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.


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[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.

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.

Divine Knowledge: The Victory of Joan of Arc

I haven't actually played The Victory of Joan of Arc. I want to, but this month I bought Relic, and then the Deadzone Kickstarter happened and basically my gaming budget got eaten up for a while. What this means is that I can't tell you exactly how and to what extent the concepts under discussion manifest in actual gameplay, but can only analyse their existence within the rules, which are available here. While the intention of the mechanics of a rule-set and the instances of their interpretation in actual play may vary, sometimes wildly, in focus, for my current purposes intention is the most important aspect for analysis.

Turning Point Simulations is a specialist historical wargames publisher producing a range of games based on specific key battles. They produce the kind of tight, detailed games that model specific situations and then leave it up to the player to make strategic choices within those confines - differing from the more open rules of, say, skirmish games which model individuals or groups of individuals and ask the player to manage and direct these in the hope that their larger strategy will be realised. The use of randomness is generally much larger as the scale of the battle becomes smaller. It is much more likely that an individual soldier will be unable or unwilling to complete a task than it is for an entire battalion, hence the tendency for skirmish games to be very dice heavy. When you get to the larger scale, where strategy is much more central to the model, randomness tends to be confined and constrained in it's influence as well as its extent. This means not only fewer dice, but also limits to the impact of those rolls, limiting the effects to essentially surprise reversal of fortunes, or the uncertainty of risky manoeuvres.

In this framework you can see that making an event random, especially making one truly random as opposed to a stacked set of probabilities, has a certain semantic power. That is to say that it has a meaning attached to it; in fact it is imbued with meaning by the context of the game and the design decisions made when the game's reality-model was devised.

In general, randomness in game design is about taking things out of the players' control. There is a big question in terms of games-as-games as to how much randomness should be included. This often includes questions about reliability of simulations as well as player enjoyment, participation and skill and is a fascinating and rich area of study and discussion, but isn't what I'm going to look at here. What I'm interested in is games-as-representations. Randomness within player actions obviously indicates what is out of their control, but it also suggests what is not pre-ordained; i.e. that which does not (or in the case of historical simulations, did not) have to happen. Applying this to the story of Joan of Arc points to what I think are some very interesting conclusions about madness and divine inspiration.

Joan of Arc considered herself divinely inspired, and considered her victories proof  that she was an agent of God's will. Although it is easier to trace destiny and teleology in completed events it remains pretty undisputed that she had a positive effect for France on the breaking of the Siege of Orléans. If this effect was the result of special knowledge one would normally expect it to be modelled by providing the French with a strategically optimal path, or by weighting the game in their favour, but this is not the case.

Instead, Joan's voices are modelled in the game as a random events table. This does two things; firstly it suggests that her instructions were not direct from God, a position supported (regardless of your religious view on the matter) by evidence that the French prevailed despite their commanders ignoring her advice on a number of occasions, basically using her as a figurehead rather than a tactician. Secondly it suggests that her instructions were unreasoned, as even if the reasoning she employed was inscrutable or so heavily dense or obfuscated as to be functionally unknowable you would still expect them to be modelled as absolute.

The game suggests (although interestingly not explicitly), and then attempts to model, Joan of Arc as mad, in a sort of general sense; and this is unsurprising as it is the usual modern reading of hearing voices. But, by modelling this madness as randomness it enacts and embodies a common view of madness as essentially unknowable and capricious - as reacting not to what is there but to something else or by some hidden mechanism. It suggests that voices, even when not divine, are still essentially external and uncontrolled rather than a mechanism of the internal processing and presentation of ideas and conclusions, despite evidence that there are large numbers of people for whom voices do not equate to either mental distress or a psychiatric diagnosis.

Having said all of this however, it would be remiss of me not to mention a final possible reading: that Joan of Arc is being modelled as an unknowable and uncontrollable force to the French commanders. That is to say that, as a headstrong leader with her own ideas she was not always interested in following the proper chain of command, and in fact that tactical challenge is what immediately interested me in the game - just a little extra unpredictability to keep the players on their toes. But, while that still looks to be the way the game functions, I think that the implications remain as above. Joan of Arc is the title character, the leader who's decisions the player is most closely being asked to pit themselves against, which ultimately is the main draw of historical games such as this: the ever present question, 'could you do better than Napoleon?'