Body Horror as Body Shaming: Fatness and Monstrosity in Video Games

This extended abstract, presented at DiGRA 2018 by York University PhD candidate Sarah Stang, examines how video games depict fat bodies as horrific, repulsive, and monstrous. Its central argument is that fatness functions as a horror trope in games, linked in problematic ways to evilness, compulsion, madness, disability, disease, and body horror, and that these associations contribute to the alienation and "othering" of already marginalized groups. The work situates itself within a body of game scholarship that has largely critiqued the sexualization and exoticization of marginalized bodies, while noting that the framing of such bodies as abject remains severely understudied.

The methodology is a qualitative, interpretive analysis rather than a quantitative survey. The author recorded playthroughs of a selected set of commercially successful and critically acclaimed games, including Dragon Age, God of War II, The Witcher 3, Dead Rising 3, The Binding of Isaac, Little Nightmares, Left 4 Dead, The Last of Us, Silent Hill, Outlast 2, and Prey. Characters were classified into thematic, narrative, and visual categories and analysed through visual and textual methods, supplemented by online content analysis and critical discourse analysis of fan, critic, and developer commentary. The framework draws on feminist film theory on the monstrous-feminine and on feminist scholarship on fat studies and disability.

The key finding concerns gendered differences in how fatness is coded. Fat female monsters and antagonists are depicted as grotesque specifically in relation to their gender, sexuality, and fecundity, whereas male monsters are rendered grotesque through attributes such as wealth, laziness, compulsive eating, or infection. Across both genders, however, fatness is consistently associated with evil, madness, disability, and bodily horror, which the author argues reinforces fear of non-normative bodies. The stated aim is to critique these design practices and promote more inclusive representation in games.