Damage in Dead Space

Damage and Decorum in Dead Space Draft version May 2013 Diane Carr, Institute of Education, University of London. Keywords: Digital games, representation, ability, disability, disability theory, Dead Space, undead monsters, embodiment, horror, ‘body genres’, bodies. Introduction The undead monsters in Dead Space might pass as metaphors of scientific hubris or medical transgression, but they look like mobile wounds. Meanwhile, despite being wrapped in a high-tech second skin, the game’s protagonist Isaac Clarke has constant problems maintaining a safe distance between his insides and whatever is outside. Increasing Isaac’s survivability through the upgrading of his resources is crucial, while the player must acquire and demonstrate skills (resource management, accuracy and puzzle solving) in order to progress through the game. Dead Space mixes depictions of gore and gruesome injury with images of physical alteration (viral, medical and technological), tests of ability, monstrous resurrection and engineered restoration. This analysis of Dead Space will draw on issues raised in Snyder and Mitchell’s essay ‘Body Genres: An Anatomy of Disability in Film’ (2010) in which the authors slot a disabled body into Linda Williams’ account of body genres (1999). Williams used the term ‘body genres’ to describe film genres such as melodrama, pornography and horror that promise their audiences physical responses and sensation Dead Space is a survival horror game and it has succeeded commercially and otherwise, because it generates fear, panic and tension. Like many games, it mixes representations of damaged bodies, with repeated demonstrations of ability. This account of Dead Spaces combines structural and textual analysis undertaken from the perspective of a player-analyst. Through analysis questions are raised about monstrous bodies and affect, and the representation of ability and able bodies within digital games. Background Investigating the ways in which bodies and their abilities are represented within popular media texts is important because these texts reflect the cultures they emerge from, and in turn become part of how identities and social groups are perceived, experienced and articulated (see Dyer 2002). Dead Space uses deviant and damaged bodies to generate particular emotions in its players, including tension, fear, fascination and panic. While some analysis of representations of gender and ethnicity has emerged within game studies, analysis of able and disabled bodies in games remain exceedingly rare. [Note 1] Yet, as Snyder and Mitchell have argued, because ‘disabled people must negotiate a finite repertoire of social meanings […] there are significant stakes in the humanities-based analysis of disability’ (Snider and Mitchell, 2010 p193). The analysis is informed by literature on affect and pleasure in horror games (such as Krzywinska, 2002, Perron 2009). It also draws on film studies literature, particularly Linda Williams’ essay on body genres (1999). Williams’ work has previously been applied to horror games (Carr, Campbell and Ellwood, 2006 pp 151- 252, and Perron, 2009a). Williams focuses her analysis on film genres that share low cultural status, that feature various forms of excess, and that provoke sensations and physical responses from audiences: melodrama (tears), horror (fear, anxiety) and pornography. She discusses these responses and the use of the female body on screen, arguing that ‘what may especially mark these body genres as low is the perception that the body of the spectator is caught up in an almost involuntary mimicry of the emotion or sensation of the body on screen along with the fact that the body displayed is female’ (Williams p 704). The analysis also draws on humanities-orientated cultural theories of disability, including Davis (1995), Linton (1998) and Siebers (date). These theories have been productively applied to literature and film. Examples include Mitchell and Snyder’s work on narrative and disability (2000), and Smith’s book length study of the ways in which early 20th century discourses on eugenics fed US horror cinema of the 1930s (Smith, 2011). The analysis is also shaped by various contributions to Chivers and Markotic’s edited collection of essays on the ‘problem body’ on screen (2010), especially Snyder and Mitchell’s chapter, which builds on Williams’ work in order to discuss the ways in which representations of disability are leveraged for the sake of affect within body genres. Engaging with Williams’ work on gender, Snyder and Mitchell find ‘a similar utility for explorations of disabled bodies as staple characteristics within these popular formulas’ (p 185), and they go on to argue that ‘body genres are so dependent on disability as a representational device […] that each formula can also be recognized by its repetitious reliance on particular kinds of disabled bodies to produce the desired sensational extremes’ (p 185). Within generic horror, they argue, these bodies are excessive, monstrous and disgusting (p 188) and they ‘serve to cement longstanding associations of stigma with bodily difference’ (p 192). Methodologically, this account of Dead Space combines textual and structural analysis (see Carr 2009) generated by a culturally situated player-analyst. The analysis attends to the textual aspects of the game (threads, themes, image; the game as played) and aspects of game structure (the game as designed). Dead Space is set on a marooned, gore-smeared spacecraft. Plot-wise, it resembles science fiction films that incorporate elements of horror, including Alien (1979) and Aliens (1986), Total Recall (1990) and Event Horizon (1997). The game depicts a future where human scientists meddle with death, the alien and the sacred with disastrous results. Various narrators within the game prove to be unreliable (as do corporations, colleagues, doctors, and government). Technology is depicted as crucial to human survival. The playable protagonist is Isaac Clarke, an engineer who progresses from one broken machine to the next, repairing the ship and culling undead monsters. Starting a new chapter, Isaac has just disembarked from the ship’s public transport system into a previously unexplored section of the ship. He receives an update from his commanding officer: some part of the ship is broken, and the team’s survival depends on Isaac being able to find it, and fix it. Screenshot from http://www.visualwalkthroughs.com/deadspace/deadspacewalkthrough.htm Like many horror survival games Dead Space is composed of sequential chapters, each built around an overarching goal that is broken into a set of missions. Each of these missions is set in a particular area of the ship, including medical clinics, engine rooms, or the bridge. In each case, the player is presented with a series of puzzles that must be solved using Isaac’s capacities and tools in combination with any on- site resources (levers, machines, engines). For example, making a necessary repair might first involve locating a key or an access panel in order to restore gravity. His abilities are repeatedly tested, demonstrated and performed (in tandem with the player’s). The failure to act effectively results in Isaac’s physical damage or death, and the temporary removal of the capacity to act at all. While Isaac occasionally dies by misadventure or industrial accident, most of his deaths involve ambush by the undead Necromorphs. The Necromorphs ensure that Dead Space functions as horror. They are not straightforward depictions of impairment. Yet the manner in which they function relative to Isaac, the deviance of their bodies, the ways that they are associated with medical research and technologies, and their spectacular ‘freakishness’ all evoke discourses of disability. Dead Space’s undead have unpredictable, wounded and distorted bodies, and these bodies are involved in the generation of particular kinds of affect. As Snyder and Mitchell have argued ‘Quite simply put: disabled bodies have been constructed cinematically and socially to function as delivery vehicles in the transfer of extreme sensation to audiences’ (Snyder and Mitchell, 2010 page 186, italics in original). Like horror games, horror films have frequently incorporated images of impairment. However its presence has generally remained masked or disguised, because: ‘The interpretation of impairment as metaphor for social otherness permeates critical understandings of horror film’ (Smith p 25). Because of this interpretive convention, critics have persistently cast impairment as a sign of some other variety of otherness, in a move that ‘accomplishes its own repression of the monster’s material form and of the culturally and historically specific notions of disability that make horror’s metaphors possible’ (Smith p 27). Perron (2009b p 5) describes generic horror survival as ‘horror-based third-person action-adventure games’ that incorporate various conventions from horror cinema, and that succeed critically and commercially when they evoke sensations including discomfort, anxiety, fear and tension. In addition to being structured as an action adventure game, and functioning as horror survival, Dead Space is a science fiction. This is significant to Dead Space, and to discourses of disability, because science fiction involves the ‘mapping of social relations as they are created and changed by new technological modes of “being in the world”’ (Sobchack, cited by Kuhn, 1999, p 3). As a science fiction, Dead Space depicts a particular social organization: it is set on

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