Diversity and inclusion have become huge gaming discussions in the past decade, and with good reason. More people are playing, talking about, and making games than ever before, and everyone has strong feelings about what they’re playing, or if they’re able to play at all. And, of course, those discussions comes with their own backlash.
The frustrating thing is that discussions about disabled representation in games often feel like an afterthought, compared to other axes of marginalization. It’s much more common to talk about whether or not games are playable by those with disabilities than what the content in the games themselves say or imply about disabled individuals. But both conversations are just as important.
With that in mind, as the 2010s draw to a close, it’s worth looking back on some of the games that stand out for their representations of disability, in both positive, but more often negative, ways.
The Bad
It’s worth noting that by “bad,” I do not mean the game is bad. I’ve enjoyed almost all of the games listed here. These notes are meant to be part of a conversation, not a condemnation. Nor are any of these lists meant to be exhaustive; they are merely meant to show specific aspects of disabled representation in gaming.
Life is Strange
Dontnod’s Life is Strange managed to do a lot of positive things. The queer relationship between Max and Chloe at the heart of the game resonated with a lot of people, and its narrative included conversations or depictions of abuse, assault, and suicide that were provocative but didn’t feel edgy for the sake of edge.
But the way the creative team handled both disability and mental health were an absolute nightmare.
For most of the game, the primary antagonist is Nathan Prescott, a violent, obnoxious rich kid who relentlessly bullies, and in one case even murders, other characters in the game.
It turns out that Nathan is undergoing intense psychiatric treatment and is heavily medicated for both schizophrenia and bipolar disorder. Instead of this being used to help the audience sympathize with Nathan, it’s used as a quick way of conveying the basic idea that this guy sure is a dangerous psycho.
It turns out he isn’t the main antagonist of the series, but by that point, the imagery of mental health problems has already been used to paint him as much more deranged and evil than just a teenage boy struggling with his mental health. But the issues are portrayed as being linked, despite the fact that those with mental health struggles are far more likely to be victims of violence than perpetrators of it.
“Most people with mental illness are not violent and only 3% to 5% of violent acts can be attributed to individuals living with a serious mental illness,” MentalHealth.gov states. “In fact, people with severe mental illnesses are over 10 times more likely to be victims of violent crime than the general population.”
Pop culture loves to link mental health with violence, but in doing so it often creates the belief in a connection between the two that simply does not exist in real life.
The Good… ish
These are games that do some things well, while still falling into some well-known traps when it comes to showing disabled characters in their stories. Let’s dive in.
Dishonored: Death of the Outsider
The Dishonored series’ Billie Lurk is a fantastic character. A commoner with a troubled history, she serves as a contrast to the supernatural political struggles of the rest of the series, and so it was exciting when she was finally given center stage in Dishonored: Death of the Outsider, a standalone expansion to Dishonored 2.
On the one hand, Billie Lurk is canonically a black, queer, disabled woman, and her intersectionality made sense with her role within the game’s universe. In a series that focused on the world’s royalty, nobility, and the rich, Billie represented everyone else, and showed how they were brushed aside by the magical scheming of the upper crust. Arkane put a queer, black, disabled woman on the cover of the latest game in its flagship series. That’s a huge deal, on its face.
And yet I can’t help but feel that Death of the Outsider betrayed Billie’s status as a disabled character. In Dishonored 2, a time travel-focused mission can, if played in a specific way, restore Billie’s arm and eye. It’s just one outcome of many for that mission, and is by far the easiest to miss, requiring you to save a specific character at a specific time in a level that’s already confusing. Yet it is considered the canon outcome in Death of the Outsider, which means Billie starts the game with her eye and arm intact.
The game then brutally and violently rips away Billie’s eye and arm again for what seems like shock value, and a hint of body horror that could’ve been avoided by just having her start the game disabled, and replaces them with the magical artifacts that give her new abilities.
In effect, a disabled character is ‘fixed’ through time travel, disabled again in a traumatic way, and then “fixed” again before she is considered a viable Dishonored protagonist. There is no reason why Billie couldn’t have been just as skilled and powerful with her disabilities — this is a world of magic, after all — but Arkane decided that she needed all four limbs and both eyes fully functional to be a hero.
Wolfenstein: The New Order
Wolfenstein: The New Order is special because it gave us not one, but two disabled characters in its central cast. Max Hass and Caroline Becker.
Hass suffered a traumatic brain injury as a child and has since had a large portion of his skull removed, leaving him with a visible dent in his head. Meanwhile, Becker uses a wheelchair to get around, while still being the closest thing the group has to a respected leader.
It’s really, really nice seeing disabled people take such a core role in Wolfenstein’s firmly anti-Nazi message, as the suffering that disabled people were subjected to by the Nazis is an often underdiscussed aspect of history.
Disabled people were one of the groups persecuted by the Nazis, and disability in general was seen as a burden that made Germany weaker. From 1933 onwards, long before the second world war began, forced sterilization programs were put into effect by the Nazi regime. Six years later, in 1939, the T4 program was started, and sterilization turned into mass execution of disabled people through either gassing or lethal injection. It is believed that 275,000 disabled people were killed by the Nazis.
Wolfenstein could have simply said “Nazis are bad, let’s go shoot them” and that would’ve been a totally valid philosophy for the game. But MachineHead Games managed to provide immense catharsis to myself, and I’m sure many others, by showing those who are often forgotten by history in the real world come together to tear down the game’s fictional Nazi regime.
Yet Max Hass falls into the same annoying trope as characters like Lenny from Of Mice and Men or Hodor from A Song of Ice and Fire: intellectually disabled, but superhumanly strong, and thus useful as unskilled labor or servants. Hass’ strength is why he continues to have a place in the group, and his characterization leans into the idea that some disabilities somehow create inhumanly strong, but nearly unthinking, human beings.
Becker, on the other hand, is ultimately given the Wolfenstein version of an Iron Man suit that turns her into a cybernetic super weapon. Games, and the animation within games, have literally limitless possibilities, and yet the only way MachineHead games could picture Becker being viable to the group in battle was to fix her legs with technology and let her jump and fly. Both characters feel like a step in the right direction, as well as a missed opportunity.
The Great
These are the instances of disability in video games that I just love, and that help show the way forward for everyone else. This is how to do it well.
Borderlands 2
I have to mention how excellent the Borderlands series has been in its disabled representation.
The first game included T.K. Baha, a character I adored. A blind character who radically, and assertively, used his disability to make able people uncomfortable through humor, subverting the presumed pity placed upon him as a disabled character? Excellent. Then he’s murdered and strung up, of course. Because gaming has a history of introducing interesting disabled characters, and then finding a way to either “fix” them, or kill them off after humanizing them as a way to shock the player.
But then Borderlands 2 introduced Sir Alistair Hammerlock. Hammerlock is a cyborg — his arm, leg, and eye were all lost in various hunting escapades — but he’s also a canonically gay man of color who has actual romantic relationships across the games he’s in. What’s more, Hammerlock thrives across the Borderlands games.
He isn’t murdered or traumatized like so many Borderlands characters are, and he has a life that is developed and varied. He has exes, grudges, family problems, and even gets a new boyfriend in Borderlands 3. And it’s all done with a level of detail and respect not afforded to many others in the Borderlands cast, not to mention how rare this is in any form of pop culture, even today.
Borderlands still isn’t my cup of tea, but I adore Hammerlock and everything he represents. He gets to be a regular person, with a regular story. At least as regular as things get in the Borderlands franchise
Watch Dogs 2
The criminally underrated Watch Dogs 2 was jam-packed with well-handled diversity. While the game is best known for its exploration of race and law enforcement, it also fit in questions about class and, critically, disability. And you better believe those two issues are more closely linked together than many games would like to admit.
Josh is a quiet, focused hacker who is eventually revealed to have autism. Normally, this would be a firm eye-roll, as it could have been yet another example of the socially-awkward-computer-genius trope. Instead, Watch Dogs 2 handles Josh with care and and an attention to detail that more games, and pop culture in general, could learn from.
Josh feels like an autistic character written by someone with an understanding of autism. He isn’t written as one-dimensional, offensively blunt, or rude like other autistic characters in fiction tend to be. Instead he’s a quiet, anxious young man who takes comfort in the things he knows and likes, and the game embraces that.
Josh is a core part of the team, and his friends respect and understand his idiosyncrasies. He’s not played as a joke; he’s just another person suffocating under the weight of Blume Corporation.
How Things Could Be Better
Representation isn’t the be-all and end all of inclusion, but it is a major part of it. All the adaptive controllers or well-presented subtitles in the world won’t help disabled people feel included when they’re not being seen on the screen.
This isn’t a matter of “forcing diversity,” as some players may argue, but an issue of showing the world how it actually is, with the full range of human experiences, limitations, and triumphs. There’s no drama without adversity, and realistically portrayed disabled characters are an opportunity to add both into a game’s story.
We not only need writers to be more aware of how they present disabled people, we also need more disabled people writing our own stories, and we need publishers and developers to take a chance on them. The best defense against the stereotypes of the past is a creative team filled with people with many kinds of lived experiences they can bring to the art of making games.
Disabled people deserve representation, and we deserve to have a seat at the diversity and inclusion table. The last decade has been mixed for us, but, with a few adjustments, the next ten years could be a whole lot better.
