The Guitar in the Corner – April ’09 Round Table Entry

This month’s Round Table challenges you to design a game that deals with a social issue that personally troubles you. The recent months have seen controversy sweep through the video game industry. Whether people are objecting to the use of imagery widely considered to evoke racial stereotypes, or to the gameplay based on violent sexual crimes, or to the fact that anyone would complain about either topic–the discussion has been fierce. This month, contributors to the Round Table are invited to design a game that focuses on racism, rape, domestic violence, cruelty to animals, genocide, or any other serious, and potentially hot-button, topic.

My game design idea for this month’s Round Table addresses mental illness, specifically schizophrenia, and the ways it dehumanizes the person suffering from it. I initially intended to deal with something that wasn’t as sensitive to me personally, and at first, I couldn’t identify anything that I both had insight into, and felt strongly about. Sometimes, however, the most troubling issues are so close that they are easy to overlook.

Mental illness is definitely a taboo subject in our culture, though many of us will experience some degree of it during our lives. People experiencing mental illness are often discriminated against, both blatantly and in countless other more subtle ways. People dealing with serious mental illness are often feared and isolated, even by their own families. A large portion of the homeless population suffers from undiagnosed or untreated mental illness. Unfortunately, because of the nature of many serious mental illnesses, the people experiencing the diseases are unable to even comprehend that they are sick.

Schizophrenia is particularly misunderstood in popular culture, where people experiencing the disease are often depicted as violent murderers, or are said to be “schizophrenic”, but are actually experiencing multiple personality disorder. The word “schizophrenic” itself is misused to describe things that have very little to do with the actual disease. I wanted to attempt a game design that humanizes someone with schizophrenia instead of trivializing the disease.

My family has a history of mental illness. Most of my family members, including myself, deal with depression and anxiety. My uncle was diagnosed with paranoid schizophrenia as a teenager. The fear of, and fascination with, serious mental illness is something I’ve dealt with for much of my life.

The short story collection I’m working on explores various facets of mental illness and the way it affects a family over three generations. It is based on my grandmother’s life, and her influence on two sets of brothers: my father and uncle, and my brother and me. I decided to use one of the stories as a model for my game design, to see if I could convey the meaning of the story through game mechanics instead of words.

The story describes a mother visiting her son at his apartment. The son suffers from schizophrenia, and the mother feels a lot of guilt for the way his life has turned out. She expresses that guilt through jealousy of the psychiatric workers that care for her son. She feels like their responsibility for her son represents her failure as a mother, so she tries to clean his apartment and projects her guilt onto others. My goal with the game design is to have the player explore the relationship between mother and son through gameplay, and to discover the characters, their relationship, and their conflict without revealing anything directly.

The game uses a single screen depicting a dark apartment living room and kitchen from an isometric perspective. The rooms are illuminated only by a small, fake Christmas tree with flashing lights and a television tuned to fuzz. The audio starts as television static, but faint Christmas music plays beneath, from a radio on the kitchen counter. A calendar on the wall lists the month as June. Only two characters, the mother and the son, are directly shown. Their interiority is represented by images that form over their heads. The mother’s image appears directly on the background without any discrete separation, as if part of the environment, but the edges of the son’s image are fractured.

The game starts with the mother entering the apartment and the son in the bathroom, which is not shown, but suggested by the strip of light beneath the door. The player can only interact by clicking the mouse on the environment. The cursor is a hand, but changes to signify objects the player can use on something else. The shifts in light and sound are the mother’s perception, not the son’s, and this is apparent to the player because their input only directly influences the mother.

The floor of the apartment is filthy, but a vacuum sits in its center, power cord tangled around its base. Cigarettes butts are piled on a pizza pan sitting on the kitchen table, and are spilling over onto the floor, but the trashcan by the refrigerator is emtpy. Dirty clothes are strewn across the living room, but a washer and dryer sit in a closet off the kitchen. Cleaning up any of the mess will bring the son out of the bathroom. The mother visualizes a tidy apartment with her and the son embracing, but the son visualizes his mother crying. The Christmas tree dims and the static’s volume increases as the mother continues to clean.

If the player selects the Christmas tree or the photo album on the coffee table, the object will enlarge and allow a choice between handmade family ornaments or photographs. The icon will change accordingly, and the image above the mother’s head will change to reflect the memory represented by the object. All of the memories will be subverted by the mother’s guilt, but if the player uses the object on the son, both of their memories will slowly merge. The Christmas lights will get brighter and the music on the radio will become louder. As the shared memory unfolds, the image will tarnish and the mother will refuse to select another memory until the apartment is cleaner.

As the mother cleans, the son’s image will darken and display memories associated with his illness, but as the mother and son share more memories, the player will gain the ability to directly interact with the image above the son, altering the negative memories by clicking their source and clearing away the darkness by swiping with the cursor. The fractured border will remain unchanged, as the player’s actions are not intended to represent alleviation of symptoms related to schizophrenia. As the player balances the mother and son’s mood, the Christmas tree will get progressively lighter and the Christmas music will replace the television’s static.

When the static is gone, the son will turn off the radio and pick up the guitar sitting in the corner. The mother and son sit on the couch together and the son plays her a song he wrote for her (this is conveyed through the now completely shared image above their heads). The song will incorporate elements from all of the memories, both good and bad, and the son’s portion of the image will retain its fractured edges, to show that the brain disease’s effect on the son has not been alleviated in any way.

The apartment is not fully cleaned, and the son’s song is not completely happy, but it is important that the mother has formed a connection with the son and is able to cope with her guilt directly through the memories they share. The mother is the only character that changes significantly, because the son is not at fault in the conflict. His willingness to share the song he has written for her is based on the connection she forms with the player’s input.

I hope my design managed to convey story through game mechanics. Developing a game that’s implicit rather than explicit in meaning is a little like walking a tightrope, especially when presenting a sensitive subject, since the intention can be misinterpreted. Even the visual representation of the mother and son’s thoughts could be offensive, considering the symptoms associated with schizophrenia. Hopefully, by making it obvious to the player that the visuals are an abstract gameplay mechanic that originates with the mother and not the son, the potential insensitivity is avoided. Please let me know in the comments, however, if anything in the game design seems to trivialize the situation I was trying to explore.