Cats in the Sun: Representations of Suicide in Two Games

This piece discusses suicide in a way that, while hopefully pragmatic may be difficult or triggering for some readers. It contains spoilers for two games, The Cat Lady and Actual Sunlight, which both examine the theme of suicide in deeply emotive manners.

In video games suicide is painless. Respawns, resets, failed lives are all grist to the iterative mill that pulls the player forward; they mean nothing except as learning experiences or temporary annoyances, instantly soothed over by the continuation of the game. By restarting. In this milieu, suicide can be part of that cycle of death and rebirth - a conscious seeking of the failstate to reset a misaligned system, to test a theory or practise a maneuver, or even to just partake of the vicarious joy of self-annihilation and le petit mort of that momentary reversible end.

BRIAN:     What are you playing?

TIM:          Tomb Raider III.

BRIAN:     She’s Drowning.

TIM:          Yeah.

BRIAN:     Is that the point of the game?

TIM:          Depends on what mood you’re in, really.

Or, as this scene from UK sitcom Spaced attests to, sometimes dying can be the point of the game.

The Cat Lady starts with the death of its protagonist Susan Ashworth by suicide. Pretty soon she comes back to life and discovers that she is no-longer able to die, although her immortality is shown to the player, but not to Susan herself, to be at the expense of others’ deaths. Susan is thwarted, but she is also punished. It is suggested by the entity that Susan meets and deals with that the fate of those who die by suicide is worse than that of those who die by other means. And this was where my problems with The Cat Lady started.

I once, as a selfish teenager, thought that I might be able to break my girlfriend’s suicidal urges by telling her that I would never forgive her if she succeeded. Thankfully, those thoughts stayed in my head and were never articulated; for as much as I was a terrible person to go out with at least I never added to her burdens in that way. The idea that those who die by suicide are damned further and more conclusively than those other dead is a common and horrible stigma. It may have a place in horror stories, although I would argue that it does harm far beyond its narrative usefulness, but in a setting that aims to make us sympathise with the deceased then it is unforgivable, even as a background aside.

This is the first of many points at which the twin aims of The Cat Lady diverge and create a tension that is, in my mind, irreconcilable[1]. The game wants to be a serious and sensitive portrayal of living with suicidal feelings, of loneliness and of coming to terms with death. But it also wants to be a schlocky horror story, with blood and nudity and power chords and unmitigated, violent evil. And so, after a meditation on the taking of one’s own life and what it means to want to be dead Susan enters into the machinery of the void, forced to fix that which no longer works...

… and it promptly chops her arm off. And then there’s a sequence of spurting blood, bad metal and she wakes up in a hospital talking to a creepy doctor and we’re right back into the most obvious of storylines once again.

It is supremely frustrating. The game aims to humanise Susan’s suffering but it succeeds in simultaneously demonising the psychiatric profession and other mentally and physically ill people. There is the hospital in which no-one, not orderly nor nurse nor doctor, acts in a professional manner. There are the so-called Parasites; the villains of the game. These cliched horror murderers are portrayed as part of the usual portfolio of killers set loose from the asylum; including the butcher-doctor, cannibal couple and random hammer guy. And then there is The Eye of Adam, the game’s big boss, so to speak, a man who causes others to kill themselves because he really just wants to die.

Of all of the people who I have known who have been suicidal the only person to complete the taking of their own life was not depressed. This is anecdotal data, not evidence, but it is important in our cultural understanding of what suicide is and what it means to choose to no longer live that we understand suicide and depression as separate concepts. Depression is a risk factor for suicide, that is undoubtable, and it is the most common psychiatric condition present in those who die by suicide. But depression and suicidality are parallel streams; not everyone who is depressed is suicidal and suicide should not only be understood as a function of depression.

My favourite part of The Cat Lady is a sequence that introduces that old bugbear of mine, the sanity meter. Susan is at home after escaping her first confrontation with a murderous Parasite and for the first time since her suicide attempt. As she goes about washing herself and getting a coffee and a cigarette she is given a stress meter and a wellbeing meter. Each of these are filled by events as she potters about; a reminder of her past triggers stress, a nice shower triggers wellbeing. There is a sense as you do this that you might just succeed in making it through, but the deck is rigged. Eventually Susan has a quiet breakdown, sobbing on her bed. The feeling that you just might make it if you do the right things, if you solve the puzzle correctly, is one that I found myself relating to immensely, along with the final, lonely moment of collapse.

It turns out eventually that, unlike my own, Susan’s depression is tied directly to trauma. This need to explain why people are depressed is understandable but I think ultimately devalues both trauma and depression. I have been through both, and for a while they were deeply entangled, but one of the most important things for me, at least, and I feel it is the same for others I have spoken to in similar situations, is to know the limits of each. To be at peace with both one must understand what the qualities of each sadness are and to relate to them for what they are. Tying depression to mourning works only to delegitimise the sadness of those who untouched by tragedy, or who have dealt with it already. Calling mourning depression risks medicalising human experience. They are linked, but they should not be bound.

When we get suicide represented without depression it tends to be noble, heroic or tragic. The orientalism of honourable seppuku or the brave sacrifice that saves others. In contrast, the suicide of the depressed is coded very often as one imbued with selfishness. The short game Actual Sunlight makes this explicit: every time the player-character contemplates killing themselves they are turned away by the thought of a duty to someone else. When they finally do complete their suicide, at the end of the game, it is in part because they no longer feel beholden to anyone else, they are finally able to make this one selfish act.

Actual Sunlight is in my view a deeply irresponsible game[2]. In this world killing oneself is no-longer a fail-state, it is the completion of the game. It imparts the value of success on the ending of one’s life. It is difficult for me to criticise in this manner because it is so clearly a very personal story, and to its credit it does contain disclaimers and content warnings from the start. I feel that if it had been presented in any other medium I would have loved it for its raw honesty, but as a game I cannot do so.[3]

The advice given by mental health and anti-suicide charities to the media on reporting in cases of suicide is primarily about the protection of other at-risk people. Don’t detail methods of suicide. Don’t disclose the contents of suicide notes or final social media postings. Don’t use formulations such as ‘successful suicide attempt’ even. This is because it is well researched that reporting in this manner can cause further suicides as people become fixated on the justifications of others, get ideas about how they can achieve the aim and begin to see it as a valid and successful answer to their problems. This suggestion or strengthening of destructive thought patterns is known as suicidal ideation and it kills.

The status of ideation in fiction is more complicated. Unlike the unavoidable gut-punch of a suicide note splashed on a front page with a headline screaming the method of death that sends your thoughts spiraling all day most fiction is consumed voluntarily. In addition, the very unreality of the situation can help many people, where they feel able to do so, to work through their own suicidal feelings and to come to terms with who they are in a relatively safe environment. Many of the more public forms of fiction, for example television soaps, will also provide information and support as well as content warnings when showing traumatic scenes that might cause viewers distress or unearth difficult feelings. I myself made very sure that I was in a safe place mentally before playing either of the games I am discussing here.

It is hard to say that a work of fiction or a work of art shouldn’t approach suicide head-on, and I don’t believe that either, but there are still consequences to the way that they might do so. Actual Sunlight’s position as a game blurs, or rather hyphenates the distinction between reader and protagonist. The character of Evan is a player-character, his actions are driven by the player and his death implicates them. The game encourages you to interact with objects and other people, but each interaction only brings forth bitter justification, eloquent and clever and above all funny, for the ending of Evan’s life. The player has no opportunity to argue and is instead further wrapped up in Evan’s warped worldview, which sees women only as objects, men only as rivals and those younger than him only as incomplete failures yet to make the decisions that will consign their life to the inevitable. This is an ideation machine.

There is a chan culture meme, and if you do not know about chan culture then you are a lucky person indeed and I don’t suggest that you find out, that is crystallised into the words ‘do it f****t’. It is drive-by ideation, the one-upmanship of trolls who would just love to be killers, and it manifests usually in a description of a life that is not worth living, that would be better off ended. The life described is all of the worst elements of the self-image of the stereotypical chan-dweller, and the clear intention is that, just maybe, the post will catch someone at their lowest ebb and push them over. It is targeted ideation. Actual Sunlight bears an awful lot of similarity to this rhetoric.

This is where it becomes difficult to split the artistic intention of the author from the reality of the situation of the work. I don’t believe that Actual Sunlight wants to be an incitement to suicide, I believe that it is the heartfelt expression of the creators’ own feelings, but that is how it acts. In order to play Actual Sunlight one needs to have a knowledge of the language of top-down RPGs, how they function and tell stories and how movement and interaction through them work. To have this knowledge a player needs to have spent a non-trivial amount of time playing computer games. That non-trivial amount of time spent playing computer games is one of the things that Actual Sunlight puts forward as being a waste of a life, of making a person’s value as a person diminish to the point where their death is a greater good.

Actual Sunlight does this repeatedly, building a picture of a life that hews closely to that of many of the people who will be playing it as it builds a picture of the life of Evan, and then insisting that this life is fundamentally unfixable - is only worth trashing. And then it makes the player complicit in that ending. As with the chan meme it indicts itself in a way that attempts to (or at least manages to even if that is not the intent) indict those most likely to come into contact with it (and alienates those who don’t fit the mold of its protagonist), a self-destructive variation on last man standing.

Susan Ashworth is not the only person in the Cat Lady to attempt or complete a suicide. One of the major plotlines in the game is her lodger and later friend Mitzi’s search for a murderer who calls himself the Eye of Adam. The Eye is a frequenter of suicide support chat rooms and message boards who this time actively seeks people to encourage and aid in their suicide attempts. He too wants to die, although disappointingly this is revealed to be because he is severely physically disabled, once again undercutting one of The Cat Lady’s greatest moments of understanding. As Susan and Mitzi evaluate their changed relationship to their own value as people in the one moment of true player choice in the game, and as Susan’s inability to die is challenged and transformed into an unwillingness to die, the game unveils the old ableist trope of the ‘evil cripple’ whose life is not worth living.

This final judgement of the value of lives is shared with Actual Sunlight, although in the Cat Lady you can spare The Eye and condemn him to the ‘horror’ of being alive as he is. Susan finds the strength to go on, but it is at the expense of the deaths of others. Ultimately, both games are unable to escape the transactional underpinnings of suicidal thinking, or maybe they illuminate them starkly. All I know is that it is important most of all to find the value of your own life in and of itself.

For support with suicidal feelings please look here for a list of hotlines by country. For further information on reporting or writing about suicide please look here. I am not an expert on suicide, although I have done what research I can it is a very complex and personal subject and my views should not be held over the head of either your own or someone you know’s struggle with suicidal feelings. The most important thing to do is to talk and to understand.

[1] For an alternative view that sees power in this dissonance see Sin Vega’s article here http://lonelymushroom.com/?p=3850

[2] Jed Pressgrove's essential Marxist reading of actual sunlight sees it in an entirely different light http://pixelsordeath.com/features/actual-Marxism

[3] Laura Dale examines the specific nature of culpability and suicide as they relate to games, looking at her experiences with Life is Strange in this excellent piece http://www.polygon.com/2015/4/21/8457673/life-is-strange-suicide

This post has been funded by Patreon. It has been slightly updated at 22/04/15 to include some new links.

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.)

Peripheral Visions

I've written before, sometimes in slightly more polemical terms, about the ways in which games try to present the experience of madness and to impart that information to the player. Right now, however, and for Critical Distance's Blogs of the Round Table I thought I'd look closely at the point of interface between player and game rather than at systems or audio visual vectors. This is an important area of contact between the player and the game, but the relative lack of representational power means that it is something that is relatively easy to overlook in discussions of representation. 

Although I did mention some of the ideas that follow in my post on the physical aspects of suffering from what are usually classified as (solely) mental illnesses that was a very personal post and so here I want to look at things from a slightly more general position. I'm also going to expand my remit slightly to include emotional and psychological aspects of all stripes, not just madness, because as this is an exploratory post rather than a response to any one game or issue I think it is worth remembering that mental illness is just a subset of mental experience; that it is not a state to be held apart from sanity but that they are both facets of the same human experience.

I can't find an image credit for this, despite searching,
so holler if it's yours.

As with much tech-futurism there can often be a teleological narrative around controllers, i.e. a belief that there is an idealised end-point, most likely one where the object of the controller itself has become invisible or indistinguishable from the activity of the game, towards which every instanced controller to date is a direct causal link. This can be seen in the marketing and the evangelism that surrounds new controllers, as well as the misappropriated and pseudo-Darwinian language of linear evolution towards a higher being. 

This futurism however hides a number of practical and real-world complications, not least of which is that, like with real evolution, earlier adaptations are not necessarily either inferior or obsolete. It also ends up with genuine innovation or divergent lineages with divergent applications being re-imagined into the central narrative so that something like the Wii ends up explained as a faltering step towards a homogenised future rather than a genuinely alternate way of playing. As well, the aim of effortless play, as so often hinted at by the focus on ergonomic innovations and 'instinctive' control schemes in next-generation rhetoric, papers over the way in which using a given controller or input method is a learned skill. 

The actual lived experience of being or becoming a player of video games is one of negotiating a landscape of input devices, learning and internalising layouts and iterating set-ups, both in terms of the physical objects and the input mapping, until they are aligned as closely as possible to one's unique physical needs. As a concrete example of how all of the above come together, both my partner and I are equally proficient at the SNES game Donkey Kong Country 2, having repeatedly beaten it when younger. If we replay the game today, however, our performances are significantly affected by which of the two controllers we now own is plugged in, either a classic controller or a non-branded turbo version, as well as how the sofa and TV are set up at the time. Similarly, despite the controller being objectively better, I find playing ported 8- and 16-bit games on my XBox a distinctly unsatisfactory experience and I do not believe that I am alone in this. The game itself cannot be divorced from the physical act of playing it.

All of the above is, I believe, relatively uncontroversial; amounting essentially to: using computers is a skill and everyone is slightly different. I felt it was worth stating in those slightly expanded terms to ground where I'm coming from in the rest of this post and to ensure that my assumptions are clear.
 

Controller feedback, which seemed so ripe with possibilities when Nintendo announced their revolutionary Rumble Pak accessory for the N64, has since stalled into merely fine-tuning those vibrating hotter/colder clues and death shocks. It is true that there are examples of feedback that are very cleverly deployed but there's also an awful lot of vibration for the sake of it, and despite my fevered imaginings there doesn't seem to be any other form of tactile, physical feedback through controllers in the pipeline. 

In some ways I'm glad. I have no great desire to shackle myself into some kind of full body harness to be able to experience more fully the horrific situations most action game characters find themselves in. (The joke in Red Dwarf's VR episodes being that the only attachment they have other than the headset is for your groin). In the main the most successful and enhancing feedback set-ups are those used for simulations, making a steering wheel resist on a difficult turn or go floppy at high speeds for example, where the aim is accuracy of a measurable representation rather than the imparting of narrative or psychological nuance. 

If we look first at horror games, then, as madness and horror are so heavily linked in our cultural imaginations, we can begin to see the current state of play. Unsurprisingly the majority of games, even those without a sanity meter as such, will embellish tension, damage, surprise and death with jolts and rumbles. This is, to be honest, relatively uninteresting as it is just that: an embellishment. Done well it may increase both tension and catharsis, but it cannot do anything to inform your experience of the character or their embodied situation as we do not tend to experience our emotions, beyond maybe certain aspects of nervousness, predominantly in our hands. The rumble feature is still a one way vector of information from the game to the player, generally ignoring the fact that the controller has an often unique position as the one method the player has of connecting with and influencing the game.

More interesting then, are the techniques that involve the player in the mechanics of the game by manipulating the way in which they have learned to use and internalised a control scheme. David Cage's games have relied on this heavily with mixed success, but the techniques pioneered in Fahrenheit (Indigo Prophecy) have begun finding their way into the general language of adventure games. These are the sort of semi-quicktime events that, rather than telling you to 'press X not to die' encourage you to manipulate the controls in a way analogous to the onscreen action required. It can be a fine fit though, and often as not the artificiality of the movements only highlights how separated you are from the game world and how much the controller is a barrier. I loved Skyward Sword but found myself battling and subjugating the control scheme as much as the bosses, refining my movements to the minimal possible levels to get closer to the expertise I'd experienced during Twilight Princess (which I played on the Game Cube).

At its best, enacting emotionally charged events through a controller or input device (and this has certainly been made a much easier link to forge with the advent of analogue-as-standard console peripherals) which has become an embodied part of the player-as-player can ensure both player and game are infused with that emotion. The joy I get when executing perfect combos in Bayonetta, or clearing the first level of DKC2 via muscle memory alone is the same embodied joy I got dodging tackles when I used to play rugby as a teen. Similarly, there's a bit near the end of Season 1 of The Walking Dead where you dig a grave, and the game forces you to do it with agonising repetition and through a semi-analogue control scheme it's spent ten hours or so teaching you and it made me feel truly wretched in exactly the way it should have done. The future, for me, is in the integration of these different modes of mastery and control to provide appropriate registers of feeling and engagement throughout a game's passage. The recent Tomb Raider game I think provides a great example of  this, with emotionally charged moments given a more analogue input scheme compared to the somewhat more traditional, and hugely enjoyable, nature of the rest of the game.

There are other ways in which games have made the nature and the fact of the controller more apparent to the player. I have not played but have heard repeatedly of the meta-textual nature of Metal Gear Solid games, although they seem to be focusing more on commentating about the fact of the game rather than engaging the player on an emotional level. A standard trope in platform games of a certain vintage is an attack which temporarily reverses the controls, but again this is a challenge to the skills and integration of the player-controller more than it is a rejection of that symbiosis. A couple of the sanity effects in Eternal Darkness: Sanity's Requiem hinge on showing in-game actions being taken without input from the player as a form of horror, but I always found the telegraphed nature of sanity loss as well as the schlocky nature of the effects meant they were never particularly effective.

The idea of loss of control over the game is an interesting one, as it breaks the trust that is intrinsic to the player-controller interface. It also speaks to the fear of madness as a fear of loss of control over one's mind and body, or the rewiring of mechanisms of being that were taken for granted. A game which does things that the player doesn't want would have to work hard to keep the player playing, however. We don't go mad suddenly on the whole, as most popular representations would have you believe, but by degrees and in self-reinforcing feedback loops. If only a game could somehow convince us, by hiding the gauges and the knowledge of the causes of failure and by introducing the slips of control imperceptibly at first, that we were at fault for missing that jump or that combo. Then it might better model the creeping dread, the gradual anxiety and the replacement of healthy habits with maladjusted ones that typifies the experience of losing control to a mental illness. Of course, that game might be indistinguishable from a merely terribly designed and badly tested game; I may have just suggested Big Rigs Racing as the Ur-madness simulator.

This, finally, brings me right back to what could well be considered the least advanced of input methods, yet which I think has the best chance of lying successfully to the player. The keyboard and mouse set up used for playing interactive fiction and point and click adventure games is both simple to learn, in that you need to if you want to use any computer at all, and yet provides scope for a much larger range of interaction. These games are also, as they rely less on realism and more on literary techniques of constrained viewpoints, better able to lie to players about what is and isn't happening. Adam Cadre's 9:05 being a beautiful and short case in point. Cadre's Photopia also highlights the ability of a game like this to effectively play itself at points in order to make emotional and psychological impacts, which is possible mainly because of the turn based nature of interactive fiction - even though you are being guided you don't feel like you are being taken through a cutscene.

Interactive fiction is still a learned form of interface, however, so a lot of the tricks that might work on the input level still require a knowledge of what to expect in the first place. This is mitigated somewhat in games like Jon Ingold's Fail Safe or Introversion's Uplink, which work to highlight the computer they are being played upon (and so simultaneously the person doing the playing) as an object within the game world rather than a portal into it, bringing the game-player interface closer to the surface. This urge can also be seen in the FMV games of the 90s which trace their lineage to graphical adventure games as well as more modern engines like Twine. Twine and the like at least initially borrow from the aesthetic and experience of navigating a web browser which is itself a learned skill so integral to modern work and leisure that many people have, as with me and the SNES, forgotten quite how learned it is.

The question then that was posed by Blogs of the Round Table is one of the future of input schemes. I'm not sure I've covered everything that I could, but I think that the future of using inputs to connect and link players emotionally and psychologically with the games that they play is one in which existing methods are mined for their strengths rather than replaced completely. Where we remember the physical joy of dance mats and plastic guitars and light guns over a promised future of mime and thought control. Where stories are told with the tools that tell them best, not just the newest tools in the box.

(A couple of links. Brendan Keogh talks about the player as cyborg, and the interface as a generative space here while everygame talks about the learned nature of game interactions and how that affects the way a game's 'message' might be imparted to those with different skill levels in his review of Cart Life)

What Makes a Psychopath?

I came across an interesting paper via Mind Hacks recently on portrayals of psychopaths in cinema. It is something of a given that mental health is portrayed overwhelmingly negatively and inaccurately in the media, and that is something that I've talked about before on this blog. In this paper however, Leistedt and Linkowski were interested in looking at that depiction in a closer and more methodical fashion, analysing 126 film psychopaths against current criteria. Unfortunately the paper is locked as it has a wonderfully dry humour accentuated by the constraints academic language but the key points are summarised nicely in that Mind Hacks post.

It did get me to thinking about doing a similar exercise with games, although I have neither the time, resources nor the expertise to do a review of that scope. Again, as with most media, games have a real problem of labelling individuals as psychopathic when they actually aren't and so a great many members of our subject pool would be automatically disqualified. Even then there should be enough to make a survey, although I imagine that they would come mainly from the less-narratively heavy end of the spectrum than most people would expect.

Psychopathy is a funny old disorder in that it is beloved of melodrama and yet the more lurid the invocation the less likely it is to be accurate. Writers like the concept as an explanation for evil acts and yet by definition it has no moralistic explanatory power. In some ways it's fine if you want a villain to commit random violent acts to establish them as a psychopath (although it isn't really) as in many ways the term psychopath is one we use to get an intellectual handle on people who commit random violent acts (although this has been expanded). The problem arises when that label becomes established as a synonym for a certain kind of villain and then writers seeking greater sophistication but lacking the psychological awareness attempt to get into the mind of the character. I am absolutely all for better-rounded villains, but essentially as you provide (emotional) motivation you degrade the integrity of your original diagnosis: as one of the key aspects of psychopathy is invulnerability you cannot retain the right to call your villain a psychopath even as you make them vulnerable.

I'm talking a lot about villains here, but I'm doing so because Leistedt and Linkowski do so too. It is almost a given in their paper that it is always the villains who display psychopathic behaviour. Partly I think this is to do with the general sense in which  psychopathy has become a moralistic concept; its essential amorality being consistently read as immorality, and partly it is as they say that psychopathy lends villains danger and intrigue. I also think it is a function of genre expectations, in that when for instance an action film protagonist acts in ways that might in other contexts be considered as psychopathic we don't consider it to be so because they are acting in-genre and we recognise that and so parse their behaviour accordingly. In many of his films James Bond is almost certainly a psychopath, for example, and although this is sometimes made explicit and sometime lampshaded it is usually excused in a way that the psychopathy of the villains he meets is not. Meanwhile numerous films and heroes are based on the Bond model without even that complexity and with the assumption instead that their heroes are just acting heroically.

What does this mean for video games though? It would be easy to shrug and to say that a great many video game protagonists are psychopathic and that by extension they engage players in episodes of psychopathy; and a great many people do say this. It’s all there: the violence, the lack of empathy, the erratic and impulsive behaviour and the emotional invulnerability; I never once saw Mario shed a tear over the first goomba let alone the thousandth. These particular extracts from Liestedt and Linkowski particularly struck a cord with me, especially if you consider the perfect no-deaths playthrough of any particular game to be the canonical version of the events depicted.

"In these slasher films, psychopathic characters are generally unrealistic, accumulating many traits and characteristics, such as sadism, intelligence, and the ability to predict the plan that the future victims will use to escape."

"Psychopaths in films generally possess a number of standard characteristics that are not necessarily as common among real-life psychopaths, ... The traditional “Hollywood psychopath,” generally found before 2000, is likely to exhibit some or all of the following traits ... (ii) a somewhat vain, stylish, almost “cat-like” demeanor; ... (iv) a calm, calculating and always-in-control attitude; and (v) unrealistic, exceptional skill at killing people, especially with blades or household objects (sometimes overpowering multiple assailants with superior armament). These traits, especially in combination, are generally not present in real psychopaths."

So yes, we could say that video games make us inhabit the lives and minds of psychopaths and blunt our capacity to feel in the process but I think that that would be both grossly unfair, to players, game characters and psychopaths alike. the key sentence in those extracts is the last. As I mentioned a few paragraphs ago this is more a question of genre; these characters are not psychopaths within the rules of the world that they live in. To say 'why aren't video game characters more like real humans?' is to miss the point that they fundamentally aren't real humans but are artistic representations of humans instead. The reason I don't feel it as jarringly out of character for Lara Croft to kill hundreds of grunts but feel sad about her dead mate is the same reason I don't feel it is jarringly out of character for Arnie to kill hundreds of grunts in Commando but feel sad about his dead mate. The art, unless you're in a movement like Dogme 95 where verisimilitude is paramount, is in negotiating between abstractions and representations to create something that feels true rather than merely is true. And sometimes that involves building a jigsaw puzzle of different registers and genre tropes to create a bigger and more vibrant picture that maybe has to gloss over some of the details.

The other problem I have with that analysis is that it is particularly teenage in it’s level of insight, especially as it usually comes alongside an assumption that most players are passive consumers in this situation allowing their minds to be dangerously warped by desensitising media. I say teenage because it's sort of this idea that you are the only one who can see the truth and who was affected a certain way by a certain piece of work. It ignores the internal life of others who may not have the inclination or the vocabulary to express themselves, assuming that if feelings or responses are not being talked about then they must not exist.

Video games are getting technically more competent and so are looking at broadening the emotional register of their characters in-game, but to assume that that is happening in parallel with a broadening of emotional register in players is demonstrably false because human emotional evolution is not tied to graphical processing capabilities; I was having emotional responses to games, and questioning the thoughtlessly violent nature of their protagonists, 20 years ago and I am no-one special. I don't mean to say that there aren't plenty of people wilfully missing the point or interacting with a given work purely on the surface level at any given time, myself included. But, my default position is to assume that the way any given person feels about a work of art is much more complicated than the way that they talk about it.

Psychology and in particular anthropology have historically suffered from a version of this fallacy which has left a legacy of popular belief in the emotional simplicity of both sub-cultures within and external cultures to the western education system from which they draw their explanatory framework. Which actually, neatly, brings us full circle to the initial problem with labelling people psychopaths: which is that it can easily fall prey to the same instinct to ignore internal lives and pathologise solely on the basis of external actions. Which is not to say that the concept of the psychopath is without use or validity, but that it's usage in media is certainly fraught with problems.

Liestedt and Linkowski (2013) Psychopathy and the Cinema: Fact or Fiction? Link

Getting Shot At In All My Guises

I'm used to being shot at in games. I'm intimate with it, with the experience of viewing myself through the sights of a gun, with depressing a trigger that brings release and relief from being and wholeness for both the bullet and the me the bullet interrupts. Being subject and object holds no fear for me, as whichever is destroyed I know that I will continue. I remember my sister complaining that her boyfriend sat around in front of her just playing games where he shot Germans without realising that it might upset her but I knew the problem was deeper than that. We're always killing someone in games, it's just something I learned to be down with because I like playing them. Killing myself, or at least my great grand parents, on a regular basis just made things a whole lot more honest. It humanised everything else I've ever killed.

Of course, we don't really kill Germans in our computer games any more, if we ever did. As the atrocities fade into history, the stock Nazi villains that populated early shooters have developed an armour of camp and irrelevance. Too many other players have caught up with me and can see themselves, or someone like them, in the ordinary soldiers. Duty now calls upon you to kill brown people instead, for the most part, (the rhetoric of culpability remains, shorn of any shred of the justificatory logic it might have held) so I've been dodging that particular bullet for a number of years. Except that they aren't people at all, they're Terrorists, who are like Nazis but without the sexy uniforms. They're an ideology wrapped up in flesh for you to try to wipe out: you can't shoot an idea, but maybe if you can trap it in a fragile mind you have a chance of deleting it once and for all. Every repeated instance.

(But ideologies don't work like that anyway. They are external to the minds that they touch upon and change, like the protagonist in Geist they are unaffected by the death of the host. Execution and war become punishment; punishment for every German's culpability in the holocaust whether they were a Nazi or not. It's a ritual, but one that's hidden from the player - referencing the one reason the war was worth prosecuting would fundamentally spoil the fun of prosecuting it again and again and again. My favourite, personalised, example of the disinterest displayed in the true horror of Nazism is Call of Duty's General Heinrich Amsel. In a game that slavishly recreates the weapons that mechanised death no-one researched the names of the villains. Heinrich Amsel would never have fought for the Nazis, he would have been obliterated by them, because Amsel is a German-Jewish surname. So it goes.)

This is all a preamble to what was to be my main point but maybe isn't any more: why I don't feel that there's anything wrong when I gun down the mentally ill in games. I mean, I do think that there's something wrong, something massively wrong, it's just that I'm used to it. I can't always feel the disgust that I know I probably should. I'm far too used to it.

The mentally ill make for good villains, across all media in fact. You see, we just don't stop, we don't know how. We can't listen to reason, so the question of the appropriateness of force is taken away from you, the protagonist. We make things easy as well, because ultimately, we want to die. Not the clean, pure death urge of the hero either, who stakes his life on the promise of a better world; we just want to be put out of our misery.

It's bullshit, of course. Stigmatising bullshit at that, coming from the same root formulation of moral innateness that allows us to bomb civilians because they look like our enemies and fuelled by a desire to have new villains as uncontroversially evil as the Nazis until recently have been able to be. But I've seen it again and again. Its in the cutscene where a defeated enemy attacks again, justifying the final blow. It's on the choice tree that pops up when an antagonist's eyes clear, reason returns and he begs for an end; and I've provided it. In horror games where the horror is that your mind may not be your own so you obliterate any evidence of what you may become. The mad are both cause and victim of the evil that threatens you.

Even cures are worthless, the popular anti-psych message about medication is that it turns you into a zombie: unfeeling and unaffected; effectively unable to contribute in a meaningful way any more. And, well, the good thing about zombies is how fun they are to kill, how many you can wade through without any feeling of remorse. They are better off dead; both the victim and the cause of the evil that threatens you.

It should stop, though. We need to be able to tell the difference between madness and malice. We need to be able to show the difference between madness and malice, because ideologies spread in a way that madness doesn't. But the secret I know is that we'll always need enemies to populate our fantasies of opposition, and my complicity in this narrative power structure is as unavoidable as my complicity in global inequality. But then, if there's one thing I've learnt from my ancestry it's that an awareness and acceptance of your past is vital for the work of doing things better in the future.

Depression Quest and the Physicality of Mental Illness

Trigger warning, this is about depression in quite a visceral sense.

I know what it feels like to be depressed from my own past experience. As much as anything that means I have an understanding of the physiological effects as well as the mental, which can be important because, as a mental illness, it is often discussed in purely mental terms. 

But those physical effects can be horrible, almost indescribably so. It isn't just the lethargy and the headaches, in some manner similar to the experience of a bad cold, but the curious fear that accompanies them. Colds come and then they go, following a familiar and understandable self-limiting pattern. They are grim and they can vary in severity but they make sense and have an end that can be anticipated while the physical symptoms of depression merely persist. And the longer they persist the more the anxiety over that persistence becomes a physical thing in itself; a gnawing in the gut that feels like maybe you ate something wrong and oh god what if you might get sick for real and...

I imagine that this is similar to many other chronic illnesses, which I am aware have the capacity to feedback into mental illness. I also am certain that other mental illnesses have their own set of physical symptoms which I have never felt and will probably never know. It is interesting that I am better able to imagine the mental state of someone with mania than I am the physical feeling of it and it fascinates me, in part because the physicality of my own depression is a huge part of the way I understand it.

I said I know what it feels like to be depressed because what I realise is that I don't know what it feels like to become depressed. I can imagine that it must be terrifying on that purely physical level because there's no frame of reference for why your body suddenly feels the way that it does - it can be terrifying for me and I know that it's coming and that it will, eventually, pass.

Those games which do model mental illness seem for the most part to be focused on its onset - on the shift-point between sanity and madness. Once the illnesses are contracted, and they are contracted, imposed into the sanctity of a character's  mental cradle by the agencies in the external world, they become modifiers on play rather than lived and vital experiences. Or worse, they signify the end of playability.

But mental illnesses are progressive, not binary. Those acquired later in life do not snap into being, fully-formed in the sufferer's mind, but are wrought out of experience and predisposition. Of course, to make a secret list of the illnesses your character might develop would be a curious exercise, and to roll your winnings on the genetic lottery on a random table at the point of phenotype expression is functionally, if not teleologically, the same action as rolling at birth.

It makes me wonder what a game would have to do to actually embody the experience of being mad - to genuinely get at at the phsysicality of it without resorting to glitch or distortion, to showing things which aren't there when it's already in a world that isn't there and anyway can't we just get over the idea that hallucination is the be-all and end-all of being mad?

One game which makes a stab at this is Depression Quest. It's a good stab, and I like the core idea of having, in a choose-your-own-adventure, greyed-out choices. It says that the core of being depressed is knowing that there are things you could do, but nevertheless being unable to do them. Unfortunately the rest of it lets it down.

Really, it's doomed from the name onwards. The idea that depression is a quest already suggests that it has a win-condition, that no matter how many times the authors tell you that it is something you must learn to live with fundamentally they view it as something that can be beaten. And that it can be beaten by the sufferer. For some people that may be the case, but unfortunately the game clearly isn't talking about an isolated episode of depression as experienced by an otherwise healthy person, it's talking about the chronic kind. The kind I've got. The kind that isn't a game.

It's odd for me to say that because, perhaps unsurprisingly, I've gamified my own depression. When I was sixteen, and heavily self-harming, I sat in a park at night somewhere near Three Bridges and I made a deal with myself that if I was to commit suicide then I would have lost the game I was playing. I didn't know what the win condition was back then, I still don't, but that was a clear loss. It helped. It gave me a point of power and control and it's kept me going. But some of the worst mistakes I've made have been to, even unconsciously, project that system onto other suffering people, because it has seriously fucked up my relationship with them.

That's the problem with systems. Unlike events, for which you can disclaim universality, systems imply their applicability to all situations. Depression Quest allows that it doesn't describe every depressed person's experience, but it implies that it models it. Ignoring the use of static and glitch as signifiers, they may be tired but they are at least uncontroversially deployed, the first thing you notice when you load up the game, especially if you are used to playing games, are the three gauges at the bottom of the screen. Again, suddenly, there's a win condition, and it's when those gauges say the right things.

It almost doesn't matter that those gauges represent a hopelessly proscriptive view of what depression is and how it should be managed. The fact that they are there at all is enough to imply that failure in this game of coping is the fault of the player, the very thinking the game aims to subvert with it's greyed-out choices. It isn't the case that you can't try these options because you are unwell, it's because you rejected meds and meds always help. If you'd gone to the therapist you'd get to have sex with your girlfriend and enjoy it, but you didn't, so fuck you. You're just not thinking about your illness in the right way, because if you were you'd know how to fix it.

I should be clear, I think medication is wonderful if you get the right stuff, but because we don't know exactly how these illnesses work it is always a compromise. I think therapy can be an incredibly useful tool, but it can also become a very expensive sideshow, even more addictive than the supposed addictiveness of the drugs, and again it depends on so many factors I can't even begin to explain them here.

I stated earlier that I wondered what a game that truly embodied the experience of being mad was like but I'm not sure I actually want to know. I was imagining things like haptic feedback on controllers that flooded your limbs with dull current. Characters that controlled sluggishly, like you were pushing them through treacle. All those similes we employ, writ large on the screen. The thing is, I'm not sure I want to know, really. I wanted to love Depression Quest's core mechanic, but I ended up hating the execution. 

I still think that the best expressions of what it is to be depressed come through in Douglas Adams' adventure games. It's in the loneliness of Starship Titanic or the sheer bloody-minded hostility of the world in Hitch-hiker, but the systems of those games are not the vehicle for that expression. I want someone to show me a system that works as well as that, and I admire that people are trying, but I can't not point it out when those noble failures look like propagating further harm.

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.