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Git Gud: Video Games, Mental Disability, and Resilience Rhetoric

Sheehan, Ryan
http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=osu1620125053498597

Abstract Details

2021, Doctor of Philosophy, Ohio State University, English.
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.
Wendy Hesford (Committee Chair)
Margaret Price (Committee Member)
Ben McCorkle (Committee Member)
239 p.
Composition; Literacy; Rhetoric
video games, rhetorical theory, resilience, mental disability, affect, pedagogy

Recommended Citations

Citations

  • Sheehan, R. (2021). Git Gud: Video Games, Mental Disability, and Resilience Rhetoric [Doctoral dissertation, Ohio State University]. OhioLINK Electronic Theses and Dissertations Center. http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=osu1620125053498597

    APA Style (7th edition)

  • Sheehan, Ryan. Git Gud: Video Games, Mental Disability, and Resilience Rhetoric . 2021. Ohio State University, Doctoral dissertation. OhioLINK Electronic Theses and Dissertations Center, http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=osu1620125053498597.

    MLA Style (8th edition)

  • Sheehan, Ryan. "Git Gud: Video Games, Mental Disability, and Resilience Rhetoric ." Doctoral dissertation, Ohio State University, 2021. http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=osu1620125053498597

    Chicago Manual of Style (17th edition)

osu1620125053498597
368
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This open access ETD is published by The Ohio State University and OhioLINK.