It’s Mental Health Awareness Week here in the UK, so I thought I’d tell you about Echoes [official site] – a newly announced episodic exploration puzzle game that explores themes of psychology, mental health and the relationship between the two. I’m a sucker for games that strive to generate wider and nuanced conversation around sensitive issues. Echoes appears to be one such game AND it looks really pretty into the bargain. See:
RPS Feature Rubber duckies optional
[This article was originally published to our Supporter Program on 22nd February.]
I’ve had a really shitty couple of weeks. I’ve written before about anxiety disorder, and after a really quite astonishingly awful start to 2016 I had quite the collapse. I share this information for one reason: I know there are many other people out there suffering with anxiety, panic and low mood, and I know how often it’s not talked about, and from brutal personal experience, what it’s like to think it’s just you, to think you’re going mad, to think there’s no way out of the hole. If that’s you, I strongly recommend that you leap over to the post from last year, and look into some of the resources listed. You deserve it. You deserve to feel better. There are ways you can feel better.
Today I want to briefly talk instead about that hot bath feeling a perfect game can give you when things are low.
It’s World Mental Health Day today, thus I wanted to draw your attention to Sym [official site]: a stylish, monochromatic puzzle platformer that portrays issues of mental health in a very unique way.
Josh, the game’s protagonist, suffers from acute social anxiety disorder and has a tendency to shy away from social situations. This is portrayed metaphorically within Sym’s abstruse world, where you must switch between light and dark areas, where Josh is encouraged to show more of himself if he wishes to overcome the game’s puzzles.
Asylum Jam, a 48-hour game jam to promote mental health, is back for its third consecutive year. Against the tide of misinformed tropes and unfortunate allegories consistent with popular culture that suggest mental health is something to be feared, Asylum Jam asks participants to design horror games that break from such associated stigma.
RPS Feature Reaching Out
I have generalised anxiety disorder. It’s a condition that falls under “anxiety disorders”, which also includes OCD, despite more often being categorised under “depression”. It sort of fits with both. It’s an obsessive condition that causes someone to be unable to control their fear, to become entangled in irrational and debilitating worry, and at its extreme, to be afflicted by horrible intrusive thoughts.
I’ve had AD since I was in my early 20s, undiagnosed until my late 20s. Those were some fairly horrendous times, not being able to understand why I couldn’t cope with basic situations, and utterly terrified that the awful thoughts I was having might be real. Too scared to tell anyone, and too fearful that if I did I’d be feared, I suffered badly. As it turned out, it was telling someone, anyone, that was the first step to getting a great deal better.
RPS Feature Games On The Brain
The relationship between gaming and depression tend to only be addressed by sensational misinterpretation of studies by the mainstream press. RPS contributor David Owen set out to find out whether gaming can be linked to mental health, how games could better represent depression, and whether games themselves can be an effective means of helping those who suffer.
Far Cry 3 gives a definition for insanity. “Insanity is doing the exact same fucking thing over and over again, expecting shit to change.”
You’re probably familiar with how madness manifests itself in the world of games. It’s that ill-defined brand of hyperbolic insanity that compels antagonists to shoot people in the face, hatch needlessly convoluted plots to take over/destroy the world, and maintain a socially unacceptable hairstyle. And this is not just a cheap dig at Far Cry 3, which rode a wave of promotion centred on insanity. It just happens to be the most recent example, in that every major character on Rook Island is unhinged in some capacity – we know this because of their propensity for murder, rape, and to hallucinate giant voodoo demons. At no point in any of this is a specific mental illness named. Far Cry 3 does not know the definition of insanity.
