Virtual Burden: Representations of Animal Disabilities in Video Games and Their Posthuman Contexts

This paper examines how animals with disabilities are represented in video games and how these representations participate in posthuman questions of agency, embodiment, and relationality. Drawing on critical posthumanism, disability studies, and animal studies, the authors argue that such characters occupy an ambiguous position, existing both as computational constructs and as narrative agents that shape players' subjectivity within hybrid systems of affect, automated procedures, and human and non-human forms of causality. The study frames its inquiry around whether disability representations for animals differ meaningfully from those for humans, particularly in games featuring animal-human hybrids or strongly anthropomorphized animals, and whether Garland-Thomson's concept of animal norms applies within gaming environments.

The analysis identifies several recurring strategies for deploying animals with disabilities in games. These include cultivating sympathy through "cute animals with dysfunctions," depicting "transhuman camouflage" in which implants and exoskeletons fully compensate for impairment, framing disabled animals as monstrous, and treating animals as military or war resources. A further strategy involves institutional efforts to construct brand heroes for disability-related social campaigns, while a contrasting approach concerns activist pressure on commercial titles that avoid disability altogether, as seen in debates around The Sims. The authors attribute these patterns to converging conditions, including the predominantly agonistic structure of gameplay, the general underrepresentation of disability in games, instrumental attitudes toward animals, and wider cultural stereotypes.

The study is primarily conceptual and interpretive, grounded in a close reading of selected game examples and an extensive review of scholarship in game studies, disability studies, and animal studies. It does not report a quantitative sample, survey data, or a defined corpus of titles beyond the illustrative cases mentioned, so its claims are best understood as theoretically driven typologies rather than empirically generalizable findings. Its geographic and temporal frame is implicit, drawing on commercial releases primarily from the mid-2010s through the mid-2020s.