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Über das Medium Computerspiel findet zunehmend eine Auseinandersetzung mit psychologischen Traumata statt. Posttraumatische Belastungsstörung, Krankheit und Tod sowie Depressionen und Phobien sind hierbei vorherrschende Themen und Motive. Thomas Spies zeigt in einem historischen Überblick und in vergleichenden Analysen Tendenzen der kulturellen Repräsentation auf. Die Beschäftigung mit Titeln wie »Papers, Please«, »Hellblade: Senua's Sacrifice« und »Disco Elysium« lässt deutlich werden, wie Computerspiele zunehmend medienspezifische Möglichkeiten finden, die Vielfalt und Komplexität traumatischer Erfahrungen zu vermitteln.

RESIDENT EVIL 7, in articulating the threat of infectious mold, situates the illness with the feminine: Historical, cultural, and physiological connections between mold and women gives the game license to limit, objectify, and render the female characters monstrous. First-person immersion brings us into contact with the infection, as mold and Molded threaten the buildings of the Bakers, while mold growing in their brains threatens the Bakers themselves. Through the form of infection, the disease is invasively feminine, reflected in the Bakers and their homes.

This article argues that video games carry tremendous potential in furthering public understanding of mental illnesses. WHAT REMAINS OF EDITH FINCH is considered as an example to demonstrate, focusing on the specific sequence of Lewis Finch and which aspects of Lewis’ biography are indicative of schizophrenia. The variant models of comorbidity between addiction and psychosis play a significant theoretical role as, according to the developers, the character’s main trait is a marijuana addiction. The actual narrative, however, indicates causes and consequences of mental illnesses that go way beyond drug abuse, such as traumatic childhood experience and social isolation. Following a biographical approach, this article thus focuses on the ludic construction of Lewis’ psychosis, reaching the conclusion that players may, by virtue of their interactive involvement, experience ›symptoms‹ such as depersonalization and forms of dissociation within the safe framework of play.

The term »medicalization« describes a process in which non-medical problems are explained and solved in medical terms. This often happens through the definition of disease categories. Medicalization as a multifactorial process leads to the pathologization of certain phenomena, to an associated expansion of social control and, in the context of the economization of medicine, to increased social inequality. The expansion of medical competence can take place as a primary medicalization on an institutional and structural level, or as a secondary medicalization on an epistemological level. The latter encompasses the circulation of all medical knowledge in society and (popular) culture. Digital games are also implemented into this medical structure of integration, on the one hand in the form of serious games as a medicalized technology and their use as therapeutic, diagnostic, educational or research tools. On the other hand, commercial games are secondarily medicalized, if they use medical semantics to plausibilize their narrative or game mechanics. Thirdly, games can critically question medicalization as a process and thus provide a normative commentary on problems of medicalization. The operationalization of the concept of medicalization for the analysis of digital games is carried out in the following steps: First, the concept of primary medicalization, its causes, characteristics and consequences are outlined. As a second step interfaces of media and cultural analysis regarding medicalization are identified in the context of the sociocultural circulation of medical knowledge (secondary medicalization). Thirdly, it will be shown to what extent one can speak of medicalization of digital games and which categories could form a meaningful analytical tool kit. Finally, by means of the games RED DEAD REDEMPTION 2 (Rockstar Studios 2018) and SPIDER-MAN (Insomniac Games 2018), the elaborated aspects are applied in two brief qualitative analyses.

CELESTE (Matt Makes Games 2018) is a game about climbing a mountain. But it is also a game about protagonist Madeline’s struggle with her mental disorder, specifically depression and anxiety attacks. Embodied by a dark doppelganger named Part of Me, Madeline’s disease makes her perilous climb almost impossible and fights her every step of the way. By primarily externalizing mental disorders on a narrative, visual, and ludic level, CELESTE presents an innovative and differentiated way of depicting depression as a form of functional disorders within the game text. As a theoretical starting point, the widely recognized biopsychosocial model has been chosen in which human beings are defined as whole entities and the relationship between health and disease is described as a dynamic process where one does not cancel out the other. Media portrayals of mental illness – in films and on television, as well as in video games – can be stigmatizing. But with their specific quality of interactivity and the recipient as an active subject, video games have the power to let players experience disease in an innovative way which, in this article, will be exemplified with the video game CELESTE.

This article examines the increasing ludic implementation of mental illnesses in digital games. It especially focuses on display techniques and the benefits and drawbacks of games that utilize a first- or third-person view to immerse the player into the mental illnesses of their protagonists. This sort of player involvement marks a new trend that can be observed in recent games and will play an important role in future game development. Instead of merely stigmatizing the mentally ill as evil antagonists, head-mounted virtual reality displays like the Oculus Rift are able to simulate their perception and thus create a form of self-awareness for the player. LAYERS OF FEAR (2016) and SENUA'S SACRIFICE (2017) are used as case examples.

After drawing connections between theories of unreliable narration and depictions of mental instability, this article explores ways in which subjectivity can become manifest in video games. In the subsequent analysis of Dear Esther (The Chinese Room 2012) and Layers of Fear (Bloober Team 2016), the mechanisms of verbal and visual unreliable narration will be examined, as well as the interplay between these elements and interactivity, and, especially, how these aspects are connected to the mental instability of narrators and focalizers. Dear Esther's narrator strives to inscribe an island's »always half-imagined« surface with his life and memories, while the player is compelled to question the narrator's reliability to the point where she begins to question the island's physical existence. Layers of Fear puts the player in the place of a painter who, while trying to complete his magnum opus, loses all grasp of reality - and his sanity. The game exclusively ascribes the painter, the sole focalizer of the game, the ability to »see« and simultaneously establishes that his eyes are not to be trusted.

This chapter explores the epidemiological framework of disease constructed in the 2010 Wii-console release TRAUMA TEAM (Atlus Games). By fabricating the antagonistic »Rosalia virus« as an ailment of insidious phases, volatile symptoms reminiscent of present-day outbreaks that perplexed contemporary practitioners, of molecular complexity and spread through such conspicuous and rudimentary ecological means as to make surreptitious, the game designers have provided a vivid allegory advocating for a modern paradigm of disease theory/epidemiology; one that transcends a web of causation. The ultimate result is a game that embodies and engages not only complex medical theory, but showcases the downfalls of provincialism regarding the gameplaying apparatus as a whole.

Cancer, a hyponym for serious contemporary diseases, concerns a growing number of patients each year since research has significantly improved and patients can be diagnosed early. While many cases seem to be preventable, it is one of the leading causes of death. In popular media, cancer is often emotionally represented and a sign of death. In medical terms, it might be understood on a cellular level without regarding external conditions. This article shows that both ways can be discussed in two disease models that help to set a discursive framework of cancer representation in digital games. Re-Mission (Realtime Associates, Inc. 2006) shows a scientific side of occurrence by guiding an avatar through the human body while treating cancer internally. The game perpetuates a biomedical interpretation. In contrast, THAT DRAGON, CANCER (Numinous Games 2016) examines a biopsychosocial attempt perspective. While both games are determined by their contexts of production, their representation of cancer can be read as staying close to their initial disease model.

Automation of play has become an ever more noticeable phenomenon in the domain of video games, expressed by self-playing game worlds, self-acting characters, and non-human agents traversing multiplayer spaces. This article proposes to look at AI-driven non-human play and, what follows, rethink digital games, taking into consideration their cybernetic nature, thus departing from the anthropocentric perspectives dominating the field of Game Studies. A decentralised posthumanist reading, as the author argues, not only allows to rethink digital games and play, but is a necessary condition to critically reflect AI, which due to the fictional character of video games, often plays by very different rules than the so-called “true” AI.

Why do we play games and why do we play them on computers? The contributors of »Games and Rules« take a closer look at the core of each game and the motivational system that is the game mechanics. Games are control circuits that organize the game world with their (joint) players and establish motivations in a dedicated space, a »Magic Circle«, whereas game mechanics are constructs of rules designed for interactions that provide gameplay. Those rules form the base for all the excitement and frustration we experience in games. This anthology contains individual essays by experts and authors with backgrounds in Game Design and Game Studies, who lead the discourse to get to the bottom of game mechanics in video games and the real world - among them Miguel Sicart and Carlo Fabricatore., Beat Suter et al.: Introduction Play Motivation Beat Suter: Rules of Play as a Framework for the “Magic Circle” René Bauer: Games as a Special Zone. Motivation Mechanics of Games Miguel Sicart: Play Computers. A Letter to the Reader Game Mechanics Imre Hofmann: Requirements for a General Game Mechanics Framework Carlo Fabricatore: Underneath and Beyond Mechanics. An Activity-theoretical Perspective on Meaning-making in Gameplay Guidance Systems Hiloko Kato and René Bauer: Hansel and Gretel. Design and Reception of Orientation Cues in Game Space René Bauer and Hiloko Kato: The Spectacular Space. Rules and Guiding Principles of Irrational Spaces in Games Francine Rotzetter: Nonverbal Guidance Systems. Seamless Player-leading in Open-world Games Ethics Wolfgang Walk: Ethics as a Game Mechanism Hiloko Kato and René Bauer: The Player as Puppet. Visualized Decisions as a Challenge for Computer Games Wolfgang Walk and Mark L. Barrett: The Ethical Avatar Game Spaces Ulrich Götz: Rules Shape Spaces – Spaces Shape Rules Mela Kocher: Game Mechanics of Serious Urban Games. Designing for the Ludic City NPC and Non-Human Game Design Günter Hack: NPC and Me. How to Become a Non-Player Character Michelle Westerlaken: When Game Mechanics Come Crawling out of Ant Colonies

Grand Theft Auto, Battlefield, Counterstrike - more and more, violence in computer games is becoming the subject of heated discussion. But what emotional experiences does the playful use of virtual violence make possible? Through participato observation in online games and at LAN parties and analyses of interviews, magazines, and videos, Christopher Bareither presents in detail how millions of people can take pleasure from that which would shock others. By refraining from judgmental cliches, this ethnographic study is able to provide a decisive contribution to a debate at the crossroads of popular culture, politics, and the public sphere. Grand Theft Auto, Battlefield, Counter-Strike - Gewalt in Computerspielen wird immer wieder kontrovers diskutiert. Doch welche emotionalen Erfahrungen ermöglicht der spielerische Umgang mit virtueller Gewalt? Durch teilnehmende Beobachtungen in Online-Games und auf LAN-Partys sowie mithilfe von Interview-, Zeitschriften- und Videoanalysen arbeitet Christoph Bareither heraus, wie Millionen von Menschen etwas als vergnüglich erleben können, was andere schockiert. Ohne wertende Klischees zu bedienen, leistet die ethnografische Studie damit einen entscheidenden Beitrag zu einer Debatte am Schnittfeld von Populärkultur, Politik und Öffentlichkeit.