Becoming, Not Being: Rethinking Mental Illness at theCrossroads of Videogame Representation
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Traditional frameworks for analyzing mental illness in media frequently rely on fixed representations that treat complex conditions as metaphorical devices, narrative problems to be solved, or stable markers of difference.When applied uncritically to video games, these paradigms risk flattening the medium's distinctive procedural and interactive capacities.Instead of recognizing that games can model mental illness as a lived, relational, and evolving phenomenon, conventional approaches tend to frame it as a static trope-an obstacle to overcome or a puzzle to resolve before the story's conclusion.Such readings neglect the unique affordances that video games offer, particularly their ability to engage players directly in dynamic experiences that resist easy categorization.This paper argues that Gilles Deleuze's concepts of "becoming" and "assemblage" provide a more productive framework for depicting mental illness in video games.By drawing on a non-representational approach, we can move beyond the limitations of symbolic depictions and toward an appreciation of mental illness as an emergent, affective multiplicity that unfolds through the interplay of the videogame, player, and sensory design.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.003 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".