Delicate Subjects: Vulnerability and Validation in Action Adventure Games

Diane Carr's paper examines the protagonists of action adventure games and the tension between their vulnerability and the validation they receive through play. Its central argument is that these characters are repeatedly subjected to spectacular suffering while being offered constant opportunities to demonstrate ability, and that ability itself is quantified through achievements, points, progression and collectables. The paper frames this play between vulnerability and validation through theories of ability and disability, arguing that subjectivity offers a productive lens for connecting in-game representations with broader questions of power, cultural context and social practice.

The analysis draws on Stuart Hall's distinction between semiotic and Foucauldian approaches to representation, positioning the latter as a means of bridging games understood as fantasies, games as systems of assessment, and the cultural conditions in which they are made and played. Alongside game studies scholarship on gender, race and embodiment, the work incorporates critical disability theory, including Thomson's concept of the "normate," which describes how unmarked, privileged bodies are sustained by everyday institutions while other bodies are constructed as marginal or deviant. The paper's key claim is that protagonists occupy privileged positions within game fictions, yet this privilege is conditional on continual demonstration of ability, making it an anxious and fragile status tied to possessing an able body or one that can pass as able.

The scope of the work is primarily conceptual and theoretical rather than empirical, drawing on a selection of specific action adventure games as illustrative cases rather than a systematic sample. The paper was presented at the first joint conference of DiGRA and FDG, and its reasoning relies on an interdisciplinary body of literature spanning game studies, disability studies, feminist theory and education research on institutional power. The concluding section extends these concerns to ability, status and validation within player cultures more broadly.