“A Whole ‘Nother Level of Nuts”: The Vilification of Mental Illness in Video Games
This is a featured guest article graciously written by Jay Maenhout. Jay can be found on Instagram (@jaymaenhout) or Twitter (@MaenhoutMusic).
SPOILER WARNING: This article contains major plot spoilers for the video game Danganronpa: Trigger Happy Havoc.
All images in this article except the feature image are screen captures by the author.
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Representation matters. Countless conversations are going on in the world today calling for more diverse casts in film, television, and other media. It feels good to see “yourself” in the media that you consume. This diversity matters not only for the live actors portraying particular roles but also for the characters they are playing. Though there has been much discussion surrounding positive representation in the casts of TV shows and movies, the same cannot be said for video games. In this article, I explore the problematic portrayal of a particular “mentally ill” antagonist — Junko Enoshima of the Danganronpa series — and how players’ interactions with video game characters are fundamentally different than observing characters in film and television.
Fluid Boundaries of the Real and Virtual
While many people may think of the words “real” and “virtual” as opposites, academic work on the subject has explored the relationship between the two and found far more similarities than differences. In her book Cyberspace Textuality, Marie-Laure Ryan argues that virtual worlds are very “real” in the sense that they are created by and interact with real people, and are inspired by the real world. If that’s the case, then problematic representations of “mentally ill” virtual characters have very real consequences. These consequences have an even greater impact on gamers than viewers of a movie or television show. Viewers are passive recipients of media who have no impact on what they are viewing; the movie or show will be the same every time they watch it. Gamers, on the other hand, are active participants in the media they are consuming. Just like a musician’s instrument or a painter’s brush, the game controller or computer mouse is an extension of the player’s own expression and decisions.
“Crazy” Killers
Since we now know that virtual characters can have real-world impact, it becomes clear that game developers bear a responsibility to create characters whose personalities or character traits do not harm or distort the player’s perception of a real-life group of people. Unfortunately, this responsibility is often not met, as there are countless examples of video game antagonists whose evil actions are “explained” via their mental illness. Such is the case for Junko Enoshima, the main antagonist of Spike Chunsoft’s Danganronpa: Trigger Happy Havoc.
There is absolutely no doubt that Junko is evil. She is responsible for imprisoning fifteen high-school-aged children and forcing them to murder one another for a chance at being released. Yet, the developers must have decided that Junko’s actions are not enough to condemn her, as they also make her exhibit a number of constantly shifting personalities in the vein of Dissociative Identity Disorder. This leads to a potentially dangerous conflation in the player’s mind of violence and mental illness. Though, as studies have shown us, people with mental illnesses account for only 3–5% of violent crime; at the same time, people experiencing mental health challenges are over 10 times more likely to be victims of violence.
Even the other characters in the story are far more preoccupied with Junko’s mental illness than her evil deeds. Junko is the leader of an international terrorist organization and has killed countless people. Despite this, the protagonists refer to her with phrases like “abnormal” and “a whole ‘nother level of nuts.” It is not her condemnable actions they are fixated on, but her mental illness, her constantly shifting personalities. In their eyes, she is not “evil,” she is “crazy.” Even Junko herself sees her multiple personalities as a disease.
The true “disease,” here, is the corroding of public opinion regarding mental illness through campy, irresponsible characterization. It is, unfortunately, no mistake that so many antagonists in fiction are written with a mental illness. We are led to believe only a sick person, a “crazy” person, would commit unspeakable acts. These types of portrayals of the “mentally ill” in fiction surely translate to violence toward and neglect of those with mental illnesses in reality. It is our job, then, to deconstruct the notion that those with mental illnesses are violent and unpredictable.
It is a matter of life and death.
