The Mountains We Make: Eine medienästhetische Analyse psychischer Störungen in CELESTE
The Mountains We Make: Eine medienästhetische Analyse psychischer Störungen in CELESTE
Abstract
CELESTE (Matt Makes Games 2018) is a game about climbing a mountain. But it is also a game about protagonist Madeline’s struggle with her mental disorder, specifically depression and anxiety attacks. Embodied by a dark doppelganger named Part of Me, Madeline’s disease makes her perilous climb almost impossible and fights her every step of the way. By primarily externalizing mental disorders on a narrative, visual, and ludic level, CELESTE presents an innovative and differentiated way of depicting depression as a form of functional disorders within the game text. As a theoretical starting point, the widely recognized biopsychosocial model has been chosen in which human beings are defined as whole entities and the relationship between health and disease is described as a dynamic process where one does not cancel out the other. Media portrayals of mental illness – in films and on television, as well as in video games – can be stigmatizing. But with their specific quality of interactivity and the recipient as an active subject, video games have the power to let players experience disease in an innovative way which, in this article, will be exemplified with the video game CELESTE.
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Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 Generic
Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 Generic
Keywords:
mental illnessvideo game