Carceral violence at the intersection of madness and crime in Batman: Arkham Asylum and Batman: Arkham City

Abstract

The action-adventure video games Batman: Arkham Asylum (2009) and Batman: Arkham City (2011) draw on familiar comic book narratives, themes and characters to situate players in a world of participatory violence, crime and madness. In the first game, the player-as-Batman is situated in Arkham Asylum, a high-security facility for the criminally insane and supervillains that also temporarily houses a general population of prisoners from Blackgate Penitentiary. The elision of criminality and mental illness becomes amplified in the second game with the establishment of Arkham City, a combined facility that conflates asylum and prison, completely dissolving any distinction between crime and madness. We draw on Rafter’s conceptual framework of popular criminology to seriously interrogate the representation of violence, crime and madness in these games. More than simply texts offering popular explanations for crime, the games directly implicate the player in violence enacted upon the bodies of criminals and patients alike. Violence is necessary to move the action of the game forward and evokes a range of emotional responses from players who draw from personal experience and other cultural and media representations as they navigate the game. We argue that while the game celebrates violence and the brutal conditions of incarceration, it also offers possibilities for subversive and critical readings. While working to affirm assumptions about crime and mental illness, the game also provides a visceral and visual critique of excessive punishment by the state as a source of injustice for those deemed mad or bad.

‘You’ve met with a terrible fate, haven’t you?’: A Hauntological Analysis of Carceral Violence in Majora’s Mask

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Free Mo Robinson: citizen engagement in response to a crime event on social media

“…Cultural criminology has paid particular attention to the reciprocal relationship between crime and popular culture and the centrality of the media image in that process (Ferrell, Hayward, and Young 2008;Fawcett and Kohm 2019). It aims not just to explore the role of media in shaping public attitudes, but also to examine closely the "microcircuits of knowledge regarding crime, deviance and the societal reactions to these" (Websdale and Ferrell 1999, 349;emphasis original).…”

‘Gaming the System?’ The Merits, Myths and Realities in Understanding Prison Architect: Security, Rehabilitation and Violence as Represented in the World's Bestselling Carceral Video Game

“…However, despite their ubiquity as a setting in the media entertainment industry, their place in video games is more limited. Those who have considered prison use broader themes of representation (Fawcett & Kohm, 2019;Levan, Cesaroni, & Downing, 2019). Far less research has been conducted examining representations of prisons and punishment within one of the most popular forms of contemporary entertainment media (Marsh, 2009).…”

“…How might video games be considered in criminology in a more considered and thoughtful manner? This is a consideration which the cultural strand of criminology has arguably come to begin to grapple of late (Fawcett & Kohm, 2019). Such cultural criminology has begun to deal with the complexity of how games frame of reference wider knowledge about crime and its realities.…”