Dead Space combines representations of disability as threat, with depictions of able bodies, and opportunities to display and demonstrate ability. What Dead Space offers - in addition to compelling play - is an opportunity to explore the ways in which the idea of disability is used in horror games to generate generically appropriate sensations such as fear and dread. The game features bodies that are marked as monstrous, distorted, capable, and imperiled. Despite his high-tech prosthetic skin, he is in constant danger of going to pieces. The game’s protagonist, Isaac Clarke, is able and yet unstable. Representation, ability, disability, horror, abjection, excess, bodies, the clinic.ĭead Space (EA Redwood Shores/2008) is a survival horror game. At the same time, the game offers players the opportunity to display attributes that are culturally associated with able bodied status, including accuracy, precision and control. It is argued that these aspects of the game contribute to the generation of sensations associated with generic horror, including fear, anxiety and dread. Locales that are culturally associated with positivism and corporeal assessment (clinical and medical facilities) are tainted contaminated by the intrusions of uncontrolled, excessive and abject bodies. Through textual analysis, it is found that Dead Space represents the idea of disability as threatening, and able-bodied identity as conditional and precarious.

These are (1) the abject bodies of the game’s undead monsters, (2) the colourful nature of the protagonist’s deaths and the uncertainty of his existence, and (3) the extravagant amount of gore and blood on offer.

Three instances of ‘excess’ in Dead Space are used to structure the analysis. In her essay, Williams describes the pleasurably excessive and spectacular aspects of body genres. The inquiry is shaped by two essays in particular: Williams’s screen studies account of ‘body genres’ (1999) and Snyder and Mitchell’s disability studies extension of Williams’s work (2006). This paper focuses on representations of able bodies and disability within Dead Space. Ability, Disability and Dead Space by Diane Carr Abstract:

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