Doing the Same Thing, Over and Over

Insanity might not be every hack’s favorite nail to pound, but they keep it near to their hammer.

To say the face of mental illness as portrayed in videogames is inaccurate is the sort of thing that provokes a wretch. For a lot of reasons, like the fact that ‘inaccurate’ in this case is one of those pocket hand sanitizer weasel words for capital-L Liberals who want to look as though they’re trying hard to make the world a better place without offending their sensitive conservative pals. It’s like ‘problematic’, in that the only real use it has is for the sake of politeness. Videogames are inaccurate to the reality of life with mental illness, on the level of a fratboy, who’d be obnoxious even if he hadn’t drank himself into a state of uncontrollable sweating, missing his urinal and hitting you directly in the pristine white Air Jordans with a stream of asparagus piss is inaccurate with his own dick.

If you’re offended in any way by how graphic that image was, you should see the look I shoot when some prick goes off on what a great series of games Outlast is.

A thing that shows up a lot in games, that hacks to this day still get confused into thinking is profound, is that old chestnut about insanity. You know, the one so trite, Ubisoft made it the centerpiece statement of one of their fucking E3 trailers a few years back. It goes that the definition of insanity is doing the same thing, over and over, expecting a different result. That’s not what insanity is; that’s being accepting of the conditions of capitalism afforded to you as a worker. Which actually is something an Ubisoft dev can tell you about, I imagine.

I am not insane. He said, to his reader, as much to himself. I’m also not a psychiatrist. My experience in mental illness, however, is profound, like it is among a lot of folks in my peer groups. If mental illness is a tornado, then I’m that tub full of drones and science the stormchasers in my own personal version of Twister keep trying to push in front of it.

We as a society are finally learning how ill we are, and important to the cause of healing is destigmatizing from the bad old days when the mentally ill were villains that needed to be fought. I don’t know that disease that can alone make someone a cackling madman, free of outside pressures and personal history compounding with morbidity, actually exists, but I know the reality of my conditions, of the places my anxiety and depression take me when they flare, either alone or both. I’ll give you a hint, folks living on the outside: when the chemistry of your brain is altered and your thought patterns swing accordingly, things get a little more intense and compelling than can be dismissed with a “cheer up!” or “relax!” or, worst of all, “you think you’ve got it hard?” 

So, you know, fucking knock it off.

What I can say is that a more fitting frame of reference for insanity being a state of mind, is the condition of seeing the laws of our reality, and of cause and effect, as being less or different than how they are to people with a differing frame of mind, and not being able to grasp or care that it’s an issue. True, that casts a wide net, and it also doesn’t easily fit within a sizzle line in a trailer. Consider that we’re talking about the human brain here, a lump of inedible, squishy biomass that is nevertheless capable of driving an organism made of bones and meat to the heights of reasoning capable of rendering rocks able to do math for them. This shit isn’t simple, so stop acting like matters are cut and dry, let alone even understood.

Last week I had a dream. I know, you hate hearing about other people’s dreams. There’s a support group for that. It’s called Everyone, they meet at the community center Tuesday evenings. Sit still, I’m going somewhere with this.

Last week, I had a dream, and I’m still coming to terms with it. Not because of what I saw in it, but because I’m not sure what senses it was attempting to reach me through. For lack of a better term, it was like being buried alive in static electricity and sounds that I wasn’t actually hearing with my ears. It was concrete, both weighing on me and conglomerating with me, making whatever I was in this state less indistinct, instead integrating me into whatever it was that it was. It was like being beat up, torn apart and carried off by the static of a TCP/IP handshake, something I really want to describe as indescribable, except I keep describing it, so suck it, Lovecraft.

The point is, for literally no reason, my brain decided to confront me with a jumble of sensory data I couldn’t process. What was most likely uneasy sleep from an intrusive thought spun into a cyclone of mental and emotional nonsense that it in a sense escaped into the real world, when I immediately and in one motion stood from bed and walked into the bathroom to have a little panic attack-let before trying to convince myself it was just nonsense. That was a week ago. This happened a week ago, again. Yesterday, or actually two days ago now, because what even is time in a volatile state of mind, my brain decided I needed to be awake for 36 hours, because I grew fixated on the idea of it happening to me again. I grew fixated n the idea of being accosted by the same dream of chaotic, practically alien sensory data charging through my sleeping mind, less like information or images and more like electricity, wringing me out of shape and making me as indistinct and fractured to myself as it was to me. And so I did, completely without concerted effort. 36 hours, on my head, no problem, because the alternative was a chance to return to the ineffable hell of sounds that weren’t sounds and feelings that was also screaming. Or so my brain told me.

I want you to read that and try to place yourself in that frame of mind. Maybe you can, and my condolences. Maybe you can’t, and if that’s the case, I hope it was enlightening as to what having to put up with this godawful shit is actually like. But however you choose to relate to what I just told you, I hope it comes across why I find the average videogame’s approach to mental illness so utterly worthless. It’s a pincer attack of lazy pseudointellectual adventurism into a social issue we’ll be fighting until we evolve or go extinct, and both the prongs have got bellends instead of points.

On the one side, we’ve got the wretched, kicking remnant as mental illness as a horror experience. Let it be known that we still live in an age where being committed can be the gateway to further abuse- in this world there are bad facilitators, bad nurses, bad doctors, bad policies, bad programs and bad hospitals, and any single one of these things or more could cause more harm to someone mentally ill and vulnerable. That said, literally every human being involved with Outlast can go fuck themselves. I’d say they would have been better served in touring a modern working mental hospital instead of a horrorshow from yesteryear, but I actually don’t feel comfortable with the idea of them being in the same room as folks who could be threatened by their presence.  

In their attempt to tell a classic tale of big business, small people and Nanotechnology Based Weapons Turning People Into Spooky Clouds of Tiny Robots, the original Outlast was more or less an attempt to hybridize real life horror stories from Bedlam with Disney’s Haunted Mansion and first-person virtual genital mutilation. Every patient within its stereotypical Spooky Scary Asylum that isn’t actively trying to murder you for fun is a literal abomination of science with physical deformities, because you can’t have people that aren’t Very Obviously Wrong inside a mental hospital, now, can you? Every new area has multiple tableaus of gore and atrocity, with perhaps the most ridiculous hitting you right at the front, with the last surviving member of a fully armed and armoured police tactical team telling you to stay away before expiring, having been impaled through the chest by a 100% Developer Certified Crazy Person. Because as everyone knows, a sane man with a ballistic vest, a helmet and a submachine gun is simply no match for the irreconcilable deadliness of “psycho” with a broken lunchtray, I guess. All attempts at being understanding or humane to the individuals caught in this hell falls flat. The main character attempts to eulogize for one of the patients after he’s torn apart by the game’s ridiculous true antagonist, which may have been more effective were he not a literal 8 foot tall Jason Voorhees stand-in who is extensively self mutilated with wires and cut-off facial features. Because it turns out, he was a veteran before he went and got Joker Toxined, or whatever they claimed his actual illnesses were. Rest in Peace, sergeant, writes the photojournalist in his notebook, to a ring of blood splatter in the corridor of a secret underground bio-base. 

I couldn’t skywrite a SHUT UP big enough for this devteam.

Its followup was effectively the same game, but also transphobic, if you’re wondering if they’re ever going to make a game not geared towards screaming idiots on youtube.

The other prong is the mincing, brainless liberal busybody to counterpoint the fearful and ignorantly cruel conservative slug. You already know what this is, because if you’ve read my writing before, I’ve brushed at the fringes of it. It’s the people out there that think they’re a lot smarter than they actually are, that they’ve experienced more than they actually have. That people who were raised sheltered and suburban, who are probably the sort to say that Gamer is an actual subculture rather than something invented back in the 90s to ensure videogames were more sales-exploitable than just software alone. These people see other people creating media that they like, that they admire, that says important things about important issues. They want to be important people too, so they think of an issue they can speak about that’s their sort of Important. Now, under no circumstances do I believe that outsiders can’t offer insight. And BOY did I just say a very loaded thing, I realize. But there’s two good qualifiers to that view. The first is that the outsider’s educated to what they’re speaking on and it’s actually worth a damn. The second is that the outsider is understood to not actually be an authority, being that they are- go figure -an outsider, and not someone that can speak on anything other than someone with a grasp of an issue and, importantly, respect for the issue. This is the sort of shit as to why people hate Dan Savage, and it’s not because they’re homophobes. It’s because Savage feels entitled to speak on trans issues as a cis queer man, often times using slurs. It is my outsider’s insight as a straight cisman that this behavior makes him a huge shitheel. See what I did there?

Unfortunately, a lot of people wouldn’t, because they don’t get it. And because they don’t get it, we’ve got a ton of games out there purportedly about mental illness or at least involving it that might as just be about phrenology or homeopathy for about all they’re worth. You see it at the most minor level of gamedev- there was a damn Retsupurae video of a flash game on Newgrounds about dealing with grief that came to the conclusion of “suicide is the answer,” which is pretty much the worst moral of the story you could arrive at, aside from maybe “genocide is the answer.” 

But for all we know, that game was made by a precociously skilled 14 year old that wanted to be seen as wise. It wasn’t David Cage putting himself as a self-insert into Heavy Rain, attempting to psychoanalyze protagonist Ethan from inside an… edifice that appears to be a combination indoor firing range and Shame-arium. I’ve delivered pizzas to more welcoming meth houses than that shrink’s office. That shrink’s office in Heavy Rain isn’t the sort of place of calm and safety I know from my own times of healing, it’s the sort of place that human traffickers meet to do business away from their product handlers. That shrink’s office is what a member of the Trump family thinks Easter decorations look like. That shrink’s office is David Cage in a nutshell, an ugly and baffling construct of poor decision making, arrogant ignorance and desperation for approval. I mean, I could be more broad and fair, and say the “creators at Quantic Dream” but we know who that is. It’s the guy who makes sure his name is bigger than everyone else’s in the credits. David Cage, you know, that guy, David Cage? The guy who made mental patients attack via animalistic claw swipes in an earlier game? You know, that ballsack.

Not to turn this into yet another narrow David Cage bashfest, though I’d love to. But for once, this isn’t totally about one French dickwad’s mediocre overconfidence, childlike caprice and just general unlikable stupidity, it’s only partially about those things. It’s not just him, it’s devs that should be better than him, better than they are, having mentally ill characters break down into the weakest “no mommy don’t hurt me so bad no more” crisis states or writing messages in blood. We put up with this only because the culture among videogames is, at best, to just sigh and buy, and even the sigh is enough to upset the perpetual squalling conservative babies we’re forced to rub shoulders with in this hobby. Dissent is unforgivable in games discourse, which is why lootboxes aren’t exploitative, Jim Sterling, they’re just cosmetic and completely a choice, and also disregard the fact publishers are hiring psychologists to better exploit foibles in people’s impulse control in order to sell more of them. 

We’re so accepting of utter bullshit in games, we still don’t get that publishers aren’t just giant exploitative corporations even as they try rationalize selling in-game items- not actual new game content, but actual objects in the game -for real money in games as a necessity for modern gamedev. We’re so accepting of utter bullshit in games, we just accept that three white guys in England can accurately depict living as a young black criminal on the streets of not-Compton. Or that people who are trans just walk right up to you and declare they are as part of their introduction. Or that a substance that is ‘liquid cocaine’ is a hot new designer drug. We accept all this ramshackle, above-their-paygrade, out-of-their-wheelhouse flailing from people who don’t know better but won’t be stopped, because Fuck Yeah, Videogames. Anyone opposed to that sentiment is suspect, because it’s just easier and safer to assume everyone here actually knows what they’re doing, and despite the petulant scrawlings and screamings of Gamers’ shittiest and most verbose representatives, “easy” and “safe” are only what they’re after in their media diet.

They don’t, and that’s why this shit is just as easily accepted as AKs with the charging handle on the left side and characters resheathing longswords over their shoulder without effort. Why think and seek to understand, when you can just speak instead and be understood as correct by people who aren’t looking to question you? You ever been told, as a mentally ill person, that you don’t know what your own life is like, because it’s not how some hack dev described it? Do you even know how hot that anger gets?

At the end of it, I think that’s what gets me the most about this. Because what mental illness and videogames combine to form in a really ugly scenario is a stage for the ignorant to speak without criticism to the impressionable, even the willfully gullible- people whose only learning comes from their entertainment, and never from vice versa. It’s part classroom, part echo chamber and almost nobody in it knows what they’re talking about. So you can understand why I and people like me get tense when we start hearing about the latest new game about psychological shit and mental illness. This why we roll our eyes and mouth ‘asshole’ whenever some sack of spare organs gets up on stage at an E3 and starts talking about insanity like we’re blindfolded at a Halloween Haunted House and he’s handing us a bowl of peeled grapes that he says are actually eyeballs. We aren’t doing it because we’re looking for attention, we do it because some goof is running with our human condition like it’s a goddamned pair of scissors. It doesn’t help matters that he’s doing it while screaming “hey look at me, look at this art I’m making, love me! Hate those scary crazy people, but love me, because I made a game and I also chose to make it about a real and important thing, I’m great, I’m amazing.” You’re not important, you’re not even anyone to anyone that actually suffers from mental illness. You don’t speak for me, because all you’re interested in is having your hypotheticals heard and making sure people are playing along with your fun little thought experiment. Your notions are no more innovative nor intelligent than those of the Victorian doctors that used the straitjacket and isolation to treat depressive self harm- archaic, brutal and self-evident as such to anyone that isn’t bent on causing harm to yet another Other.

It’s fucking old. And I know I’m not the only one that thinks so.