PART IV
CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO
Shawn Edrei
An enduring challenge for cinematic media such as film and television is the visual portrayal of internal cognitive processes; where a novel may describe, in detail, a character’s state of mind via descriptive language, the eye of the camera is limited to externalized markers. Consequently, early attempts to depict madness or mental instability often required direct audiovisual cues (i.e., discordant music, facial or verbal tics, or filming at odd angles). In the absence of textual descriptors, such techniques are meant to inform the viewer that a given character may be suffering from some form of psychological affliction. Over time, these tools have become refined to the point where, according to Robyn R. Warhol, even their limitations provide valuable insight: “Film makes literally graphic the changes and developments in its form, and sometimes a particular film’s experiments with widening the boundaries of the narratable can make us conscious of unnarratability we hadn’t realized was previously there.”1 However, even films such as 2004’s Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind (in which the protagonist journeys into his own memories as they are being actively deleted and rearranged) or 2010’s Inception (most of which takes place within a nested sequence of artificial dream-worlds) are bound by the medium’s reliance on symbolism, suggestion, and allegory in order to render visual simulations of the human mind.
With the advent of video games as a technologically innovative narrative platform, new possibilities emerge. Unlike its filmic and textual counterparts, video games require active participation on the part of the player, who is embodied within the fictional world by an avatar—in narrative terms, this is typically the protagonist of the story in question. Karin Kukkonen’s definition of metalepsis aptly serves to encapsulate this process:
In terms of the narrative roles of fiction, an author explicitly interfering with the events befalling the characters, like Diderot suggests for Jacques’ master, ends up leaving the narrative level of the teller and puts himself on the narrative level of the story itself, because otherwise he could only report it but not interfere with it. In terms of the world creating function of fiction, such a metalepsis is described as the author entering the fictional world.2
What does it mean, then, to play a game in which the primary actant—the player’s self-projection into diegetic3 space—may be suffering from mental illness? What forms might an unhealthy virtual mind take? And how do the player’s exploratory powers factor into the experience? This chapter will examine three games which attempt to depict mental illness in ways that are singularly exclusive to the medium in question: Square-Enix’s Final Fantasy VII (1997), Ubisoft’s Prince of Persia: The Two Thrones (2005) and Ben “Yahtzee” Croshaw’s The Consuming Shadow (2015). Each applies different tactics to represent damaged psyches as well as possible routes for recovery that are wholly dependent on action, rather than passive reception of the text.
This is not to suggest that video game narratives are wholly unique and share no overlap or intersection with other media; Evan Skolnick’s Video Game Storytelling points to foundational similarities shared by games, films, and novels in relation to basic storytelling conceits: “At this core level, stories and games are in blissful agreement. The driving force behind both experiences is the core conflict of a character wanting something, but needing to overcome challenges in order to get it.”4 The key difference is that video games create diegetic spaces in which the player is not just a spectator, but an active participant and explorer whose absolute control over the virtual avatar positions them in an interstitial space between storyworld and reality. According to Grant Tavinor, such spaces are perceived and treated as mimetic analogues of reality while the player is engaged with the game:
A virtual representation such as a 3D model of a city can be treated like the real city because it replicates features of the city (such as geography, street layout and addresses, and so on) in a symbolic form. As such, it is as good as the real city—or even better than it, in some respects—for learning the city’s layout: practically, one might treat the representation like the thing it represents to achieve some goal (orientating oneself, or learning where to go to find a given street address).5
Thus, if a player encounters a fictionalized representation of mental illness, or is embodied by a character who suffers from such an illness, the experience is both cinematic (informed via direct audiovisual cues) and participatory (as the avatar’s illness does not prevent the player from assuming total control of the character in question).
The Japanese role-playing game Final Fantasy VII demonstrates one such experience through the use of specific techniques that draw players closer to an unstable psyche. The game’s protagonist (and initial player avatar) Cloud Strife suffers from a form of amnesia due to unspecified past traumas. The story’s first act only hints at this, during an interactive cutscene in which Cloud recounts the fateful and violent demise of his home village, an event also witnessed by his childhood friend Tifa Lockhart. Tellingly, Tifa—who is present during this scene—displays visible signs of discomfort, indicating that something is wrong with Cloud’s recollection of the event. As the player progresses, they encounter more hints that their avatar’s mental health is questionable at best; he suffers from unexplained seizures and flashbacks, and is partially aware that something is wrong with him: “I’m Cloud, ex-SOLDIER, born in Nibelheim…. I came here by my own free will…. Or so I thought. However, … To tell the truth, I’m afraid of myself. There is a part of me that I don’t understand.”6 Late in the game’s second act, Cloud and Tifa accidentally fall into the Lifestream, a mystical source of energy that flows beneath the Earth’s surface. The player’s control abruptly switches to Tifa, in a scenario described by the game’s official guide thusly: “Tifa awakens to find herself in a seemingly empty void. Voices from the dark question her actions and challenge her to confess; she’s quickly overcome with emotion and sinks into the darkness. When she awakens she’s in a surreal world with not one, but three, Clouds. His conscious [sp] hangs overhead as if watching and waiting for answers.”7
As with Inception and similar films, this sequence literalizes mental illness by representing a character’s psyche as a visible and tangible mindscape, a pseudophysical environment that can be traversed as though it were a room or a city street. The inner mind becomes a setting, a three-dimensional space within the diegetic world. However, where Final Fantasy VII differs from this cinematic tradition is in the player’s inherent ability to control the manner and method of exploring this space. Cloud’s mindscape is a sickly green platform that branches out into three paths, each containing a different sequence of memories. As Tifa, the player must access those memories by walking the paths, navigating the reconstructed accounts of Cloud’s past while comparing them to Tifa’s own recollections. The truth is only fully revealed when the player has traveled all possible roads, piecing together clues and conflicting accounts until the root cause of Cloud’s breakdown is exposed, and his identity crisis is resolved. Both characters return to reality and emerge from the Lifestream, and the player resumes control of Cloud as the game’s primary actant and protagonist. This sequence is framed as a literalized healing process, in which the player is tasked with stitching together the broken fragments of the character’s mind; while the speed of Cloud’s recovery is a matter of narrative expediency rather than an accurate portrayal of recuperation, this investigation into the protagonist’s true history serves to solidify the almost-therapeutic bond between player and avatar, per Benjamin Chandler’s assessment:
Cloud’s identity crisis partway through the game forces players to reinterpret the game text; his preset signifiers and the players’ understanding of them are altered…. players are forced to reorder their impressions of Cloud and the way Cloud shaped their experiences in the game world. The extent to which this is necessary will depend on the extent of their identification with Cloud. Gamers will most likely accept it as it comes: “Cloud has an identity crisis that spurs on the next part of the action.” Players will need to reassess their interpretation of Cloud’s signifiers and alter the way they have produced the text of the game up to this point. The result is a stronger level of identification with Cloud and a shift in perceptions of the game world based on an alteration of signifiers.8
The interactive component of this story segment sets it apart from similar examples of mindscapes in other cinematic media—when the role of the audience is limited to that of the passive viewer, any ability to engage this psychological space is curtailed by the eye of the camera and its choice of focalization. Final Fantasy VII offers a more complex experience due to its innate interactivity: Cloud’s mind is not merely an abstract space rendered visually, but a programmed area of the game similar in function (if not form) to any town, forest, or secret cave the player may visit in the course of their adventure. The act of controlling Tifa, determining where she goes and in what order she accesses Cloud’s memories, and deducing the truth of his condition, create a form of active engagement no other narrative medium can generate.
However, spatial representation of a damaged mind is not the only way in which video games may allegorize madness or cognitive impairment. The Consuming Shadow, a Lovecraft-inspired horror game, begins with a clear indication of the protagonist’s affliction: the introductory scene offers the player a choice between “Begin Journey” and “Kill Myself.” This suicidal tendency is a product of the game’s premise: a malevolent extradimensional god is poised to invade Earth, and the player is given the daunting (if not impossible) task of preventing this incursion by assembling the scattered pieces of a magical ritual. However, per the general themes of Lovecraft’s work—particularly what has come to be known as his “Cthulhu Mythos”—exposure to otherworldly forces and entities results in a gradual deterioration of the protagonist’s sanity. Where The Consuming Shadow differs from Final Fantasy VII is its use of mental health as a gameplay mechanic, rather than a purely narrative function; the avatar’s sanity is a resource that must be carefully preserved, and encountering certain enemies may cause debilitating damage to the mind rather than the body:
Many different levels of reality layer upon ours, most of which we have no means of viewing or accessing (and for that we should be grateful). It seems to be possible for certain entities to exist on more than one level at a time. Such creatures have a strange, distorted appearance, madly blurring and vibrating like a poor quality TV picture. While they have the same physical properties, their touch may induce visions of extradimensional planes that could drive a layman raving mad in an instant.9
The player’s progress is directly tied to a steady accumulation of psychological damage, and the protagonist’s decaying mind begins to affect the game in visible ways: static flashes across the screen, hallucinatory enemies manifest and disappear upon contact, and at random intervals the game controls themselves may become reversed, leading to exponential difficulty for the player. The character’s prolonged suffering may also result in sudden suicide attempts which the player can attempt to avert—failure to do so will immediately lead to a bad ending and force the player to restart the game.
The Consuming Shadow portrays mental illness in an entirely different fashion from Final Fantasy VII: namely, it is a purely ludic function directly tied to gameplay. At any point, the condition of the protagonist’s psyche is determined by the actions (or failures to act) of the player; sanity is quantified, a meter that rises or falls in similar fashion to the more ubiquitous health bar seen so frequently in other games. While it is impossible to completely avoid gradual loss of sanity as the extradimensional incursion draws near, the amount of mental damage the protagonist sustains is dependent upon the player’s mechanical aptitude with the game system: the more familiar one is with The Consuming Shadow’s rules and mechanics, the longer a given avatar may endure. Cloud’s breakdown in Final Fantasy VII is a narrative event rather than a consequence of poor gameplay—it cannot be averted, and must be experienced in order for the story to continue; conversely, the format and design of The Consuming Shadow is such that, per Clive Fencott, the player’s enjoyment is directly derived from gameplay: “The ability to intervene, to be able to reconfigure signs, constitutes the basis of the pleasure we gain from playing games; agency, in a word. Intervention signs are principally conventions; they are symbols; we have to learn them anew for each new game.”10
But while the techniques used by The Consuming Shadow and Final Fantasy VII fall into the established schism between narrative and gameplay in terms of critical approaches to video games, the use of these games as examples does not imply that depictions of mental illness must exclusively fall into one category or the other. Games such as action-platformer Prince of Persia: The Two Thrones illustrate a hybrid approach, combining elements of story and play. As the final installment of the Sands of Time trilogy, The Two Thrones represents the culmination of the titular protagonist’s character arc. At the start of the series, the Prince is portrayed as a noble, somewhat naïve adventurer who is granted a limited ability to manipulate time. The second game, Warrior Within, sees the player in control of a hardened, more violent Prince, the result of a seven-year flight from an implacable monster: “The beast, the Dahaka, is the guardian of the Timeline. You were supposed to die, so it will catch you and see to it that you meet your fate.”11 Mentally exhausted by past events—some of which only he remembers, as a result of his many reversals of the timeline—the Prince is nevertheless revitalized upon defeating the Dahaka, only to return home in The Two Thrones to find his kingdom under siege. Very early in the game’s story, the Prince is infected with the eponymous Sands of Time, a physical trauma with immediate psychological ramifications that initially manifest as a voice only the Prince can hear. This unidentified persona constantly advises the Prince to take harsh, pragmatic actions in pursuit of vengeance rather than attempt any rescue of his people. However, as the player progresses through the story, it becomes clear that the Prince is struggling against a semiautonomous alter ego, the Dark Prince, an entity capable of taking over his body at scripted intervals. This, in turn, forces a gameplay change upon the player, as the Dark Prince must kill in order to sustain its life, and therefore eschews stealth and acrobatics in favor of brutal violence. The internal conflict is depicted as a form of dissociative identity disorder, as the Dark Prince claims to be the product of the cumulative traumas the Prince has suffered over the course of the trilogy. As with most fictional representations of this particular condition, the alter ego seeks to gain total control of the physical form and assert its will entirely, while claiming it acts in the best interests of the Prince himself:
Do you think you would be here now if not for me? How many times did I save you? How many times did I unblock your path, take down your enemies, remind you of your mission? While all you did was cry about your father and Kaileena and Farah, and how everything bad always happens to you! Boo-hoo, Prince!12
This struggle plays out as both a gameplay mechanic (the player must master the different tools and tactics employed by both the Prince and the Dark Prince in order to progress, and shifts between the two may occur at inconvenient points in order to heighten the challenge) and a narrative component that is key to the Prince’s personal story arc. The personality shifts occur more frequently as the Sands’ infection spreads, worsening the protagonist’s psychological condition, until a final conflict erupts within the Prince’s mind, taking the form of a running battle between the two personalities. As with Final Fantasy VII, mental space becomes ontological space: this realm is visually represented as a composite of locations the player has visited throughout the trilogy, while the Dark Prince taunts the protagonist (and by extension, the player) for past failures. Just as Final Fantasy VII requires that the player-as-Tifa progress through the fragments of Cloud’s psyche in order to knit his mind back together, so too must the player-as-Prince revisit his past in order to gain a clearer understanding of himself. By accepting the Dark Prince as a product of his repressed anger, vanity, and violent urges, the Prince ultimately emerges whole, a unified self once again.
What these three games share as examples (among many others) of video games that deal with mental illness is the heightened value offered by the inherent interactivity of the medium. Film and television may offer visual manifestations of mental illness, and follow focalizers through spatial allegories, but video games demand that players be both active and complicit in the exploration of the avatar’s mental state, as well as the possibility of recovery. The ability to investigate and navigate the diegetic space as a basic function of gameplay is a powerful tool through which players may enter broken minds and attempt to heal them. As previously stated, these processes are typically expedited, and are wholly unrealistic insofar as actual psychological health is concerned—but as visualized metaphors, the complex and immersive interactions offer valuable, innovative representations of mental illness that have no direct parallel in any other medium.
Notes
1. Robyn R. Warhol, Blackwell Companion to Narrative Theory (Malden/Oxford: Blackwell, 2005), 227.
2. Karin Kukkonen, Metalepsis in Popular Culture (Berlin/New York: De Gruyter, 2011), 4–5.
3. The level in which the story occurs; the fictional world projected by the text.
4. Evan Skolnick, Video Game Storytelling (New York: Watson-Guptill, 2014), 16.
5. Grant Tavinor, The Art of Videogames (West Sussex: Wiley-Blackwell, 2009), 49.
6. Kazushige Nojima and Yoshinori Kitase, Final Fantasy VII (Tokyo: Square-Enix, 1997).
7. David Cassady, Official Final Fantasy VII Strategy Guide (Indianapolis: Brady Publishing, 1997), 147.
8. Benjamin Chandler, Final Fantasy and Philosophy: The Ultimate Walkthrough (New Jersey: John Wiley & Sons, 2009), 18.
9. Ben “Yahtzee” Croshaw, The Consuming Shadow, in-game text (Australia, 2015).
10. Clive Fencott, Game Invaders: The Theory and Understanding of Computer Games (New Jersey: John Wiley & Sons, 2012), 166.
11. Corey G. May and Michael Wendschuh, Prince of Persia: Warrior Within (Montreal: Ubisoft, 2004).
12. Corey G. May and Michael Wendschuh, Prince of Persia: The Two Thrones (Montreal: Ubisoft, 2005).