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 a mining ship owned by a corporation. It features themes of knowledge and power, and it explores ‘the cultural attitudes and competencies’ associated with technologies (Kuhn, 1999 p 3). Science fiction is not a game genre per se, and yet science fiction content is common within games, and games themselves have a particular relationship to technology. Gaming technology has been described as involving ‘seemingly perfected yet constantly perfectible machines’ (Therrien 2009 p 27). A similar interest in ‘perfectibility’ is present in Dead Space as upgradeable weapons, tools and armor. It is present in the player’s need to improve and progress. It is reflected in Isaac’s role as engineer, finder and fixer. [note 2]
The game is software played on hardware that involves particular arrangements of the player’s body, and which assumes particular kinds of physical and perceptual capacities. Playing Dead Space involves physical sensations. It involves onscreen and off-screen bodies reacting to one another in the presence of technology. Dead Space features representations of bodies marked out as monstrous, deviant, scrambled, augmented and professional. It depicts ability as crucial to survival, and structures ability into the game as a condition of progression. It depicts technology in particular ways, and associates technology with ability, restoration and agency. It offers a rich arena for the analysis of representations of ability and disability. This suggests why digital games like Dead Space might be of interest to disability studies, and why cultural theories of disability may be pertinent to the study of games.
Analyzing Dead Space
Screenshot from http://www.visualwalkthroughs.com/deadspace/deadspacewalkthrough.htm
Dead Space is set on a massive mining craft, the Ishimura. The ship is divided into specialist zones linked by long, ill-lit corridors. Many of these zones reflect the game’s interest in bodies, medicine and technology. The medical research facility, for instance, features promotional posters that propose radical prosthetics as the solution to nasty industrial accidents. The structure of the ship itself is apparently modeled on the body. Tasks in the bowels of the ship involve ejecting waste matter through a circular exit. In the lung-like hydroponics area there are problems with respiration and toxicity. Isaac spends much of the game traveling down arterial corridors, cleansing the ship of numerous infected and infecting undead.
The undead Necromorphs are mutated, twisted, damaged and transformed. They have insect-like movements and tool-like appendages. They employ non-human modes of reproduction (laying eggs in dead bodies). They are simultaneously dead, mobile and murderous. In these ways they resemble other monsters that have emerged from the overlap between horror and science fiction. Like these other monsters, they could be analyzed using theories such as Freud’s notion of the uncanny (1919/2003) or Kristeva’s theory of abjection (1982). The uncanny involves a jarring play between feelings of recognition, the familiar and the disconcerting, and it is particularly present when Necromorphs stagger towards Isaac bearing human parts that have been recycled in unconventional ways – for example, impossible bodies tottering on recognizably human legs, still dressed in boots and trousers. Kristeva’s theory of the abject involves the feelings of revulsion or discomfort generated by the blurring of categories. The Necromorphs evoke abjection through their mixing of life with death, fatal wounds with deadly appendages, and alien agility with undead flesh. They are grotesque, as theorized by Bakhtin and applied to representations of disability by Mitchell and Snyder: ‘Batktin’s theory of the grotesque crystallizes around his notion of “fusion,” in which the “monstrosity” of his subject allows it to accumulate an expansive series of references and meanings’ (2000, p 158) Grotesque bodies are all consuming, unfinished, peculiar and resourceful. More than mere inversion, the grotesque involves the collapse of the aspiration, spiritual or intellectual, into the material. Confusingly, while monstrously impaired, the Necromorphs are highly able (otherwise they would not provide the necessary challenge to the player). They remain agile and deadly in zero gravity, and are more at home in space than Isaac, who requires a prosthetic skin in order to function.
Medical imagery in Dead Space: Doctors and nurses, clinics and anatomical posters, babies-clones in tanks grown to provide replacement limbs, and encounters with an obsessed doctor. Screenshots from http://www.visualwalkthroughs.com/deadspace/deadspacewalkthrough.htm
The Necromorphs possess monstrous abilities, and they signal what is at stake for Isaac and for the player. Isaac’s abilities are depicted by the game, and structured into the game, as the best insurance against these unruly deviants. The undead appear in particular spaces, and contribute to the representation of Isaac by contextualizing and motivating his capacities and actions. They are what Isaac will become if he fails.
Isaac wears a space suit and his face is generally covered. He does not speak. His crewmates tell him what to do. They don’t ask him what he thinks. [Note 3] Much of the information the player does receive about Isaac is either delivered by his suit, or gleaned from his actions. The suit updates the player on Isaac’s health status and his available resources. Isaac’s suit works as a second, thick skin. It is armour and life support. It protects him from giant pincers, claws, teeth, tentacles, and various environmental hazards. It enables Isaac to function (walk, jump, breathe) in space.
Screenshots from http://www.visualwalkthroughs.com/deadspace/deadspacewalkthrough.htm
The suit also functions as a reward. Isaac accesses new suits as the player progresses through the game. When the relevant schematic is located as a pick-up it can be downloaded at one of the stores on the Ishimura, and a new suit purchased. At these points there is a brief cut scene where Isaac pops into an apparently Necromorph-free changing room. The door shuts behind him. It reopens, and Isaac emerges, flexing his shoulders and apparently satisfied with the upgrade. Such expressive gestures by Isaac are rare. The suit also functions as reward in that it each new suit is stronger and more protective, which means increased survivability as well as a more capacious inventory for Isaac and for the player.
When Isaac’s suit is punctured or penetrated, play halts and Isaac dies. At death Isaac shifts from being playable, to being viewed. He rarely just dies. His deaths often trigger cut scenes that elaborate on his demise, providing extra death throes, or gory details about the Necromorphs’ monstrous appetites. Isaac suffers multiple deaths-in-one: He gets stabbed, slashed, then suffocated, or he will be dismembered and then beheaded, and then chewed [Note 4]. His corpse is violated in various ways. Isaac’s deaths involve leaking, splashing and splattering, going to pieces, struggling and splitting up. When he dies, the game’s ‘camera’ (the player’s screen) is splashed with blood. This interest in overkill can be explored using the notion of the problematic as developed by Althusser, and summarized by Storey as follows (Storey, 2006/1997 p 57)
a problematic consists of the assumptions, motivations, underlying ideas, etc., from which a text […] is made […] One way in which a text’s problematic is supposedly revealed is in the ways a text may appear to answer questions which it has not formally posed.
Isaac’s suit and his deaths – thanks to the aforementioned overkill – can be read as over-determined or excessive. That is, as the symptom of a problem that infuses but is not actually articulated within the game. The problem is Isaac’s tendency to fall to bits, leak and explode, and this problem suggests that while the obvious role of Isaac’s suit is to keep things out, the crucial function of his suit is to keep things in. Isaac’s suit contains his body and when it is breached, punctured or penetrated, Isaac’s able body breaks, leaks or bursts. Snyder and Mitchell propose that in body genres such as horror, disabled bodies are positioned as producers of trauma or as threats to ‘the integrity of the able body’ (p 186). This integrity is what Isaac’s suit is supposed to support. This in turn suggests that one of the fantasies that fuels affect in Dead Space is the potential loss of bodily cohesion and control. For Snyder and Mitchell, these fantasies become meaningful, or persist, thanks to ‘shared cultural scripts of disability as that which must be warded off at all costs’ (p 186).
At the centre of Dead Space, then, is a body that has problems with permeability. Self-containment (and the agency associated with self-containment) is one of the things at stake, one of the things that must be demonstrated, and that gets lost at ‘fail’ moments. Then this permeability itself is situated within a particular context – the game as a whole – where various phenomena (including knowledge) are framed as either helpful or fatal. Knowledge depicted as bad or tainted includes medical knowledge, which is associated with biological manipulation, blood and gore, epitomised by a corrupted monster-generating maniacal doctor character (See Smith 2010 for a discussion of horror films, mad doctors and the perverted scientific gaze). Knowledge depicted as good is associated with the potential for survival and restoration: it includes technical, mechanical and applied knowledge (fixing things, safeguarding, repair, restoring order, purifying), as well as accuracy - both Isaac the engineer’s, and the player’s. The game depicts some augmentations as positive (wearable items that can be removed) and others as negative, especially those which involve biology, fusing, merging or mutating.
In ‘Body Genres: An Anatomy of Disability in Film’, Snyder and Mitchell find that horror generates sensation through spectacles of uncontrolled, excessive and abject bodies that are outside of respectability, and that illustrate the terms of acceptable physicality: ‘Bodies must remain within certain boundaries, and their “leakage” beyond such parameters violates social expectations of propriety (i.e., the appropriate self-mastery of one’ bodily functions, fluids, and abilities)’ (p 187). Snyder and Mitchell discuss the fantasies of ability and disability that circulate in culture, and ‘the fantasy of bodily control […that is] deeply seated in the desire for an impossible dominion over our own capacities’. [Note 5] Drawing on Foucault’s work, they argue that one of the achievements of adulthood involves subjects that are ‘responsible for policing their own bodily aesthetics, functions, and controls’ (Snyder and Mitchell p 187). They also reference Iris Marion Young’s work on the difficulties of reconciling professional identity with physical variability. Young explores bodily discipline and the performance of professional self, through references to 19th century scientific racism, notions of decorum, and ‘behavioral norms of respectability’ (Young, 1990 p 136). As this suggests, discourses of disability and ability connect with other aspects of the social self.
Isaac’s suit is a prosthetic that enables his survival, and thus his visibility, at the same time that it renders his actual body invisible. Excess is expressed in the physicality of the monstrous. It is also present in Isaac’s myriad and multiple deaths, when the external, penetrative threat of the monstrous combines with the difficulty of containment posed by his own body. Dead Space is a fantasy about ability, where the agentic body is at stake. The feelings potentially generated during play are associated with disability and loss of agency. In horror films, ‘fantasies of loss and dysfunction (maimed capacity) are made to destabilize the viewer’s own investments in ability’ (Snyder and Mitchell 2010, p 190) while in horror games, this destabilization and investment is reworked through constant tests and displays of ability. Williams writes that genres ‘thrive on the persistence of the problems they address’ (p 714). This analysis suggests that one of the problems addressed by Dead Space involves the anxieties associated with the maintenance of an able identity. Isaac’s abilities are displayed on screen, and through play become conflated with the player’s. In tension with this interest in ability and the maintenance of an able identity, are the threats, risks, distaste and losses that remain culturally associated with disability.
Implications and conclusions Williams’ work on body genres offers a politicized account of the relationship between the body onscreen, and the sensations and pleasures experienced by viewers. While aspects of William’s work on body genres have been applied to games, the cultural politics of her work and its relevance to questions of identity and the body, have not.
Snyder and Mitchell argue that understanding the bodily sensations produced by genres such as horror involves theorizing ‘psychic investments between characters and viewers, but also a scrutiny of the embodied conditions that play host to the generation of sensation in the first place’ (2010 p 186). In their discussion of the need for a re-working of the distinction between the material and the discursive within disability studies, Paterson and Hughes (1999) engage with examples of phenomenological literature in order to highlight the role of the body in meaning making. This is useful to consider in relation to one of the arguments made through this analysis - namely, that affect is embodied, and affect is generated using representations of particular kinds of bodies. It suggests the need for a theory of games and embodiment that acknowledges socio-cultural aspects of the body, and the links between these and meaning making. Accounts of embodiment within games that focus on game interfaces while using cognitive theory tend to imply a standardized body, and thus would not be suitable for addressing questions of culturally situated meaning making. A solution may be to revisit feminist theories of embodiment and situated knowledge production (such as Haraway, 1988), and to use these perspectives in order to further theorize the figure of the player-analyst.
There may be various ways to expand on the relationship between embodied interpretation, and the representations of bodies. For example, Bennett and Woollacott’s ‘reading formations’ encompass both reader and text, and involve ‘the situationally determined frameworks of cultural and ideological reference with supply the grids of intelligibility through which different groups of readers read and interpret a given text’ (Bennett and Woollacott, 1987, p 60, (previously applied to games in Carr 2009)). Like Williams, Bennett and Woollacott argue that the commercial success of a fantasy suggests cultural salience. Williams draws on psychoanalytic theory to explore the fantasies that inform relations between the embodied viewer, and the bodies on screen. While some psychoanalytic theory (abjection, the uncanny) fits the Necromorphs, Isaac seems implicated in a different kind of fantasy – more Foucauldian than Freudian. Isaac remains reliant on his suit and his able yet persistently threatened body does not manage to achieve stability. In Dead Space, perhaps it is not Isaac’s body that is constructed as neutral or unmarked, so much as his need for constant striving; his struggle to achieve and maintain a valid subject position in the presence of the invalidated.
As noted, there is an interpretive convention that permeates much writing on generic horror that involves regarding monsters as metaphors while overlooking their materiality and physicality. While monsters have been shrouded by metaphor, ability in games is taken literally and ‘hides in plain sight’ when it comes to critique or reflection. When ability is discussed, it is approached in terms of learning or in-game pedagogy. Approaching ability as a representation enables the analyst to denaturalize or ‘make strange’ the repeated skills assessment that is central to many digital games. Ability (constructed as something that can be acquired, tested, performed and demonstrated) is such a ‘given’ within games that its pervasiveness and its function in terms of the fantasies that games offer, have rarely been questioned. Similarly, the relationships between representations of ability, agency and able bodies, and damaged and impaired bodies, have not been studied – and yet a high percentage of figurative, narrative-orientated digital games parallel depictions of ability, with images of disability.
An advantage of framing ability as a representation is that it helps highlight the conceptual relationship between ability and disability. This analysis has attended to the materiality of monsters and their catastrophic impairments. Isaac’s attempts to remain able and whole have also been examined. The anxieties suggested by Isaac’s suit, including the idea that his material body is problem to be contained, disciplined or controlled in order to remain agentic, are redolent of the discourses pertaining to able and disabled bodies that circulate in culture. Dead Space is a horror survival game and a science fiction, and a disability studies reading of Dead Space suggests that bringing these genres together can involve marrying the embodied sensations and material distortions of horror, with the discursive social anxieties of science fiction. Dead Space, as it happens, is insistent about the significance of collision in general. Arriving spacecraft collide and intersect with the body of the Ishimura, rather than simply docking.
The relationship between science and technology is one of the themes of Dead Space. The forms of knowledge depicted as perverse are associated with radical medicine, biology, white coats and clinical environments, and implicated in the generation of abject and monstrous bodies. Isaac’s knowledge, by contrast, is mechanical. His abilities are supported by practical technologies, orientated towards task-based skills, and directed at repair (in the case of the ship) or dispatch (in the case of the monsters). These patterns create the backdrop against which disability as representation is played out. Games invest in the constructing, measuring, and demonstrating of ability, while using representations of damaged or distorted bodies in order to generate affect. Applying cultural theories of disability to games analysis makes these patterns visible and, as a result, makes it possible to explore and critique such constructions.
Acknowledgements: From the AHRC funded project titled Digital Games: Representations of Disability. Project dates: April 2013 – February 2014. The project aims include bringing disability studies perspectives to game studies and games analysis. For information: http://playhouse.wordpress.com/category/project-digital-games-representations-of-ability-and- disability/
An early version of this paper was presented as Carr, D. (2013) ‘Damage in Dead Space’, at ‘Gaming Culture’, a Contemporary Fiction Research Seminar, supported by the Institute of English Studies, Birkbeck dept for English and Humanities, University of London. 16/3/2013 http://events.sas.ac.uk/ies/seminars/332/Contemporary+Fiction+Research+Seminar
Notes 1. Distinguishing between impairment and disability is complicated when the topic is the representation of bodies. In Mitchell and Snyder’s Narrative Prosthesis the authors note the political value of conceptually pairing impairment with materiality, and disability with ideology - and yet they prefer ‘to try and avoid this theoretical partitioning off of the physical and the textual realms by contemplating their inevitable intersections’ (notes, page 179, Mitchell and Snyder, 2000).
2. New technologies potentially change the ways in which impairment is experienced but at the same time, the promotion of technology-as-solution involves the perpetuation of medical or deficit models of disability and the repeated implication that bodies that deviate from the norm require fixing. Most of the existing ‘games and disability’ research literature features clinical or medical models. One of the charms of science fiction is that is explores augmentation or mutation without inevitably depicting the altered body as deficient.
3. Taciturn avatars are a convention within action adventure games. See fan discussions of ‘silent protagonists’ for instance, and dismay that in Dead Space sequels Isaac becomes more vocal. Speaking personally, Isaac’s reticence was one of the things I liked about his character. While his crew- mates fussed about the odds of surviving and the prospect of being decapitated, Isaac obligingly got on with fixing the ship.
4. The death-by-overkill scenes are gross, playful, inventive and funny and thus mix penalty and failure, with pleasure (see 50 Ways to Die in Dead Space on YouTube). 50 Ways to Die in Dead Space http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1_C2iiFc8Ss
5. There are, for example, games and game advertisements that play up the links between suits and mastery (of self, others and entire environments), that frame it as an emphatically masculine problem, and which recognise the comic potentials of rampant over compensation (view for instance, this trailer for Crysis 3 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ugo3ZK8YIis )
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