This dissertation proposes a speculative design framework called Reparative Game Creation, a process of creating interactive media focused on healing, emotional acceptance, and accessibility for the psychosocially disabled. The goal of this work is to recognize the current massification of psychosocial disability, mental illness, and debility and to orient the design and use of interactive media towards healing and care, rather than towards a slow debilitation as is the current convention. This dissertation deviates from previous research on videogames and mental illness that align with medical institutions and medicalized models of health, instead coming from personal experience, process-based art, and critical disability studies. In this mode, videogames are less a tool for systematically decreasing anxiety and depression, as if the goal is to overcome psychosocial disability and shed all negative feelings, but instead positions game design as a potential avenue for interactive practices that build towards creating a more livable life through providing moments of self-reflexivity, connection, bodily sensation, and acceptance. The creative project portion of this dissertation, UnearthU, is a videogame about wellness culture, perfectionism, and healing. The written portion lays out the principles of Reparative Game Creation, theories key to them, and explores examples from other game designers making art about and with psychosocial disability. These principles include not only how a reparative game could operate, but consider the process of making reparatively as equally, if not more, important. Reparative Game Creation is part practical design, part analysis, and part utopian dreaming of an alternate media landscape, one that helps sustain life rather than drain it.

Some media archaeologist look to the Victorian Era as the starting point for the Digital Era because the nineteen century telegraph laid the conceptual groundwork for the internet and solved electrification. However, Victorian innovations relied on the conductivity of copper, and the Bronze Age is when humans first mastered wide-scale copper production. In the Bronze Age Levant, two closely related love and sexuality goddesses were associated with this production: Hathor (from Egypt) and Astarte (from Canaan). Thus this research project positions the Bronze Age period as the early dawn of the Digital Era, and it mytho-poetically re-casts these feminine deities as “proto-cybergoddesses” because of their role, as per ancient belief systems, in digital media technology history. This exploration of copper as an agential actor in the history of networked information systems (telegraph, telephone, internet) relies on methodologies from media archaeology, elemental media, posthumanism, agential realism, and Archaeology. This story then serves as a case study for a Virtual Reality cyber-archaeology game. Cyberarchaeology trends encourage the creation of multi-sensory projects that leverage the affordances of multi-media and strive to create embodied experiences. Few projects dare, however, to speculate about intangible heritage. As an exception, this game is the result of textual research in Archaeology, cyber-archaeology, and Human Computer Interaction; international archaeology museum research; documentary field work at archaeology sites in Israel and Cyprus; interviews with archaeologists and curators; collaborative design ideation using improvisational theater techniques; and a collaboration with Serious Games engineering graduate students to realize a playable prototype. In “Cult and Copper,” players use their own breath, via a simulated breath interface, to control a smelting fire and ensure a successful copper smelt. Early smelting methods, which employed blowpipes to heat smelting furnaces, required deep and sustained breathing techniques. Thus this cyberarchaeology game probes, what if altered states manipulated by breath were one of the reasons shamanism and smelting were linked? The game facilitates an experiential awareness of smelting’s physiological effects via breath, encourages players to ask questions about intangible heritage aspects of copper smelting, and motivates further scholarly investigation.