In a perfect world, we would all be leading healthy, fit and fabulous lifestyles.
Due to busy schedules and lack of budgetfriendly, healthy meal and grocery options, it can seem nearly impossible to practice healthy eating habits nearly any single day.
Sometimes you may feel lucky enough to have time to eat, and similar times you may barely have enough money to afford hamburgers. Indie game Elude is a metaphorical discussion about mood disorders, and how people who suffer bipolar depression live life as a series of dramatic, emotional ups and downs. Neverending Nightmares is a horror game that developer Matt Gilgenbach built to explore his personal experiences with depression and ‘obsessivecompulsive’ disorder. As in Arkham Asylum or Manhunt Dunlap noted that Manhunt 2, mental hospitals and psychiatric institutions were depicted as terrifying and brutal places a game about a patient with amnesia doing best in order to navigate an asylum filled with psychopathic killers, was considered so offensive by the National Alliance on Mental Illness that it asked for the game to be recalled.
Breaking down into recognizable tropes the way film and television depict the mentally ill is not difficult.
There’s an awful lot of scholarship on the topic, thousands of movies and shows to look at for examples.
However, she found only a single paper in a peerreviewed journal, and decided to do some informal investigation to fill the gap, when Dunlap went looking for scholarly work on how video games depict the mentally ill. The actual question is. Why are video game characters with mental illnesses almost exclusively depicted as raving lunatics and psychopathic killers?
Like swapping weapons with them, master Chief can typically interact with other Marines in the game.
Should Master Chief accidentally shoot another Marine, he has a health bar and doesn’t die instantly.
Master Chief isn’t allowed to interact with the AWOL Marine, likewise, who also dies if Master Chief shoots him only once. Essentially, sanity rolls, or seeing whether a character spontaneously loses their mind, are very common in board games. Like Don’t Starve, in so broke her study down by characters, environments, and abstract depictions of mental illness itself. Whenever working from her own experience as a gamer and from examples submitted by friends and family, dunlap took a list of 39 different games that dealt with problems of mental illness or included mentally ill characters.
Now look, the mentally ill characters in the games Dunlap looked at fell into one of two groups. Like Cloud from Final Fantasy 7, they have been haunted by ‘post traumatic’ stress disorder, or Martin Walker in Spec Ops. Combat Evolved depicts an unbalanced Marine who’s gone AWOL, and threatens to kill series hero Master Chief if he steps for example, all allies and enemies in Halo. Actually the traumatized AWOL Marine encountered by Master Chief, however, does not. Combat Evolved appear on the player’s radar as light green or redish dots. Dunlap knows there’re more than 39 games she ought to be looking at, and wonders how often people will not realize how and when video games are even addressing the huge issue.