Rock, Paper, Shotgun

18/08/2010 at 23:03 TeeJay says:

@ perilisk:

Sure people often feel uncomfortable around extreme, wierd, unusual, inappropriate or unexpected behaviour – which could be someone on drugs, deliberately being annoying, deliberately attention-seeking, clueless about the ‘right’ protocol – or in some cases suffering a mental illness or with a ‘personality defect’. Sometimes it is someone just losing their temper, snapping and doing something crazy. Maybe it’s less scarey if we can say ‘oh he’s drunk’ because most people know what that feels like and have some expectation of what drunk people do.

It’s true that some people feel very uncomfortable being near someone in a wheelchair for example or some other ‘disability’ – but they might be surprised how fast they would get used to it if this was a friend or co-worker, someone they knew and did talk to about “the issue” rather than someone they didn’t know and were scared of ‘offending’ or unsure how to ‘deal with’.

I’m not against having games featuring “psychos” or other characters with mental illnesses (depression? hearing voices? personality disorders? aspergers & autism?) even where this is used as a kind of ‘bogeyman’ or ‘scary monster’, but I’d like to point out that “mental illness” is a very widespread and common thing which many people experience at some point in their life, if not personally then almost certainly amongst their close family and friends.

Hopefully we can see “monsters” in a game or movie (or aliens/zombies) and still respect people with facial deformities (or foreigners), because we can make a clear distinction between the fiction and real life people. I’m slightly worried that this distinction is less clear when mental illness is involved – for example where ‘psychotic’ (eg a violent killer) and ‘psychosis’ (eg hearing voices) are both similar to the word “psycho”. Many recent movies depict people with schizophrenia, manic-depression or autism as tortured geniuses who are ‘great despite their madness’ but reality for most people is far more mundane – unemployment, wasted lives, a feeling of shame and isolation. Stephen Fry has ‘come out’ as bipolar and is still loved (I am wondering how people will react if and when he has a manic episode and gets locked up?) but I can’t think of a contemporary public figure who has admitted to a diagnosis of schizophrenia or of a personality disorder. There is still dispute about whether “psychotic” (aka antisocial personality disorder?) is actually a valid diagnosis. Some docters are proposing to define ‘excessive grief’ as a mental illness – even “religious belief”.

So I’m not picking on videogames per se – they haven’t deviated from other media in this respect, and you do raise an interesting point that the ‘uncanny valley’ effect in computer games does have parallels with feeling uncomfortable with weird behaviour in real life. My point was more about not reenforcing harmful stereotypes and misunderstandings surrounding real life issues – maybe this is why the zombie/alien/vampire ‘proxy’ is so useful and common in modern culture?