| Popis: |
This project examines the centrality of resilience rhetoric in efforts to institutionally instrumentalize video games for addressing mental disability and mental health. Institutions have increasingly turned to video game technologies for addressing mental disability and/or mental health in pedagogical contexts. Yet there has been little critical consideration of the assumptions about mental disability informing these gaming technologies. I suggest that discourses of mental disability, mental health, game design, and institutional implementation construct an affective rhetoric of pain. For example, designers might harm the player for rhetorical effect, and/or highlight how play can minimize pain and foster happiness. These games therefore raise considerations of resilience, or the psychological ability to “bounce back” from traumatic or painful experiences (APA, 2012). Through a multidisciplinary framework of feminist, queer, and crip approaches to video game rhetoric and institutional critique, I trace how neoliberal resilience rhetoric has been used to justify video games for pedagogical and institutional use by managing or mitigating mental disability. I specifically identify a spatial principle I call the resiliency paradox: a normative and dominant rhetorical logic that normalizes pain and/or violence under the pretense that a space is safe. The resiliency paradox sustains ableist institutional structures and game design principles by denying institutional reform. By examining, critiquing, and ultimately rejecting the resiliency paradox, I identify opportunities for resistance through play while affirming differential movements through institutional space. |
