ABSTRACT
This chapter explores how the action-adventure game Night in the Woods helps players engage ethically with neurodivergence without ‘making them care’ in an oppressive manner. The video game offers an excellent case study on the potential role of videogames as a speculative medium to imagine neurodiversity-affirmative and disability justice-informed worlds. By turning to new materialist care ethics, the chapter argues that a care-ful approach is crucial if we want to use games to relate to another person’s lived experience and make sense of it. In this light, Maria Puig de la Bellacasa’s threefold definition of care is adopted to argue that NITW effectively includes each of these elements. Specifically, crip time functions as a way for players to make care-ful connections on the level of gameplay, storyline, and the ethico-political positioning of the game. The chapter explores the prominence of slowness and repetition in the video game and interprets them as neuroqueer affects. In the game, temporality functions as an affective structure that implicates the player in the task of building relationships both with Mae and through her with other characters. This offers an imperfect but imaginative exploration of what just disability futures might look like.
