Warning: This post discusses themes of depression and suicide. So, here’s a thing about video games: Typically, they suck at mental illness. Nine times out of ten you pick up a game that has mental illness in it and the involvement boils down to, “Crazy people with knives try to knife you, isn’t that scary???” Frankly? No. It isn’t scary.…
Tag: depression
Make Your Choice…except when you can’t
Depression Quest is a piece of interactive fiction written by Zoe Quinn and Patrick Lindsey that centers around the premise of, you guessed it, depression. The plot is a very serious portrayal of a person’s internal and external battle with depression. Quinn and Lindsey place the reader as the central character in the piece by directing every event with a ‘you do…
Paperwounds by Andy Campbell
Adam Campbell’s “Paperwounds” takes its readers to a dark place; to a mind of suicidal thoughts and depression. The reader is presented with a crumpled up suicide note. We can click on certain words which are highlighted and pulse red. There is also a sound effect, a sort of technological beep which goes off whenever the mouse hovers over the…
Gravitation: portrait of a bipolar world
Gravitation is one of the games that we played in class, but I didn’t give it much thought until I attended a student’s presentation on the source code as a text of literature that can be read for meaning. The creator, Jason Rohrer, released a statement indicating his reasoning behind creating Gravitation: “I needed to make a game about…