Videogame Sanity Systems and Mad Representation
By Alice Fox
Technological artifacts do not exist in a vacuum: they bear the undeniable markings of human histories, politics, blind spots, and biases – for better and worse. Consider, for example, the video game: everything in a video game must be created, decided upon, and often negotiated in a dynamic and lively way.
As I have written elsewhere, video games can directly embody and reproduce harmful stereotypes and misconceptions, while neatly packaging these dispositions as “the way things are” in the videogame world. Video games can be a powerful source and foundation of “knowledge about the world” to which players are exposed – especially when games are played by younger people who may not have had exposure to a variety of different life experiences, people, and ways of knowing to recognize and “inoculate” themselves against problematic positions in a video game. If these flat, one-dimensional depictions are players’ first and frequent encounters with differences in race, gender, sexuality, and ability, these stereotypes and ignorant depictions can become incredibly sticky and difficult to undo. And unlike scientific experiments in mis/disinformation studies, video games rarely provide a debriefing session after the game ends!
One of the most critiqued depictions of madness in popular culture is that of the Joker in Batman. Within the video game world, this critique is often leveled at Arkham Asylum, where the Joker, among others, is depicted as deranged, violent, unpredictable, and described as a “homicidal maniac.” On one hand, psychiatrists have argued that these depictions are inaccurate and fabricated. Players, on the other hand, often defend these depictions under the banner of “Gothic Horror,” and suggest that such representations provide a critique of the violent and neglected asylums of the past, like Blackwell. However, these “critiques” often lack nuance in the game world, with the gameplay rendering the historic threads largely invisible.
Another classic depiction of madness in video games, albeit one that has received less critique, is Eldritch madness – a core element of Lovecraftian horror. This type of madness is depicted as a psychotic break that occurs after someone encounters unfathomable or cosmic knowledge that renders their own existence obsolete or inconsequential. Often, this becomes conflated with experiencing or witnessing an event or action that is existentially dreadful: senseless violence, murder, and so forth. Importantly, anyone can experience this type of madness.
As the Fist Full of Meeples game-maker notes, the things going on in these games and worlds are absolutely awful, and it makes sense that people are psychologically impacted by that! However, the question remains: why is madness always depicted as a personal failing in video games, rather than as a potential strength?
Fortunately, the problems surrounding representation have been gaining traction in video game studies, particularly surrounding representation of gender, race, and disability within game (see, for instance, Kishonna Gray’s Intersectional Tech: Black Users in Digital Gaming and Adrienne Shaw’s Gaming at the Edge). Disability has received increasingly more attention when it comes to video games, and more authors have been examining the specific challenges that emerge at the intersections of video games and Madness/Mad Studies. When popular games attempted to depict madness, at least 75% of those depictions, with an upwards of 97%, engaged in stereotypical and negative representations. This area of research has plentiful opportunities for continued critical analysis and examination from Mad perspectives. However, I would like to turn the reader’s attention to less charted territory for the remainder of this piece: game mechanics.
If we draw a circle in the ground to delineate the game space (inside) from the not-game space (outside), mechanics are the core components that make up the possibilities of play within the magic gaming circle. Game mechanics include both the rules and the appropriate responses to various actions within the game. When playing marbles, there are the social rules that govern how to play marbles properly, but also the hard material constraints of the marbles themselves, the environmental constraints of the surface being played on, the embodied restraints dexterity of the player’s hand and their ability to judge short distances and momentum, and so forth. In a video game, all of these features must be created and established via game mechanics. No hard and fast rules, like gravity and velocity, exist in the video game world. And only so much flexibility for social rules or house rules can generally be tolerated without ‘breaking the game’. For example, if I am bad at marbles, and I decide to guide my marble, like a Hotwheels car, into the target marble to knock it out of the circle, the game has fundamentally changed regarding rules and skill requirements. A new game may have just been invented altogether! Mechanics are crucial to gameplay; they are the key elements that develop the structural system for ‘the way things are’ within a game, whether video or analog.
One example of a game mechanic that exists in a number of video games is called a Sanity System. A Sanity System is an alternative or complementary system to a character’s health in a video game that often acts as an element that weakens the player character (commonly called a “debuff”) and makes it more challenging to play the game with low sanity and easier when it is high. An example of a Sanity System can be found in the game Don’t Starve. In the “Insanity!” update to the game in February 2013, Don’t Starve added a sanity meter that measures how much sanity the character has in the game. Interacting with ghosts and monsters, being alone in the dark, or jumping through wormholes decrease sanity, and wearing flower crowns, fun hats, or learning a recipe can improve sanity. While having low sanity will not kill the player-character, it will make it much more challenging to survive: the primary goal of the game.
From these game mechanics, questions emerge about how the concept of sanity is depicted: Is the game actually representing sanity? Or is it fear? Isolation? Loneliness? Energy? Confusion? Safety? Exhaustion? Or an endless number of experiences and emotions that all humans, at some point or another, regardless of ability, navigate? This playful ordering of madness to quantifiable mechanics reinforces the binary of being sane, and normal, or of “losing” sanity and being reduced and subject to increasing challenges that more “sane” characters do not encounter. The mechanics of the game operate as a systemic injustice, eliminating the possibility for encountering “mad border bodies,” as Shayda Kafai calls them,: bodies that are dual inhabitants in the in-between of social and institutional identifiers of sanity and madness. In this same way, Don’t Starve also falls into tropes of depicting madness as burdensome or challenging: they added this sanity system as an expansion to increase the difficulty and intrigue of the game for players.
As Simon Ledder has argued of other video games, Don’t Starve too has inadvertently embodied and reproduced the ableist hegemony of saneness: that mental illness, emotional disability, and non-neurotypical experiences are always correlated with fear, violence, lesser states of being. But importantly, these problems need not remain. By leaning into Mad Studies and the experiences of Mad people to create more authentic and resonant depictions of madness, the tired tropes of Arkham Asylum and Eldritch Horrors can be laid to rest. While age-old stereotypes have influenced and shaped video games for decades, the possibilities for new mechanics, ones that don’t reify negative worn out stereotypes of madness, remain open for addition, engagement, and creativity.
Alice Fox is a Lecturer in Science, Technology and Society at Stanford University.
