I am currently doing a PhD in arts at the university Paul Valéry Montpellier 3, about ableism in video games.

My thesis subject is :

Emancipatory video games, anti-ableism and utopia

Video games convey the dominant values of our society, and play a role in creating norms and standards. With procedural rhetoric and sociocriticism , we can annalyse how disability is represented in video games, and how an ideal abled-bodied and abled-minded individual is constructed. The influence of ableism and psychophobia can be found in games in their representations, in their systems of rules and in the game design habits, which are repeated from game to game in a way that is most of the time not conscious. Unlike the representations of disabled people which are stereotypical and dehumanizing, many games value gameplays centered around abledness performances, often with a transhumanist logic. Abledness is a dominant identity, which incorporates ideals such as perfect and stable health, productivity, speed, capital efficiency, and defines a human with the perfect capacity needed by capitalism and neo-liberalism. Opposite to the mainstream games, artgames allow us to create critical and political games. Can we create games emancipated from the ableist norms, heterotopic spaces centered on values such as theses of the Crip theory: slowness, failure, idleness, weakness, which could destabilize the dominant social order?

Key words :

Video game, ableism, psychophobia, utopia, artgame, abledness