ABSTRACT
Chronic health conditions are defined as ‘conditions that last a year or more’ and that ‘require ongoing medical attention’ or otherwise impact the daily life of an individual. Although analyzing games using chronic health criticism reveals weaknesses, silences, and stereotypes in many cases, some games are actively attempting to explore stories of people with chronic health conditions and allow these characters to act as protagonists. The idea that people with chronic health conditions are weak and that players want their protagonists to be strong limits their inclusion in games and sometimes causes them to be actively erased from texts. Despite regularly presenting perfect sites for exploring chronic health conditions, games regularly avoid depicting disability, neurodivergence, or mental illness in favour of relying on more typical models of power accumulation. When chronic health conditions are included in a text with limited mechanical or narrative significance, this is considered to be ‘incidental’ representation.
