Darkest Dungeons and Diagnosis as Disorder

I feel like the most damning thing I can say about Darkest Dungeon is that it's boring. Or at least that I found it boring. The repeated 'scene-setting' Lovecraft-lite voice-over dulls all creepiness and atmosphere into a grind of you-will-be-scared-now horror. The prevarication over death - I had a character go down to zero hitpoints something like 5 times in one fight and still not die - robs the roguelike idea of permadeath of any meaning. Eventually, after a disastrous expedition that was entirely my own fault - my first real failure of the game - I felt no urge to retry. I had not been punished just as I had not been tested; I had just been stupid and miscalculated and I was left with the same dungeon to grind through once again and I discovered I had no more interest in proving my worth.

That this is the most damning thing that I feel that I can say is ultimately the thing that upsets me most about Darkest Dungeon. It has, as its signature system, a horribly reductive and rather stigmatising sanity system (bolted onto a somewhat elegant morale system). But everything I've seen written about it so far has praised the quirk mechanic, even while sometimes maintaining that it has its problems, as a progressive step in the way that video games handle mental illness[1,2]. And it makes me feel small and angry and bitter: like my reservations are carping or as if I'm demanding everything now when I should be praising the progress that has been made. And so I resort to sniping about those aspects that I can securely criticise. To being damning about aesthetics and replayability. To talking about it in the most terribly game-centric way.

Culture is monolithic. It takes time and energy to shift even slightly and ordinarily I praise any progressive movement. The small, localised shifts that make the world just that little bit better, that make the next shift just that little bit easier are what I've realised work the best and are what I've dedicated my own small life towards. So why can't I celebrate Darkest Dungeon's small steps towards complexity and representation for people with mental illnesses? Because, fundamentally, I don't think that Darkest Dungeon does anything new. It is mired in decades-old RPG design and all that the automation of putting it on a computer does is  make the bookkeeping easier; and when mental health becomes relegated to a bookkeeping exercise, when the advances are based on more efficient crunching of variables and modifiers, then it should be clear that this does not help us understand pain and dysfunction and joy and the life that you lead when you are mad.

Darkest Dungeon's stress meter is fundamentally a morale rather than a sanity system, although sanity systems in general grew out of morale systems in the first place and Darkest Dungeon borrows back a lot of their flavour and understanding of the mind. The differences, in practise at least, are that sanity systems tend towards describing a single PoV character and, as with a health meter, reaching the bottom renders the character unplayable (I have written somewhat more extensively about this here and here). Morale systems on the other hand tend to model a group dynamic (the spread of panic or the steadying hand of a strong leader), are more dynamically affected by success or failure (as opposed to what is experienced), and tend towards mediating between the character and the player in a way that provides for the character's agency to overwrite the player's orders.

Morale systems grew out of tabletop and board wargaming, as a way of measuring how well troops under stressful situations would follow the orders of their generals. They have grown into a staple of the modern wargaming ruleset and an important factor in how a player controls their forces. From the command zones in Warmachine to the animosity rules that could have an entire  Orc and Goblin army squabbling amongst itself in Warhammer Fantasy Battle, morale can be deeply embedded in a game or a bit of flavour or both. Although morale systems do seem to be strangely absent from many real time strategy games (the videogame equivalent of tabletop wargaming), which may account for some of the novelty factor in discussions of Darkest Dungeon, they do turn up in things like the panicked soldiers in XCOM shooting wildly at either friend or foe.

The roleplaying game, the structured dungeon/overworld adventure as we know it, derived from tabletop wargaming. Many of the odd traditions and incongruous design choices that still pop up, both on tabletop and on computer, can be traced back to that genealogy, including concepts as seemingly basic as levels and hit points. But, just as interesting as the things that were pulled through from wargaming are the things that were left behind, and morale is one of these. Early editions of Dungeons & Dragons are specific that morale, a concept which would be familiar to its players at the time, should not be applied to the characters. The shift in D&D was that you embodied a single character rather than the general of an army, and the rules are clear that it is up to the player to decide if their character is bold or cowardly, if they wish to martyr themselves for the good of a cause or to flee to fight another day.

The early versions of D&D then were missing this nod towards the psychological impacts of violence and combat. Players, given the option, tended towards bold and calculating powerhouses. Meanwhile, although the option was suggested that a Dungeon Master might use morale to govern the monsters under their command it quickly left the lexicon and the rule books. And so monsters became as stubborn as players, throwing themselves onto the swords of their enemies in waves trying to choke them with their own blood, to wear them down so that maybe someone following can prevail (a process almost like that of trying to change the entrenched culture); a quirk of behaviour that almost no video game has since challenged or subverted. The zero-sum RPG was born.

Unsurprisingly almost as soon as morale, or rather more specifically a set of rules governing how people behave (because role-players like nothing more than rules, especially if there are tables to roll on included), was stripped from the system something was put back in to replace. The most famous of these, as well as possibly the earliest, was Call of Cthulhu's sanity points system (a direct and parallel analogue of the hit point system already in use), but there are many others out there. D&D itself experimented with madness in the standalone version of the Ravenloft setting, Domains of Dread printed as part of AD&D's 2nd edition. In this various events, horrific experiences and the stress of combat against unnatural foes, could cause a player to take fear, terror and horror tests. The more tests you failed the harder subsequent tests became until, eventually, something snapped and you picked up a permanent insanity. Is this sounding familiar? Domains of Dread was printed 18 years ago.

Even then, the idea of permanent, stackable 'insanities' that added colour as well as modifiers to a character was not something new. White Wolf's gritty urban horror games already let you purchase them at character creation to give you a few more points to spend on maxing out your stats. Call of Cthulhu was often house-ruled to allow insane characters back after a spell at a sanatorium, but forever changed by their experiences. I have a copy of an independently produced game called Asylum where the premise is that everyone is mad and locked in an asylum-city; you choose what specific diagnosis you get at the beginning of the game.

I should be clear - I like the stress system in Darkest Dungeon. I actually quite like the sanity meter system in  general when it is used intelligently and non-prescriptively. What I don't like, what I think is damaging and makes life worse for those with mental illnesses, is the use of diagnostic labels as flavour text on game modifiers. Or, even worse, the suggestion that diagnosis and illness are coextensive - that knowing the first will allow you to roleplay, to understand, the second.

The Domains of Dread book is remarkably interested in not being offensive, in providing a tool for Roleplaying, but it fails so badly it just makes me sad. Part of the failure is that it is a D&D supplement, and as such it can only model the world in a way that conforms to D&D's mathematics, a maths that abstracts experience in a way that is incompatible with the realities of mental illness. But the biggest, saddest failure is that they did loads of research, they just researched the wrong things. There is a huge section on dissociative identity disorders, or multiple personalities as they used to be somewhat pejoratively known, that is based on the utterly debunked work surrounding alleged satanic cults. It also relies heavily on the DSM, making the usual mistake of viewing it as a dictionary rather than a tool. It tries so hard to not reduce us to our most basic elements, to rob us of our humanity and replace it with our madnesses, even as it does exactly that, and it feels tragic to read now.

So, Darkest Dungeon isn't doing anything particularly new. But why should this be a problem, other than a slight annoyance at the people who are mistakenly calling it progressive. Essentially, it is just the same as the rest of the gaming industry and, for better or for worse, that seems a bad reason to single it out. Maybe that's my problem - I am irrationally annoyed with the game. I am irrationally annoyed that we haven't made any progress and that this lack of progress is being hailed as progress. It isn't even the fact that the quirks in Darkest Dungeon are so often fist-bitingly offensive, that they  are wrapped up in the language of sin and redemption (a classic stick with which to beat the insane) or that they can be 'cured' with a simple week in a darkened room at  the sanatorium. Its that they are presented in this way at all. This is what we need to work against if we are ever to break the hold that these reductive ways of thinking have on our media landscape. This is what we need to do if we want to be people, rather than a collection of labels and modifiers.


---
[1] http://www.pastemagazine.com/articles/2015/02/a-burnt-torch-darkest-dungeon-mental-health-and-lo.html

[2] http://ohnovideogames.com/i-like-darkest-dungeon

Both of these are great articles, by the way, and fascinating insights into other points of view on this game.

Dark Souls, Depression and Me

I thought I knew what I was going to want to say about Dark Souls before I started playing it. I knew it started in an asylum, usually coded in games and other media as a place of incarceration for the mad, and it centred around a concept of undeath as a meaningless and hollow existence of repetition without humanity. I had heard fans talk about it as a bleak world in which you struggle against madness, that this was coded as a descent, and I assumed that I would be writing about damaging representations of mental illness, of stigmatising depictions of the mad as violent, worthless and degraded. There is still, possibly, that article to be written, but having played it for some 25 hours by now that isn't the article I want to write. Dark Souls is a strange, elegiac game that borrows from the structure of RPGs but isn't one. It is slippery and gossamer, and it represents without representing. It is beloved of people I know to be depressed and I think I now know why.

The weirdest thing is how nothing changes. Even when you kill a boss the world just gets emptier. The rush of a major victory, a completed project, is swiftly swallowed by the continuation of life's grinding work and daily battles. Worse, it can never be revisited, either for the joy of a challenge or to test oneself again if the battle is felt to have been unfairly won.

I talked before about how I play role-playing games when depressed to experience the feeling of change; to know that change is both possible and meaningful even in some abstract sense. Dark Souls denies this bodily. There are changes happening within the world as you play - small subplots that play out around you and helpful souls who can be gathered around the Firelink Shrine, but it is thin and these people all seem as tired and despondent as you. They know that their actions too can only destroy, that they exist in a world centred on your own self destructive impulses and that all that they can do is watch and help and leave you to it. Their attempts to do more are what left them hurt, trapped and afraid, lost somewhere in the maze of your psychodrama; their release yours alone to grant them.

I'm on citalopram right now, which means that my lows are of a different quality to those I might have unmedicated. I am also in a low, or have been for the last week or so. Taken together this means that my motivation and concentration is completely shot, but at least I'm not having to deal with self-loathing and intrusive thoughts in any great respect. In this situation a good mechanical grind of a game is exactly what I need which is probably why I've been playing Dark Souls every night this week whilst for the month before it was much more on and off. But it is difficult to tell if the emotional distance of the game is inherent or a product of my medication.

I think that it is inherent to the game. The weirdest thing is how nothing changes. Even as you accrue rare weapons and pick up pre-placed item-drops the world just gets emptier. A corpse you looted reverts from a glowing beacon of promise to a dull reminder that what you got was probably not what you wanted anyway.

Hollow and hardy.

I have been playing the game primarily internally. I found myself rereading Flann O'Brien's The Third Policeman and will probably reread Robert Rankin's Sprout Mask Replica trilogy too as a supplement to my internal life with the game. I think I look more interesting, more embodied in myself, when I am hollow than when I am human. But there is nothing in the text to support this, beyond the mechanic of struggle. Humanity is a face, a front. It is something that must be maintained against all odds, that can be lost with a single mistake and is ultimately worthless for anything other than material gain. I find it better to embrace hollowness, to be at one with the world and not fight it. To allow my mistakes, the lows which I know that I will always have, to be themselves rather than the thing that destroys my careful house of cards, my constructed 'normal' life, my façade of sanity. "Because the best shield is to accept the pain, Then what can really destroy me?".

A pretence at being real.

For all of this, I don't really know anything about myself, or rather my character, in this world. It is strange, pertinent maybe, that I am referring to my character as myself as this is something I usually never do with RPGs. With RPGs I play characters and I make decisions based on what they would do, not me. I started with this in mind whilst on the Dark Souls character select screen but the brutal lack of choice coupled with the continuity of experience implied by the death mechanic has eroded any distance between my own and my character's point of view. We are contiguous in what we see and what we feel. We explore this world together and at the same pace - she is not a distinct being, able to benefit in her final form from my knowledge as a player and my manipulation of her timestream through judicious save states and cancelled futures. Where I fail she fails, and where she picks herself up again I must do the same.

And of course, the weirdest thing is how nothing changes. The same enemies patrol in the same patterns as ever. The joy of a new face, of a different experience is subjugated, it is singular and can be used up and when it is the world just gets emptier. The world gets wider, and one day it will be an experience that is completed, its limit reached in both time and space, but at its core is loss.

In this way, it is like life.

--

(I would like to point to the article by Line Hollis in issue 1 of the Arcade Review as a brilliant piece of writing that explores some similar themes.)

A Journey to the Inside of your Mind

The dream sequence is one of those perennial media techniques that creators seem to think doesn't look as lazy to consumers as it actually is. They're wrong, of course, and most savvy audience members are able to spot the fake-out a mile off. This isn't to say that they can't be artfully created, or cleverly integrated into the texture of the plot, just that as a general rule they aren't. I'd blame magic realism except I like it too much to do so, but I suspect that at least part of the problem is that more conventionally structured works often look upon its techniques with a hungry eye and a lack of understanding. Sharks attracted by the scent of bloody metaphor leaking into the fathomless ocean of prose.

In general, a dream sequence doesn't have to signify mental unrest or madness. Yet one of the primary cinematic languages of dreams is derived in main from the techniques of portraying visually a disturbed mind, first delineated in The Cabinet of Doctor Caligari with it's unnatural camera angles and impossible geometries. In turn this has further informed cultural constructions of madness, which already had a reputation for being a dream-like state in which the mad were trapped and unable to awake, generating an idea of madness as a predominantly visual, or at least sensual, experience. Still, in the majority of fictional forms dreams have for a much longer time been a place of revelation - a way of advancing the plot by disguising exposition as mystical insight. And then disguising it further by making it all rather symbolic.

This needs to be handled with care of course; as with anything which takes agency away from characters it can end up stopping you from caring about those characters. The single worst plotline it is possible to write is the one which starts with the protagonist having a dream compelling them to action and ends in a deus ex machina*. But, we can't argue too much with the classics, because really vision quests are as old as religion and they're not really what I wanted to look at here.

Within games you do get the occasional bit of expositionary dreaming, but in many ways this is just another flavour of the endless task of getting the player(s) on to the next bit of action. As with all cut scenes, flavour text or DM rail-roading it can be done in a more or less satisfactory way, but it lies firmly within the imposed narration of the game rather than the shared space created during play.  What I'm more interested in just now is something that is unique to the way games work, and how this affects depictions of dream worlds.

Games are heavily predicated on player agency. I know that there are arguments about how much agency players actually have (especially in video games where there are technical limits imposed on action) or should have (in the case of heavily narrative games), but there are very few games which still manage to be games and don't at least allow the player some choice over what to do. Dreams, on the other hand are most notable for the lack of agency we experience when we are caught up in them. It's true that some people claim to be able to lucid dream** but they're basically just a bit better at having fantasies than the rest of us in my opinion.

That's not everyone's opinion though, and there is a strong faction arguing that the dream-world is a real place, or semi-real, or something coherent at least; a place where actions can have consequences, where rules, even if not the normal rules, can apply and where, just maybe, causes can have effects outside of the dream itself. The mechanism of this might be one of many; the dream being part of the larger spirit world is the classic model, but Freudian, and then Jungian, psychoanalysis has added a version with the veneer of scientific respectability to the lexicon, however unwarranted that respectability may be.

the Psychoanalytic model is worth studying here for another reason, namely to start answering the question you may have been asking; why are we talking about dreams in a blog interested in mental illness? the short answer is that a common misconception about madness, and a common depiction of it (as hinted at earlier), is that it is a waking dream. The experience of madness is often equated with that of dreaming, focusing on the supposed lack of structure and causality experienced in the two states. This is despite the fact that in madness if anything is irrational it is the subject while in a dream irrationality lies within the objects and surroundings. Psychoanalysis only compounds this by suggesting that the contents of dreams are important signifiers of waking dysfunction, and that the key to treating and healing that dysfunction can be found within those dreams.

Madness is constructed as being trapped in the dream, then, and clearly something must be trapping us, either an external force or an aspect of ourselves. Well, if there is something trapping us then clearly we need to face it and defeat it, for the alternative is either coma and death or, well, madness. Or at least such a perfect facsimile of madness that to an external observer there is no need to distinguish and the one can quietly replace the other. This is an important point about cultural constructions of madness, actually, as it is one of the mechanisms by which the mad can be blamed for being mad: it may not be their fault for being trapped in the dream, or the spirit world or whatever, but it is if they lack the strength to escape; in fact it's just the old willpower 'try not being depressed' canard but with a spiritualist or psychoanalytic flavour depending on taste.

Hence, the video game playable dream sequence, where the protagonist journeys to the centre if their dream and slays the evil that lurks their using the exact same moveset they posess in the waking world. I hate playable dream sequences***. In addition to the sense that you achieve nothing, because it's a step removed even from the game world, I've always felt that dream sequences really highlight the lack of options available to the player as well as the limits of the technology representing those options. It's all very well to tell me that I'm in an imaginary space where anything can happen, where the rules are different and dream logic applies, but when that resolves down to the same gameplay as every other segment then it's hard to maintain any suspension of disbelief.

Oh, how do I hate you? let me list the ways. [Spoilers]. The big daddy of them all has to be Dragon Age: Origins, purely for length. You fall asleep and navigate the fade, which is an extended sequence of door based puzzles and smashing things with your sword. Bonus points go for meeting people in the fade who have given up because they aren't strong enough - those guys need to buck up yeah? We all have problems. The thing I found really odd about this section is that it hints that in the fade willpower is important, much more so than physical strength, but all challenges were still resolved with the same stats as before. There was such scope for making the mage of the party a badass while turning the fighter into a wimp, but it was completely ignored. The rules are completely different, and yet somehow completely the same.

The two Batman Arkham games have dream sequences as well, as you might expect in a game heavily invested in concepts of madness and institutionalisation. When Scarecrow gets to you in Arkham Asylum the whole world collapses into a morass of shifting geography which has the potential to be much more than it is. I can buy the idea that Batman has just the right tools to traverse the physical locations in Arkham, part of Batman's legend is that he is always prepared, even down to carrying shark repellent bat-spray, but the idea that Scarecrow creates a shattered mental geography that is yet designed for the same tools again felt like a disappointment. Not to mention the skeleton warriors who act suspiciously like the thugs in the rest of the game (although it is suggested in the final sequence that Batman is actually fighting inmates, I don't recall that in the previous segments). The one good thing I do have to say about those sequences is the way Batman defeats Scarecrow is to my mind perfect: by shining the bat-signal in his face, effectively asserting his own madness over that of the Scarecrow’s.

I didn't get too far into American McGee's Alice when I did play it, but as a game which takes place entirely within the mind of its protagonist I think it highlights a lot of the problems I've discussed. It repeatedly tries to tell you that the world is shifting, illogical and doesn't make sense, and yet it has to make sense in order to be playable. In fact, it makes the exact same boring, linear sense as any other FPS, being a series of combats linked by corridors. That these corridors look different is no matter, because they function exactly the same as any other game's.

I could go on, or cite more examples, but really I think that's the crux of my point: this isn't a dream, and this isn't madness, it's just a palette swap, a different location. to my mind, the best dream worlds in games are not the ones which try to be about the look of the world, but the ones which use it for narrative power instead. The Legend of Zelda: Link's Awakening springs immediately to mind here. Yes, he defeats the evil at the centre of the dream by hitting it with a sword, but the strangeness of the dream itself is revealed slowly, not hammered down your throat. It is also, notably, a story about self discovery rather than one about the oppression of the mind. And I crucially think that that is the most important step to making dreams fun again, and rescuing them from Freud's pathologising; dreaming is ultimately part of our mental processes for understanding the world, not a hidden well of all the worst things that have ever happened to us. they can be fun or they can be horrible or they can be just weird, but they are natural, and that is the most important thing.

*And then they wake up and it was all a dream anyway.

**I once made myself have the same dream two nights in a row, I died at the end both times and woke up shattered so I don't really know why I bothered.

*** I love a good narrative dream sequence though, I'm not going to lie. Inception, for instance, is a thoroughly stupid but beautiful movie.

A Brief Overview of Sanity Mechanics

As they are among the more representational mediums, and the more personally focused, both video games and tabletop role-playing games have a history of attempting to not only depict but to model mental illness. This is only right and understandable as this is what these games do; they take aspects of reality and model them in a way that allows us to experience them in a vicarious manner with more or less realism or slant depending on the design goals of the game

This process always involves some abstraction. In wargames berserk or otherwise uncontrollable troop types (whether through madness or stubbornness) are a common feature, especially in more fantastic rather than historical games. Usually each turn whether the troop obeys orders or follows its own whims is randomly determined, the reasoning behind this generally irrelevant. What those whims boil down to is also generally quite abstracted, as having to follow complex algorithms to determine the behaviour of troops that don't follow orders can break the flow of the game; the game is modelling combat rather than motivation after all. Similarly there will often be some level of fear response modelled, but this will usually be a part of a general morale mechanic as again we want to know whether a unit does what you want them to, not particularly what's going on in their minds at the same time.

When you start modelling individuals rather than groups motivation matters more, as does response to stimuli. Roleplaying itself, as a ruleset at least, developed amongst other things out of an attempt to model the actions of strategically important individuals like sappers within the context of wargames, although it quickly surpassed these beginnings. While early adventuring games focused generally on physical challenges, popularising the hit-point system as a way of conceptualising overall physical resilience, they tended to either sublimate mental resistance into the same pool or go for the all-or-nothing 'saving throw vs. x' approach (both of which are still present to this day).

Time now for a small digression on hit points. They often get a bad rap; as a storytelling tool they are ugly and confusing and mechanically there are a few glitches inherent at some of the extreme ends, as anyone who's had their Level 1 Fighter killed by a badger can attest to. The truth is they are an abstraction and a particularly numerical one at that but their elegance and continual popularity lie not in the way they model reality but the way they make the game play. It's all about the bookkeeping. I could probably write an entire article about the different ways of conceptualising hit point damage, but really that's down to how you tell the story in your game, from a practical point of view hit points are just easier to track than damage charts and less intrusive into the game than wound penalties. They aren't appropriate in every situation, but they are still functional in most.

It wasn't long before the burgeoning hobby started diversifying, with the horror-based game Call of Cthulhu introducing a separate pool of mental hit points termed 'sanity points'. Call of Cthulhu was not really modelling real life so much as modelling the books of Lovecraft, where contact with the Great Old Ones, their minions and their ilk eventually leaves characters either dead or insane; in this case insanity being a sort of catch-all debilitating  state of mental degeneracy. In this context, terminology aside, sanity points are a really neat system, maintaining the same basic tension of 'this is how much further you can go before your character is unplayable anymore' that hit points provide but adding a second track to manage. Now going to the library can be as dangerous as entering a dungeon.

However, just as hit points can lack subtlety in interpretation, leading to characters who are essentially bullet-proof until they are suddenly dead so too can sanity gauges. On the physical damage front games have employed all manner of embellishments, from critical hit charts to permanent wounds, as a way of fleshing out that thin line between life and death. In games where one of the key innovations is continuity of individuals (as opposed to wargames where individuals are generally undifferentiated) then many have taken the position that losing one fight should not necessarily mean losing the game. This is where the idea of permanent mental disability as a punishment for, or at least a result of, failure emerges. It does so not, I believe, out of a desire to stigmatise or even make a point about how mental illness functions, but out of design choices based on modular thinking: this system works here so we can use the same mechanic here rather than try to introduce something new.

Essentially, if we're being generous, sanity mechanics like this are roughly modelling, or attempting to model, something along the lines of PTSD. But games love random tables and variety and so the urge has often been there to put in various different psychiatric disorders as possible consequences of failed saving throws or dropping below zero sanity or what have you, no matter what the real-world triggers and predictors for such conditions might actually be. As designers have started to realise that this lumping-together of conditions is not always very accurate we've since started to see discrete disorders either as pre-selectable traits or as specific responses to certain stimuli, alongside the continuation of a mental-resilience based model.

Video games, meanwhile, have long used the hit point abstraction as the underpinning of their damage mechanics for much the same reason: that it makes the coding easier. However, while in roleplaying it is possible to  visualise the depletion of hit points not so much as actual wounds but as loss of stamina, damage to equipment and a general sense of using up your will or ability to go on, the intensely visual nature of video games tends to suggest that each blow that lands actually lands. This dissonance has of course got worse as graphics have got better.

When video games have attempted to portray madness through mechanics rather than narration it is no wonder that in general they have followed the sanity point model, for the same reasons that they tend to use hit points for health. Where they have differed from tabletop games is in the effects that depletion of these sanity meters have. Again the key is the visual nature of the games as well as the success they enjoy in hiding the workings of the algorithms from their players. 

Zero sanity usually means a game over, either via catatonia, unplayable mania or or sometimes even the suggestion of suicide, and the decent into madness by necessity therefore is played out in the lower reaches of the sanity gauge. While a tabletop game might introduce madness through penalties or behaviour guides after the resolution of the traumatic event - after the failed saving throw indicates the final loss of control - in a visual game where the convention is to reset after failure the madness is often introduced as a feedback loop in that process of failing and presented through visual clues. In this way madness is presented and coded as glitch and hallucination in its entirety: to be mad is to see what isn't there, or maybe to see what is there and what others cannot or will not see.

Ultimately all of these approaches can be interesting, both mechanically and representationally, but they can also come with often unintended semantic baggage, implying things that are damaging and just untrue about the processes of mental health. they can also just be crass. I will leave you with the video games ur-example. Every sanity effect in Eternal Darkness: Sanity's Requiem, one of the first games to specifically model sanity loss as a visual phenomena based on a sanity point mechanic. It's just... crass really.

Let's Go Back to College: Some background and a discussion of Community S2 Ep14 - Advanced Dungeons and Dragons

I'd like to make it clear that it's not all doom and gloom here, and that I will be looking at approaches to mental illness that I think can be both valid and constructive at some point or another. In fact, part of what might best be termed the thesis of the book I am writing and which this blog is supporting is that there are certain overlaps in the way that we talk about madness and the way that we talk about gaming and that this adds an extra layer of interest and meaning to the way in which games approach and model mental illness.

It's just that gaming is also a part of the popular media, and popular media on a whole is really very bad at representing mental illness either accurately or compassionately. This shouldn't be surprising, as popular media is really not very good at depicting a whole lot of things (gender, race, emotional development, learning new skills, how people actually talk to one another). This is because, rather than build a new language of representation from the ground up, in the majority of cases an instance of media will be more or less reliant on the language of representation as extant. Even where it is more thoughtful, pasting in standard signifiers, or tropes, as a shorthand in less 'important' representations allows a piece of work to concentrate fully on the themes it would like to explore.

This is why procedural detective stories often make extensive use of 'mad' killers. Not having to spend time delineating a motive gives the story more space to explore the mechanics of investigation. They are able to do this because previous instances of popular media have already established the idea that psychosis is a sufficient predictor for violence and it is expected that the media consumer will be aware of this, having seen previous examples that have spelled the link out. Of course, this process blunts any nuance that might (although it may well not) have been in those previous depictions and perpetuates to further depictions the even flatter shorthand that all psychotic individuals are violent. This is a fairly basic form of memetic propagation of stereotype and you should be able to see something similar in any number of damaging and stifling or just plain limiting depictions of any group that can in any way be conceived of as a group.

While a lot of media is content to unquestioningly reabsorb the same assumptions in the name of expedience there are, I think, three main ways in which this sort of representational smoothing can be resisted. The first is to start from scratch, building a new representational language through rigorous direct observation filtered through a specific aesthetic , but this is unlikely to be popular at least at first because you will be asking your audience to do almost as much work as you are.

The second, and most common, is for creators to work generally within the current language, but to challenge those shortcuts and givens which they see as particularly untrue. Crucially, this means that a given work may well contain plenty of tropes either seemingly or actually unquestioningly as a way of expediting the storytelling around the sections of greater reflection. I am a massive fan of the show Elementary, for example, and one of the things I love about it is that it explores male/female friendships in a properly nuanced way without resorting to standard romanticising or sexual tension tropes. However, in order to have the space to do this and also present a compelling mystery every week it has more than once fallen back on the trope of madness proxying as a sort of un-parseable evil and although I'm not happy about that I can live with it.

That these new approaches to old representations may themselves fall back into the general language of popular culture is just an indication of how popular culture works and explains the curious dissonance we get from watching shows we ourselves may have had no problems with at the point at which they first aired but twenty years down the line feel just horribly offensive. It's not that, in the majority of cases, our essential decency as human beings has changed (although some of us may have done work to understand our own internal biasis as a personal exercise) but that the language of representation has changed around us (hopefully progressively, and hopefully, yes, changing our opinions about previously marginalised groups in the process).

And finally, the third approach is not so much an attempt to rewrite the language of representation, but rather to point out its failings from within by subverting and remixing it. This is where Community comes in, as it is an exemplar of this approach. Almost everything Community says or does is a reference or a trope; every character is, or at least began as, a bundle of stereotypes and yet through this they are given a freedom of expression and depth that comes from a relentless expression of '...yes, and they are also people.' It's a fine line, one that is only really possible within the magic realist confines of a very genre-savvy sitcom, and one that as the show's fourth season shows it is also very easy to over-step. However, when it works it is glorious because it is able to make you question the received language of representation whilst simultaneously utilising it to create incredibly densely packed stories that are still easy enough to follow.

Community touches upon the separation of the game world (i.e. the universe and all its rules and connections that is encompassed by and exists only for the duration of a game as it is played) from the real world in a number of episodes. It has a major arc exploring the the overlap between fantasy and reality, which although not necessarily restricted to gaming as such is heavily invested in the concept of play. It has had to date not one but three paintball episodes and, while the paintball episode of any given show will by virtue of its very structure examine the limit and transition between the real and the game world, Community's do so consistently, repeatedly and enthusiastically.

I won't say any more for now on the ideological cross-pollination between (concepts of) degraded or distorted ideas of reality in game-playing and mental dysfunction as I am if not writing a whole book then at least writing whole chapters on this sort of thing. But I will recommend one episode of Community that, if you are reading this blog, you will almost certainly get. The episode is Season 2, Episode 14 Advanced Dungeons and Dragons and it is great. It gets both gaming and mental distress (in this case the sadness and loneliness that both stem from and feed into depression) right and examines the way in which the former can be a part of the way in which one mediates the latter.

Interestingly for Community, which usually takes us fully into the fantasy world (see the stop motion and video game episodes in particular), this episode is rigorously set in reality. This enables it to say that what is really transformative about playing roleplaying games is that you are simultaneously sitting about with your mates and yet also inhabiting a different world with them - a transgressive space where you can do and say and explore things and thoughts and emotions ordinarily unavailable to you. It concludes that the best games (of D&D) are the ones that let us test the limits of of quite who we are and how we feel within the relative protective skin of the game-world, not just the ones where we kill the most monsters. It is also a rather lovely ode to the joy of social gaming and is chock-full of in-jokes for role-players of a certain ilk.

So yeah: you should watch Community anyway, but watch that episode even if you don't and you will hopefully get a bit of an understanding of some of the ideas I will be talking about as this blog goes on.

After the End

(Trigger warnings for discussion of depression and suicide)

Depression is a poison, seeping through the landscape of our lives. It is a blanket; a cloak of darkness, spread out, growing, blocking out the sun. Depression boils up from the tunnels beneath the surface, where it has riddled the bedrock, ruined the structure and invited collapse. It is chaos, jealous and defiant of order and hungering only for destruction, for a world where nothing is worth striving for.

I seem to have a lot of metaphors for depression, but none of them really work. None of them are the truth of how depression functions, merely a convenient package that gives some semblance of a neat explanatory idea that you can take away and think that you know about a thing. This isn't surprising, it's what metaphors are. This isn't surprising, again, as none of these are really my own, nor are they really metaphors for depression. These are all among the metaphors for evil of popular fantasy fiction, and they are further the ones that give form to many RPGs where evil must be something you can hope to confront with violence.

They don't work because evil doesn't work like that, but they also don't work because the things they compare evil too don't work the way they are purported to. What of the poison that hijacks your heart, forcing it to propagate agony and death ever faster through the system? Of course, there is no place for that within the pacing of a story that requires that there always be space to pursue side-quests. And there is no place for that within an illness that undermines the basis of your existence. There is a qualitative difference between wanting to die and wanting to be dead. The former suggests a desire for active participation remains.

Specifically, evil is not a thing. It is not a team or a side, or even, much as I love AD&D's tables, an alignment. It is maybe, at best, an emergent property; a series of actions. Possibly it is an attitude, a predisposition, maybe, but that is dangerous territory. Depression isn't emergent, it's where you start and that is something that goes for for all mental illness, morally, experientially, speaking*. There is a long history that equates evil with the mentally unwell and that erroneous link is only strengthened when you believe illness to be action or evil to be ingrained.

The heroic character wants to die. Maybe they want to live more, but they clearly want to die as well. Their deaths, enacted a thousand times, in often ignoble circumstances far outweigh their lives and their successes. An unheroic end at the hands of a bandit in some hidden cave will not even inspire rebellion and legend, it will not contribute to the overthrow of an oppressive regime. There are a thousand alternate universes where the evil is never halted. A thousand other universes where our lives made no difference.

Here is the crux of what I wanted to write about in this entry. It is something that has been nagging me ever since I articulated my relationship with choice during the playing of CRPGs in the last post. The question of what happens after the end, whatever end that may be, of the game. After every end implied by every choice. Because the mechanics of choice in one of these games speaks to a darker truth of the experience of depression, one that can't be packaged up as a simple elegant comparison, because it is neither simple nor elegant. It is brutal and it is formed of the destruction of complexity.

What I was trying to say about depression (at least depression as it pertains to me) in the first paragraph is that it extends beyond the depressed. We are actors in a network and depression not only affects our actions, but the way that we view them. To be told that your choices will change the world is not news to the depressed, because we already know it. But here's why it is hell: I'm not talking about the big picture, the end game and the final scroll-text saying what happened next and who got married or what, I'm talking about the choice tree itself.

Every single choice you make is a destruction of possibility, and in an RPG, every single choice is on you as the other actors are all automata. What an act of sheer brutality against the future a game like that is! Forget your shooters, where your part is as scripted as the enemies': there is no truth in the violence there. Death is binary, it is the truncated and difficult life that your actions, your very presence, has created that really hurts. The CRPG is a broken Nietzsche simulator, a systematic representation of the will to power misunderstood and run rampant. It is also what it feels like to be depressed.

The heroic character wants to die, but they strive for a death, at least, that makes a change. A death that imposes their will on the world as indelibly as their life has done. I don't want to die, I want to be dead. I want my impact to cease; the sum of it to date to be erased. Of course that can never happen and so to die would be a waste of the time I've spent so far. I might as well rectify the situation such as it is and do what I can. Curiously enough, or maybe not considering who I purport to be, the deal I made with myself many years ago (the one I will never renege on and which has stayed my hand ever since, even in the worst of moments) is couched and phrased in the terms of a game. If I die, I lose. I want to see that final screen. It is why I find it so hard not to complete those games I have started and why I find it so sad when I do.

There is a way out, of course, because this form of depression betrays an arrogance born of self-obsession and uncontrollable reflection. Real people are not scripted, but players themselves, and they have the capcity to make choices. The RPG speaks to my darkest fear that everything I do destroys the options of others but that assumes their options stem from me. Our lives are networks, and we impact on each other, sometimes catastrophically. Our actions have consequences, but the choices of others have to be held to be as important as our own.

Nietzsche would hate me for that.

*I know that neurobiologically there is evidence to say that mental illness is emergent but I am not talking neurobiology here. It would be a category error to believe that insight into mechanism necessarily informs and provides directly mapped insight into expression. However paradoxical it may seem, there may be no one discrete cause for a phenomenon but the phenomenon itself remains a discrete cause on further events.

Stress and RPGs

This is a slightly more personal post, so it's a bit more about feelings than analysis, so I hope you're ok with that.

I don't, on the whole, cope with stress very well.

When the stressful situation is sudden and intense I cower and freeze even as I watch things happen that I know I have the power to oppose. I am bigger and stronger than a lot of people (and as a child my dad was... notorious within my neighbourhood) but to an extent that never helped, as for most of the time growing up no-one ever really tried to fight me and so the wall between anticipation and action remained steady and strong and it was one I was less and less inclined to break myself. This is a physical explanation, but it applies to and I think informs all conflicts I find myself in the middle of. Without pre-warning in which to prepare myself then no matter what my instincts or intellect tell me I should do, I find that action is tantalisingly out of my grasp.

When the stress is a slow-burn, pressure rather than a blow, I do better in the sense of reaction, but maybe worse in the sense of the toll. What I mean by this is that I respond, I do what needs to be done at the time that it needs to be done by, but it grinds me down and closes out my view. This kind of stress is functionally analogous in many, but not all ways, to bouts of depression. A main difference with depression is that there is no end point, no goal in sight, to make the ground out responses to stimuli a meaningful exchange. You get nothing in return.

I had been quite stressed of late, as I was preparing for a module exam in my accountancy course, although I have taken it now, enabling me to actually do other things like think about writing. I have also been playing The Witcher 2, a hilariously 'adult' RPG in the western style which never knowingly misses the opportunity to give you a badly rendered opportunistic or voyeuristic sex scene with all the eroticism of the old British 'Confessions of...' sex comedies. That's not why I'm playing it, mind, I just really needed to get that off my chest.

When I'm stressed like this, as well as when I'm depressed, I often go in for a CRPG like the Witcher for a number of reasons. One of the effects of the closing down of mental space - imagine it as if you have no peripheral vision, but it's not just vision, it's everything to do with the way you think - is that I can't concentrate on as many stories, or on as deep stories as I might like. In general we're talking one or two long-running TV shows and that's it. I can't do novels, the words just slide off my brain without making an impression or worse, if I'm studying, the very act of picking something up that isn't a text book fills me with guilt.

And yet, I still crave narrative. This is where RPGs fit in, because they are just swimming with narrative. A big old soupy mess of it, with less depth than a paddling pool, but oh so much of it lolloped out at you as and when you want to take it. And below this oil slick of unreconstructed tropage there is the hidden narrative of the player, where you can decide back stories and motivations for yourself and away from the speculation of other media consumers - as although they may have played the game they won't have played your version of the game.

RPGs are not about challenge. Their combat systems are very rarely as deep as they think they are and the entire mechanic emphasises grind rather than skill. Occasionally an element of tactical thinking is required, but even then it often boils down to finding a way to split large groups of enemies down into manageable chunks before mechanically grinding them into a red and twitching mess of manageable chunks for the digitised carrion the coders have included as a stab at dark and serious set dressing. As I said, you're not forcing yourself to learn a whole new mode of play when you pick one up which makes it ideal for those times when you can't.

What RPGs are about is choice, or more specifically an illusion of choice. When the time comes you don't choose to  fight, but more importantly you don't freeze either - you don't choose not to. There is always that glorious moment of glitch as the game shifts from exploration mode to combat mode, as idle animations shift and everyone draws their weapons. I love that moment because it has a certainty of purpose that I can never have myself. No action-game protagonist has ever questioned the legitimacy of action as a response to a threat to their view of how the world ought to be - othrewise they wouldn't be in an action game, they'd be in The Walking Dead*.

They are also about the choices you make in conversation trees, which is again an illusion of control, but a great one. Conversation choices, in a well designed modern RPG, will not fundamentally alter the outcome of the game-as-game. You will still face off against the final boss and achieve some form of victory. Yes, the form of the victory or the form of the world you leave behind may well be different depending on your choices, but this is all narrative and emotion. There is often a best-possible-ending, but even that is subjective. What if your best ending is the one where everyone dies?

But these curtailed choices are what make the games for me, and what make them ideal for those dark periods of stress and depression. When I'm down in the dumps, with what can only be described as a tunnel consciousness, then those are the time that I don't feel I have any choices whatsoever. It is the managing of choice in a CRPG that gives me a view of the possibilities in real life as it reminds me that there are options, and that they do have an effect, but it combines it with a comforting fiction that no matter what you choose it won't be deleteriously bad. It is also nice to get to play with choice in a controlled environment, and what am I doing gaming if I don't like playing with things in a controlled and essentially consequence-less environment?

*I loved that game so hard, but seriously - never play it when you're in the kind of mood where you might be thinking about questioning your life choices. Unless you enjoy being a wreck for the rest of the day.