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

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      Crime, Media, Culture: An International Journal
      SAGE Publications

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          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.

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          Most cited references32

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            Wasted Lives: Modernity and Its Outcasts

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              Carnal Thoughts: Embodiment and Moving Image Culture

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                Author and article information

                Contributors
                Journal
                Crime, Media, Culture: An International Journal
                Crime, Media, Culture
                SAGE Publications
                1741-6590
                1741-6604
                August 2020
                August 06 2019
                August 2020
                : 16
                : 2
                : 265-285
                Affiliations
                [1 ]The University of Winnipeg, Canada
                Article
                10.1177/1741659019865298
                0f2255d5-eeca-4135-8b0f-34d39477fc81
                © 2020

                http://journals.sagepub.com/page/policies/text-and-data-mining-license

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