Killjoy Play: Illness, Disability, and No-Fun Pleasures in Video Games

This paper examines video games that deliberately refuse conventional notions of fun in order to represent illness, disability, and care. Drawing on disability studies, crip theory, and Sara Ahmed's concept of the feminist killjoy, the author argues that the imperative for games to be enjoyable shapes which play experiences are valued, and that games centering chronic illness, terminal illness, and dementia can instead offer forms of pleasure rooted in frustration, slowness, non-mastery, and acceptance. The work positions these "no-fun" designs as crip killjoy modes of play that resist cure, progress, and resolution, extending prior scholarship on failure, negative affect, and the normativization of fun in game studies.

The analysis centers on three games: you're just imagining it (npckc, 2024), a first-person chronic illness simulation; That Dragon, Cancer (Numinous Games, 2016), an autobiographical account of a family whose young son is diagnosed with cancer; and Before I Forget (3-Fold Games, 2020), a first-person narrative game about an Indian woman living with dementia. Through close readings of narrative, mechanics, and audiovisual design, the paper attends to temporal and spatial structures such as waiting, repetition, and non-linear progress, drawing on the concept of "crip spacetime." Where available, it also incorporates developer reflections, particularly from creators who are disabled or ill, have caregiving experience, or consulted medical professionals, to situate the games within lived and relational contexts.

Methodologically, the study is a humanities-based qualitative game analysis rather than an empirical survey, and it offers no quantitative data. Its scope is limited to three titles produced in the mid-2010s and 2020s, primarily from Western and Indian developer contexts, and it engages critically with debates on empathy games, identity tourism, and the risks of voyeuristic or inspirational framing of disability. The paper's central conclusion is that these games generate pleasure not through mastery or cure but through being seen and having marginalized experiences of illness, disability, and care made playable, with discomfort and frustration becoming sites of meaning and political recognition.