Echoes of Madness: Exploring Disability and Mental Illness in Hellblade: Senua’s Sacrifice

Sina Torabi () and Jeff Preston
Additional contact information
Sina Torabi: Department of Media Studies, Faculty of Information and Media Studies, Western University, London, ON N6A 2M3, Canada
Jeff Preston: Department of Disability Studies, King’s University College at Western University, London, ON N6A 2M3, Canada

Societies, 2024, vol. 14, issue 9, 1-14

Abstract: Video games are known for many things, but nuanced portrayals of characters with mental illness might not be one of them. This trend, however, has gradually started to shift with games like Hellblade: Senua’s Sacrifice , which aim to convey a genuine experience of mental illness to the player. Through a close reading of different instances in the game, this paper shows how Hellblade complicates the usual sanist ideas seen in most other games by taking an ambiguous stance, using mental illness as a representational tool. Furthermore, it avoids some of the more sensationalist and problematic tropes often employed in such representations, like the supercrip and the Cartesian divide of the body and mind. In order to show this, we have employed Mitchel and Snyder’s concept of narrative prosthesis to demonstrate how the game does not in fact rely on Senua’s disability as an exotic feature of the narrative to hook players in. By combining insights from disability and mad studies, we show how this game is a step in the right direction when it comes to challenging the perceptions of mental illness prevalent in pop culture.

Keywords: game studies; disability; madness; psychosis; narrative prosthesis (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: A13 A14 P P0 P1 P2 P3 P4 P5 Z1 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2024
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.mdpi.com/2075-4698/14/9/170/pdf (application/pdf)
https://www.mdpi.com/2075-4698/14/9/170/ (text/html)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:gam:jsoctx:v:14:y:2024:i:9:p:170-:d:1470284

Access Statistics for this article

Societies is currently edited by Ms. Farrah Sun

More articles in Societies from MDPI
Bibliographic data for series maintained by MDPI Indexing Manager ().