA
sample. The necessary sample is in Dr Mercer’s office. To access
Mercer’s office, Isaac enters the Ishimura’s hospital zone. He crosses
an emergency room, triggers a Necromorph ambush (they launch
from air vents and drop from the ceiling), and escapes down ‘ER
Hallway B’ where he passes more blood-splattered gurneys and a rare
human survivor. Traumatized and covered with blood, she is oblivious
to him. Passing through an intensive care unit, Isaac reaches Dr
Mercer’s darkened office. The walls and floors are covered with graffiti
(English and alien). The walls are lined with rows of specimen jars
containing human heads. Ragged strips of red cloth hang from the
ceiling. As the decor indicates, Dr Mercer has acted as a conduit for
the alien contagion that emanated from the nearby mining colony. He
has experimented on and infected fellow humans, and created a
particularly troublesome strain of Necromorph.

Figure 3. “Where would you be without science?” Dead Space

screenshot

Williams has argued that body genres become popular and persist
because they have salience: they offer a form of problem solving and
the opportunity to revisit problems of identity. What I want to
consider, in light of Williams’ assertion, is the ways in which the
setting and the fictional aspects of Dead Space combine with its more
specifically ludic aspects. In the West, the clinic is culturally associated
with a particular kind of gaze, with positivism and empiricism,
measurement, and the generation of evidence pertaining to bodies
(Snyder and Mitchell, 2006). In Dead Space the clinic is tainted. It is
contaminated in the sense that it is covered with gore, and because it
has been compromised by the intrusions of an abject other.
Meanwhile, Isaac’s body and capacities are tested and noticed
(Kendra: “For what it’s worth, you did a great job, Isaac”), and the
player’s skills are honed and demonstrated. Dead Space confronts
players with visions of abject disability, while engaging them in
affirmations of ability.

To discuss the game’s depictions of a contaminated clinic, the

construction of ability as measurable and demonstrable in Dead
Space, and the implications for subjectivity it would be helpful to turn
to Foucault. Game theorists have used Foucault’s work on bodies and
power to explore discipline and productivity in games (see Silverman
and Simon, 2009; Dyer-Witheford and De Peuter, 2009). Foucault has
written about the historical decline of sovereign power in the West
(with its power over death) and the rise of government and
institutional powers directed at the “administration of bodies and the
calculated management of life” (Foucault, 1978, p. 140). This power
was organized around “two poles” (p. 139). The first of these “Centred
on the body as a machine: its disciplining, the optimization of its
capabilities, the extortion of its forces, the parallel increase of its
usefulness and its docility, its integration into systems of efficient and
economic controls” (Foucault, 1977, p. 139). The second focused on
“the body imbued with the mechanics of life and serving as the basis
of the biological processes: propagation, births and mortality, the level
of health, life expectancy and longevity, with all the conditions that
can cause these to vary” (Foucault, 1977, p 139).

It is not difficult to map these onto Dead Space: there is the directing
of Isaac and the management of his capacities, the various forms of
control that are involved in play, the need to school the body of the
avatar, and opportunities to prove the accuracy of the player. The
management of life and populations is reminiscent of Isaac’s health
(constructed as a quantifiable phenomenon) as well as the game’s
many references to reproduction, childbirth and mortality, the future
of humanity, and threats to the species.

This analysis suggests that the idea of the clinic (as a perspective, as
a site, as an epistemology) becomes one of the things that is played
with in Dead Space [14]. What also matters here is the acknowledged
significance of Foucault’s work on bodies and power, to disability
studies. For Foucault, “A normalizing society is the historical outcome
of a technology of power centered on life” (1978, p. 144) and, as
disability theorists have made clear, a normalizing society is one that
equates anomaly with threat, and which acts to manage this
perceived threat by segregating and eliminating social practices that
are “based in part on the interpretation of physical disability as not
only anomalous but dangerous, indeed contaminating, like dirt”
(Thomson, 1997, p. 36).

Conclusion

There is a convention that persists in literature on generic horror that

involves regarding monsters as metaphors or allegories while
overlooking their bodies (Smith, 2011). While monsters have been
shrouded by metaphor, ability in games is generally taken literally. It
hides in plain sight when it comes to critique or reflection.
Approaching ability as a representation makes it possible to highlight
and denaturalize the repeated skills assessment that is central to
many digital games. Ability (constructed as something that can be
acquired, performed and proven) is such a given within games that its
function in terms of the fantasies that games offer has rarely been
questioned.

At the centre of Dead Space is an able male body that has problems
with permeability and self-containment. This able body is risked in
proximity to a location (the clinic) that is culturally associated with the
production of evidence relating to the body. Dead Space is not alone
in being interested in the relationship between bodies, control and the
clinic. Consider, for instance, the significance of the clinic and the
consequences of its corruption by corporate interests in Deus Ex:
Human Revolution (Eidos Montreal, 2011), or recall Joel’s choice, the
function of zombies, and the demise or death of the clinic in The Last
Of Us (Naughty Dog, 2013).

Disability theorists have noted the extent to which “the physically

disabled body becomes a repository for social anxieties about such
troubling concerns as vulnerability, control, and identity” (Thomson,
1997, p. 6). In Dead Space, the contamination of the clinic is equated
with extinction, disability is depicted as threatening and
contaminating, and able-bodied status is represented as precarious,
temporary and provisional. At the same time, the game invents
measures of ability, and invites the affirmation of ability through play.
This play between disability and ability is common in certain games
genres, including survival horror, but it has rarely been discussed
within game studies.

Acknowledgements
This research was undertaken with the support of the Arts and
Humanities Research Council.

Portions of this analysis were discussed at events including the Future

Reality of Gaming Conference, Vienna, September 2013 (Carr, 2013)
and at the Critical Evaluation of Game Studies, University of Tampere,
April 2014. Thanks to my colleagues Alison Gazzard and Andrew Burn
for their feedback on draft versions of this paper.

Notes

1. This research was undertaken as part of an AHRC project that

examined representations of disability in games, particularly games
featuring either the undead or forms of human augmentation. Eight
games were played in full on the PS3. Dead Space was one of the
richest in terms of the project’s themes, and one of the most
enjoyable to play. Dead Space was a commercial and critical success,
it spawned a franchise, and it still appears on lists of the ‘scariest
games ever’.

2. For resources on games and disability that addresses the topic of

accessibility, go to http://igda-gasig.org/. This paper does not discuss
questions of accessibility, although accessibility features made the
work possible. There is a substantial amount of research on ‘disability
and games’ within technology and education fields that uses a medical
model of disability (i.e. that conceptualizes disability as an individual
deficit that calls for treatment or compensation). It would be difficult
to reconcile this literature, with the disability studies literature
generated by theorists who have rejected the medical model in favor
of a social or cultural model of disability. In her introduction to
Disability in Science Fiction, Allan explains that by contesting and
rejecting medical framings of disability, disability theorists have
sought “to remove the socially constructed aura of deficiency and
deviancy from the disabled body” (Allan, 2013, p. 5). For an account
of the ways in which the social model of disability differs from the
medical model of disability, see Linton (1998). For an account of the
ways in which the cultural model of disability extends and adapts the
social model of disability (by re-engaging with issues of embodied
experience, for instance) see Snyder and Mitchell (2006, pp 5-11). For
a detailed account of the function of figures of otherness in relation to
the neutralizing of the ‘normate’, see Thomson (1997).

3. The politics of disability and research practice are discussed in

Linton’s Claiming Disability (1998, Chapter 4).

4. Because these threads are followed back through the game as a

whole, structural features are incorporated into this textual analysis.

5. As this indicates, there are references in the material to both

psychoanalytic and discursive theories of identity. To avoid these
collapsing together, when appropriate, the term ‘identity’ will be used
in relation to the former, and ‘subjectivity’ in relation to the latter. The
term ‘agency’ is used in a vernacular sense in reference to both
Isaac’s capacity to act, and the player’s capacity to act.

6. See Smith (2012) for an analysis of ‘Disability in Mad Doctor Films’.

7. It may be worth exploring these points further with reference to the

hyper-masculine armour worn by some avatars, and players’
recognition of the comic aspects of such over-compensation.

8. Snyder and Mitchell also cite Iris Marion Young’s work on the
difficulties of reconciling professional identity with physical variability.
Young explores bodily discipline and the performance of professional
self while making reference to 19th century scientific racism, notions
of decorum, and “behavioral norms of respectability” (Young, 1990, p.
136). As this suggests, discourses of disability and ability connect with
other aspects of subjectivity including ethnicity and gender. This is
where this analysis opens to questions of intersectionality, which could
be further explored with reference to Thomson’s work in Extraordinary
Bodies (1997).

9. It would be reductive to view death in Dead Space purely as a

penalty. Players create and share montages of Dead Space deaths
online, indicating that the sheer variety of his deaths is appreciated.
Note that his dependence on a prosthetic does not mark Isaac as
disabled, because he operates in a context where this dependence is
framed as ‘human’.

10. For more on the relationship between horror film and horror
games, and shifts between control, and loss of control, see
Krzywinska (2002).

11. For an account of primal scene imagery, maternity and abjection

in the Alien series, see Constable (1999).

12. There are further references to birth and conception in Dead

Space. For instance, one variety of Necromorph has arms reaching out
from its lower torso (see the image of Isaac and the relatively safe
frozen Necromorph specimen). It is not clear if this is because it nests
one dead, grown human body inside another, or if lots of the
Ishimura’s crew were pregnant when the undead contagion spread.
There are Necromorphs that use infant bodies (with baby hands and
feet). A swollen, spawning variety of Necromorphs are referred to as
‘pregnants’ in some online guides to DS lore. Isaac’s crewmate
Hammond ejects an escape pod containing a Necromorph. The tiny
pod enters a large approaching ship (the Valor). The Valor quickly
succumbs to the contagion, and then veers into and penetrates the
Ishimura.

13. It is arguable that the feminine is a problem throughout Dead

Space, given that Kendra manipulates and then betrays Isaac, and
that his eventual reunion with Nicole appears to be fatal. However, not
all primal scenes are marked as feminine in the Dead Space universe.
In the Dead Space sequels the call to “make us whole” is linked with
cataclysmic ‘convergence events’, where monstrous, ovoid male
entities (‘Brother Moons’) vacuum tiny figures off the surface of the
planet.

14. Sociology of education literature suggest that the ideology of the

clinic is disseminated, reified and naturalized through forms of
education policy and practice, and that “the exercise of power only
remains tolerable by hiding itself within the everyday, the mundane
and the intimate” (Ball, 2013, p. 145). The logic of the clinic infuses
discourses of status, value, worthiness, entitlement, productivity,
adulthood and autonomy -- all of which feed into the “ideology of
ability” (Siebers, 2009).

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