UC Santa Cruz

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.