Becoming, Not Being: Rethinking Mental Illness at the Crossroads of Videogame Representation

This paper argues that conventional frameworks for depicting mental illness in media, which treat it as a static trope, a narrative obstacle, or a stable marker of difference, are poorly suited to video games, whose procedural and interactive capacities could instead model mental illness as a lived, relational, and evolving process. Drawing on Gilles Deleuze's concepts of becoming and assemblage, the authors propose a non-representational approach that dissolves binaries such as sane/insane and healthy/pathological, reframing mental illness as an emergent affective multiplicity shaped by narrative, mechanics, audiovisual design, player input, and cultural context. The argument is situated within interdisciplinary dialogue among game studies, disability studies, and mad studies, and it draws on critiques such as Mitchell and Snyder's account of "narrative prosthesis" to show how disability is often deployed as a device signifying deviance and then resolved by a story's end.

The paper's central case study is Hellblade: Senua's Sacrifice (Ninja Theory, 2017). Its analysis highlights how the game uses binaural audio to simulate auditory hallucinations that respond to player action and environmental context, and how its environmental storytelling mutates the game world in alignment with the protagonist's shifting perceptions. These strategies entangle the player in Senua's psychosis as a participatory, unfolding process rather than an externally observed trait. The authors read the game's meaning as emerging from an assemblage of mechanics, narrative cues, sound, visuals, and player agency, instead of residing in any single symbolic element.

The authors also acknowledge that Hellblade does not fully escape representational conventions, since certain cinematic sequences and symbolic markers occasionally re-fix mental illness into static meaning. They treat these tensions as revealing the practical difficulties of applying a process-oriented framework within commercial, narrative-driven game production. Overall, the paper contends that Deleuzian thinking can help designers, scholars, and players understand mental illness as a constellation of processes, offering a basis for more ethically responsive and inclusive representations.