by Jack Croxall

Visual s tories are a great way for us to learn about health issues. In recent years we’ve seen films like Still Alice (depicting a woman’s struggle with Alzheimer’s), The Theory of Everything (chronicling physicist Stephen Hawking’s life and motor neurone disease), and Unrest, a documentary all about Jennifer Brea’s battle with ME. However, there is a growing medium that offers this insight at least as well, if not better, than film does: the indie video/ computer game.

Simply a video or computer game written and developed independently from a major publisher (Nintendo, Sony, and Microsoft etc.), the “indie” game might be something of a new term to some. But, much like films, the indie games help us gain insight into the suffering many people and their loved ones have to endure on a daily basis.

Hellblade: Senua’s Sacrifice

On the face of it, Hellblade might look like a pretty standard game. The player controls a character (Senua) and defeats enemies and overcomes challenges in order to progress through the game’s Celtic-inspired world. However, the entire game is a metaphor for Senua’s battle with psychosis, an illness she suffers from but believes to be some sort of supernatural curse.

The game’s soundscape incorporates the voices in Senua’s head questioning her ability to complete simple tasks; You’ll never make that jump etc, and Senua is also plagued by haunting memories from her past. In order to represent psychosis as realistically as possible, the developers (Ninja Theory) worked closely with neuroscientists and people suffering from the condition. The result is an encompassing experience in which the player is directly inhibited by the symptoms of psychosis, rather than just watching on passively as with a film.

Night in the Woods

In April of this year, I attended a talk with the developers of Night in the Woods at EGX Rezzed in London. Night in the Woods is the story of Mae, a twenty-year-old who drops out of college and returns home to Possum Springs. Whilst Mae is actually a talking cat (and everyone else in Possum Springs is an animal too) her story is a very human one. Mae struggles with an unspecified dissociative disorder and, as the player explores Possum Springs, Mae draws what happens in her journal as a means to anchor herself to reality. At EGX the developers talked about their decision not to label the precise nature of Mae’s condition. Apparently, the team wanted to write a story about characters that experience mental health problems, not the issues themselves. I found that this decision put emphasis on the experience of mental illness and really transmitted what living with a dissociative condition might be like.

Robin

Finally, I want to mention Robin, a game in which the player controls a character suffering from chronic fatigue syndrome (CFS). The game takes place over the course of just three days, and the main character, with his limited energy, must decide which activities he can complete. If you have him shower, he might not have enough energy to wash his clothes or to do something fun. Suffering from CFS myself, I thought this game represented the day to day struggles of living with the condition perfectly.

So here ends my case for indie games as the new health awareness frontier! Have you played any of these games? Or another game which dealt with illness? Let me know your thoughts in the comments section or on Twitter.

Jack Croxall is an author/blogger living in Nottinghamshire, UK. He posts for Allies Everywhere monthly.

Twitter: https://twitter.com/JackCroxall

Site/blog: http://jackcroxall.co.uk

Books: https://www.amazon.com/Jack-Croxall/e/B00BBX48NK

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Photos by: Glenn Carstens-Peters Samuel Zeller Jack Croxall (screenshot) Chris Liverani