Patreon

I've made a decision.

This project has fallen by the wayside recently with various other responsibilities and plans taking precedence, but I don't want to abandon it because I think that there is good work that I can do here. I don't intend to abandon it, but I have set up a Patreon to help fund the costs associated with it (in terms of research materials, books and games that I might not otherwise have played) and to help with pushing it up in my list of priorities. I don't expect people to pledge very much, and I won't be paywalling anything I write but if you did want to show support it would certainly help with getting this blog moving again. More information can be found over at my Patreon page.

Thanks for reading, and let me know any comments you might have about this decision.

Still Here

I am still here and I am still writing. I have, as I think I've mentioned before, a post on the cultural position of asylums in the pipeline which, once completed, should be the last of the theoretical and background posts that I need to write before I can start exploring the implications of some of these representations in games, both as a part of the media landscape and as objects of play. The problem is that, the more reading I do the more reading I want to do. Having finished Foucault's Discipline and Punish I immediately started on Goffman's Asylums. Meanwhile my fiction reading list has included One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest and Thomas Mann's The Magic Mountain. I even found myself contemplating reading Norwegian Wood, which I have only seen the film of, to ensure the accuracy of what will probably be a single sentence of comparison.

I am basically using this blog as an excuse to motivate myself to do things that, although I enjoy, are very easy for me to put off doing in the face of the opportunity of staring at a wall and experiencing the existential dread of the nihilation of nothing and feeling really sad about everything. Also making sure that I don't only read Horus Heresy novels whilst eating crisps in front of BBC4 quiz shows.

Having said that, I have still been writing. The Ontological Geek has just posted the first of what should be an ongoing, if irregular, series on the links between tabletop and video games, with a particular focus on Dungeons & Dragons. I'm also working on another exciting piece that I will hopefully be able to talk about more in a few weeks' time.

I Recorded a Podcast on Asylums for The Ontological Geek

I was a guest on the Ontological Geek's second podcast, which is posted here. I had a really great time recording it with Oscar, Aaron and my fellow guest Rowan and I think we covered a lot of interesting ground. Especially the bit about Zuma's Revenge. The lead topic for the episode is the depiction of asylums in games - a topic I will be writing about in more detail myself sooner or later - and so should be of interest to readers of this blog. I would like to thank Aaron and Oscar for inviting me to join them and especially Oscar for doing all the hard work of editing and in Aaron's case staying up til four in the morning to talk to us Europeans.

One of the things that became really clear to me during the course of the discussion, or rather was reiterated for me, was how crucial it is to avoid one-size-fits-all thinking when it comes to mental health issues. Despite the fact that they are both covered under the aegis of psychiatry and neuroscience, and are both often defined with recourse to the DSM, I think that it is clear to say that mine and Rowan's conditions (for want of a better word) affect us and our lives in very different manners. As such our fears and expectations of, as well as our hopes and requirements from, the mental health system are necessarily different in many respects and negotiating and teasing apart these differences is vital if we are to ensure that people get the support, help and the respect that they need and are entitled to.

The idea of neurodiversity is a serious one and should be considered in the same way as physical diversity, i.e. as a way of conceptualising that people have a range of different needs, rather than as a buzzword signifying yet another binary division. I discussed an earlier draft of this post with him and Rowan was very clear that he is Aspie and that that is a disability (in that it is something that abled society uses to deny him agency) whereas I view my depression as something closer to a recurring illness, as well as a madness, and that these are both valid ways of approaching these conditions.

Madness as anything undesirable.

We also discussed briefly the sort of people-first language which I delineated in an earlier post and how that is not relevant in the context of autism-as-disability. I had never really intended to cover, or to have this blog as something that could be viewed to cover, autism because I don't think that it can necessarily be described as a mental illness, although even now I’m not sure about this distinction. However, I hadn't really thought of it as a position that needed to be made clear, mainly because my knowledge of autism and of disability is so limited. As such, I still stand by my previous post but with the caveat that I'm talking about one thing but that people may be reading it as about something different. The history of institutionalisation is one that amply illustrates the way in which disparate and discrete categories can become conflated in both the public and the bureaucratic mindset to no-one's advantage.

There is a long history of, as part of and alongside the labelling and diagnostic project of psychiatry, a move towards hierarchising those with mental health problems and setting them against one another. Experiments such as Milton Rokeach's on the 'Three Christs of Ypsilanti', where three men who all believed they were Christ were grouped together and essentially left to fight it out, have entered the folklore of mental illness. A trope which we briefly mentioned in the discussion was that of asylum inmates, who have been clearly coded as mad, who profess that they are sane whilst everyone around them is not. Whilst this is sometimes done in order to present the argument that 'maybe everyone is really insane' it just as often serves to promote a race amongst these fictional patients toward the heavily normalised (and clearly rewarded, most frequently with freedom) end-state of being sane; a race that it is explicitly suggested is codified as zero-sum: you win it by throwing your fellow competitors under a bus. As with all tropes these ideas bleed through into common parlance and knowledge and are reinforced by then being shown again and again, taking on a truth value quite divorced from the original observation that will have led to the first usage.

Participating in this discussion, and working through the points it raised up, has helped me to come to realise how important it is to resist that, often internalised, competition. (Marketplaces of internalised competition and the damage they do to unity is a key part of feminist theory and I'm somewhat disappointed with myself that I've only just applied it to this situation now.) It has also helped me to understand and contextualise my own reactions to this competition arising in and affecting my life. These include things as simple and hidden as the sense that being on or off drugs, or in or out of therapy are more or less desirable states for any external reason to a person’s own well-being, as well as the more obvious badges of ‘honour’ such as never having been hospitalised.

I want to mention briefly a specific piece of writing by Jordan Erica Webber, in issue 3 of Five out of Ten magazine. I reread it in preparation for the podcast but it has also been playing on my mind in a nagging fashion since I first read it a few months ago and I single it out not to attack the writer but because I think it illustrates perfectly what I have been talking about just now. Webber, who has Asperger's Syndrome, describes discovering something about an important character in Borderlands in what is for the game itself an apparently throwaway aside.

"... we’re using our headsets to abuse the characters rather than each other. In this case, we’re undertaking missions for Patricia Tannis, whom we hate because her mental instability caused her to betray us in the previous game. She deals out our next task with a typically psychotic comment, and the mission description itself – which doesn’t come from her – reads:

How did an insane introvert with Asperger’s manage to survive in Sanctuary?

My body reacts like I’ve seen a horrible accident too far away to intervene."

What is interesting to me is that the exact same feeling of sickness that Webber goes on to describe is what I myself felt reading the article. It feels as if, whilst invoking the psychiatric system she has been a part of since childhood, Webber separates her own condition from a morass of conditions that can be described without much reflection as insanity and which are presented as valid reasons to hate or devalue the experience of a character. It is only when the specific diagnosis is given that she seems to make the leap toward association and wants to elevate the character from stigma and stereotype, ending the article with the note that Tannis is ‘partly unlikable, partly insane, and partly a bit like me.’

I spoke to Webber and she was dismayed to discover that this was what I took away from the piece. On the subject of having a ‘valid reason to hate’ Tannis she remarked that it was the betrayal that she had been referring to and that the the reason for the betrayal is being presented as a valueless aside for imparting extra information relevant to the thrust of the argument. However, I could only read the sentence quoted above as implying the ‘mental instability’ to be a causal factor in the betrayal that heightens rather than lessens the sting of it. In other words, I read it as saying that to be betrayed because of an illness is worse than being betrayed for the sound and logical reasons of the betrayer being a nasty piece of work. This stung because there is a long history of representation of mental illness as a moral failing or as being synonymous with evil or malice that the text, here, seems to me to be uninterested in countering.

Webber was clear that the article was about her internalised feelings of negativity about her own mental illness rather than any attempt to place herself above or to compete with other sufferers and I accept and am happy to stress that. I must also stress that I did enjoy and do recommend the article and its exploration of ambivalence to and acceptance of characters that are imperfect or offensive representations of the labels that have been used to define you. I also think, however, that this is an illustration of the internalised, and therefore often invisible, nature of the competition that I attempted to tease out above - an imposition of hierarchy which I myself have been, and no doubt am still, guilty of. Even the fact that I reacted like that, believing that Webber was until that point putting herself above ‘the typically psychotic’ Tannis is evidence of that.

As is Webber's eventual relationship to Borderlands, my relationship to her article is now ultimately fraught with contradiction. We are both glad for the opportunity to relate and for representation to be at least somewhat advanced, but reminded of the hold that the structures that seek to erase or delegitimise our experience still have. I am glad also that Webber took the time to speak to me about my concerns and to clear up the intention behind the words. Maybe the goal, the escape from the asylum as it is constructed both physically and metaphorically, should not be sanity as such; a badge and with it a special dispensation to join the outside world. Instead we need a meaningful engagement with and discussion of what either madness or neurodiversity, in all of their multifarious forms, might actually be.

Insufficent Memory

I have an essay in the latest issue of gaming and history e-zine Memory Insufficient. This month's theme is the history of ecology in games and there are two other essays, both really strong and interesting pieces, alongside mine which look at the flaws in the concept of natural balance and at visions of post-apocalyptic futures and how they relate to climate disaster. I've written a quite post-modern piece about the Gaia hypothesis (sort of), which is in a very different register to most of what I write for this blog. If you have an interest in games and like how I write then hopefully you will also like that piece so please do check it out.

On the other hand, if you read my piece in Memory Insufficient and ended up here via the bio then hello, nice to see you, and please note that this blog is nowhere near as post-modern or structurally complex as that essay. You can find out more in the links above, but the short version is that I write about representations of mental health issues in gaming and talk about my own experiences of depression and how they relate to my experiences playing games. I did write a somewhat post-modern blog for a while called Things I Failed to Do which is generally quite bad but has a few nice entries in it.

Also, if you like post-modern, heavily structurally significant essays on pop culture though I would recommend reading Philip Sandifer's blog, or for specifically game related work his long-abandoned Nintendo Project. Sandifer has definitely been an influence for me; not only do I really enjoy his writing I am indebted to it for demonstrating how to do the encoding-meaning-in-structure technique well and for generally getting me keyed in to the idea of blogging to a structure as a way of keeping writing as I was coming to the natural end of my small press comics phase.

A Little bit of Housekeeping

First up, I'd like to point out the tabs at the top of the page. Yesterday I set up a new one to go alongside the Further Reading page as a resource listing Games that feature madness either mechanically or thematically. I intend to keep adding to both these lists and will gladly take suggestions for titles I've missed. The games page doesn't have links because primarily because choosing a definitive resource on each title seems somewhat too subjective, but again I'd be willing to put something in if enough people shout.

Secondly, it's in the further reading tab, but if you found my take on Depression Quest interesting then you might also like this take by The Orts. I don't agree with everything it says, especially the slight anti-psychiatry stance that seems to push the, in my mind false, dichotomy between treating mental distress as illness and treating it as a part of your inviolable self. But it does say a lot of stuff that I agree with, and that I would say myself, and it does so more eloquently and more academically than I'm capable of.

Thirdly, the latest issue of the as-always excellent Memory Insufficient is on Disability and Games History. Of the three essays two are primarily focused on issues of mental health, while the third encompasses it in its overview of disability as a concept, and so the issue will be of particular interest to anyone who reads this blog. A couple of confessions: editor Zoya Street's article on sanity rules in D&D does reference this blog, and I did intend to write a piece for this issue but couldn't get an angle I was happy with sorted out in time for the deadline.

(I was planning on taking a look at how the merit and flaw system popularised in the World of Darkness games deals with disability by both quantifying it but also systematically compensating for it by allowing players to buy unrelated bonuses but I didn't get much father than 'that's really quite reductive' which is pretty un-interesting really, because roleplaying rules literally are attempts to reduce complex realities into a system.)

I have a few brief responses to the articles in the issue which I'll lay out here. I though it was interesting that in general all the essays worked within a conceptual framework in which the DSM and psychiatry are essentially synonymous. This is a common position and a useful shorthand, especially for some of the points being made about medicalization and normativity but, as I discussed here, I think things are more complicated than that and I sometimes worry that this shorthand can become a self-limiting axiom. I don't think this impacts on what the articles have to say in any significant sense, and I may also be reading it in wrongly, but I think as a critical position it might be worth bearing in mind.

I have to admit that I've never played with the rules from Unearthed Arcana, so as far as I was aware the only sanity system in D&D was that developed for Ravenloft. I will have to read into it some more. In some ways that just goes to show how large D&D is as an entity, as well as the scope of its ambition as a system. (Are there any sanity rules for the explicitly universal systems like GURPS or Rifts/Palladium? There must be, although I've only ever read the core rulebooks for either of those.)

Zoya Street's take on D&D is probably harsher than mine, I was quite pleased to be described as 'even-handed' as I sometimes worry I get too polemical, but I suppose my problem is that I've always thought D&D to be self-evidently a terrible system. That's not to say I don't enjoy it as a game, just that in some ways that enjoyment was hard won and involved a lot of ignoring the really stupid bits. The article also reminded me of the tribalism in RPG circles, where people are wedded not only to systems, but to the primacy of those systems' representational models.

D&D, and AD&D especially, is never going to describe anything realistically, or allow you to play or explore any concepts in a realistic manner, because as a project it is about imposing the D&D mathematical model onto those concepts and not the other way around. While this is not to say that it shouldn't be called out for doing so, which is something Street does very well, I suppose my position is that it can only be understood in the light of this dynamic. One day James Wallis will finally publish FRUP and I'll be able to point at it and go 'look, this is what you have done - this is the world your slavish rules-lawyering has implied.' Until then you'll just have to take my word for it.

And finally, I recently wrote a piece for The Ontological Geek about horror in roleplaying games. I looked at where horror is located and how game systems, including sanity systems, can mediate and generate that horror. It isn't strictly about mental illness but I hope that my rule-happy readers will find it interesting. The Ontological Geek is running a horror month at the minute and I heartily recommend having a look at what is coming out of that.