Using Mad Studies to Explore Ninja Theory’s Hellblade: Senua's Sacrifice
The following is an abstract for a conference paper:
British developers Ninja Theory took a swing with their 2017 videogame Hellblade: Senua’s Sacrifice. They combined two gaming genres that have never been artfully merged, at least not with such a deliberate eye to the ethics of the subject matter. The surface plot follows a popular hero’s-journey arc: An Orphean descent and return, in which Senua, a Pict warrior in 8th Century Scotland, enters Helheim to save the soul of her lover, slain by Vikings as an offering to their gods. So far so action-adventure. But the hero’s journey is complicated by a secondary element that, over time, becomes the game’s central dramatic locus: Senua suffers from what modern-day players will recognize as psychosis, a condition that populates her world with frightening hallucinations and a cacophony of internal voices (the player is one of the voices). Moreover, Senua is a pariah among her people, like many schizophrenics throughout history, including in our own time, so the Helheim she navigates feels eerily empty. Her clan conceives of her condition as a demonic curse that brings bad luck to the community, and in the end this proves a greater obstacle to Senua’s wellbeing than the schizophrenia itself. Although Senua personifies her condition as an encroaching presence she calls “the Darkness”—a slow but relentless pursuer whom she must avoid and eventually fight—astute players will note that the creature is voiced by the same actor voicing Senua’s father, Zynbel, when he appears in flashbacks. Zynbel isolated and abused her in her youth in order to rid her of the curse. Along the way we learn that her mother, Galena, was the clan healer who, like Senua, could “commune with spirits.” Though Galena regarded her own schizophrenia as a gift of insight and prophecy, the fiercely religious Zynbel had Galena burned alive to “save the village.”
Senua’s Orphean descent into Helheim operates on three distinct registers: It is at once a circular journey through one of the realms of Norse mythology, a popular stage for videogame storylines; a metaphor for processing guilt and grief over a lost loved one; and a spiraling in toward the “ground zero” of Senua’s psychosis, where she can finally face and define herself on her own terms, reframe her narrative in ways that promote stability and self-regard, and contend with the vestiges of trauma that haunt her. The game is a comparatively respectful representation of mental illness, made in collaboration with healthcare professionals and individuals with schizophrenia. It leverages videogames’ varied rhetorical strata, including its procedural rhetoric, to provide players with a compassionate, embodied experience of navigating a hazardous world with a neurodivergent brain. This paper uses a mad studies lens to explore the way Hellblade, while it falls short in a number of ways, nevertheless hints at the medium’s potential to promote empathy, challenge sanist narratives, and suggest different ways to frame and treat conditions that thrust people outside the shelter of normativity. Set in the distant past, the game speaks clearly and directly to our current cultural moment.