INTERVIEW WITH UNIVERSITY OF UTAH GAME DESIGN STUDENTS

MUCH LIKE THE PREVIOUS INTERVIEW WITH GAME DESIGN students from the University of St. Thomas, this interview about portraying mental health in games looks for fresh ideas from fresh minds. In February 2022, I reached out to some contacts at University of Utah’s Entertainment Arts and Engineering program to ask their game design students to brainstorm how they would depict mental health and illness in video games. With a focus on using interactive mechanics in their design answers, the following are some responses from Claire Engvall, Lance Tallman, and Oliver Gallina.

QUESTION: If given the opportunity to depict anxiety or depression in a video game, how would you design it?

CLAIRE: Imagine playing a game that takes place in only one room, perhaps a tight studio apartment with no windows to the outside world. You play in first person, fully manipulating the player character and the objects around the apartment. You can perform the basic tasks that a person could in their home: cook, clean, shower, use the bathroom, watch TV, read a book, write on paper, etc. But the game won’t tell you to do anything. No objectives or goals. The game doesn’t give feedback beyond the literal completion of the task. You won’t get sound blips when you learn new information, ratings on the quality of your cooking, experience points for cleaning. No progression whatsoever. The only indication that anything is changing at all is a clock on the wall that never stops spinning. Now, this game would be no fun to play, and not just in the way that some games are for entertainment and others are for the experience. Without a challenge/reward feedback loop, time spent in this game wouldn’t really get the player anywhere. But messing around in this sandbox would take them through the same thought process that one has when suffering with depression. What am I supposed to do? Is this all there is? Nothing that I do changes anything? Why should I do anything at all? What’s the point? Before long, the player would quit the game, leave a review stating that this wasn’t really a game at all, and go back to playing something that does provide an impact.

The experience outlined above doesn’t address the deep sadness and despair that comes with depression. Mental illnesses are complicated, and it would be impossible for one game to capture it all. This design focuses more on the questioning of purpose that builds with depression as time goes on. Life feels worth living and worth the effort when we have taken up goals that we care about. Whether it’s graduating from college, starting a family someday, or finishing your third playthrough of your favorite video game, we live for the possibility of our achievements. When the ability to care about goals big or small has been taken from you, the internal/external validation balance doesn’t even matter anymore. That validation doesn’t even land no matter where it comes from.

LANCE: Jordan Magnuson’s game Loneliness (2010) stands out to me as a near-perfect depiction of anxiety and depression implemented through the mechanics of a video game. In loneliness, you play as a square that can move orthogonally and can never interact with other squares around it. Without dialogue or any sort of narrative substance, you personify the squares scattered through the game and intuitively begin to understand the plight of the game’s ‘protagonist.’ Your desire to touch even one of the other squares is compounded as the game progresses and a feeling of hopelessness, much like that of depression, overtakes you. If I were to create a game that was also meant to depict and potentially instill players with feelings of anxiety and depression, I imagine I would come at it from a similar design perspective. To start off, I would begin the game by giving players access to an arbitrary number of actions. The game would consist of a relatively simple core gameplay loop where players would apply these actions to relatively mundane tasks. Overtime, I would remove the player’s abilities so that by the end of the game they could take no feasible actions. This is best demonstrated using an example.

Let’s say the goal of the game is to be a successful student in high school (though since that could be construed as an overused trope this could be any sort of daily and fulfilling routine). The player would begin by performing this routine as expected: getting out of bed, walking to school, putting stuff into (or taking stuff out of) their locker, going to class, going home, doing homework, then going to bed. On the second day, the player would need to perform all of the same tasks that were required of them during the first day, but maybe now they only move at half of their usual speed. As a result, they were late to class and their academic standing was diminished. On day three, they would have to perform the same tasks, but they still moved half as fast and now could only move right. Maybe their backpack is on the left of them when they get out of bed so now it’s impossible for them to pick it up. Their ability to complete the game’s actions would continue to be reduced until they couldn’t get out of bed one morning and then the game would end.

QUESTION: How would you approach the design process for depicting mental illness in a video game?

CLAIRE: Everything in game design asks you to create a world opposite of depression. Games teach us that our efforts will be rewarded, that taking on goals will lead to better things. In life and in video games, we are taught to desire what we don’t have in a way that positively motivates us to get it. But in the cloud of depression, goals don’t seem to matter much anymore. The reward is no longer worth the effort because the obstacles feel insurmountable. The energy and emotional vulnerability that it would take to attempt to achieve the goal is too big a risk for what may or may not feel like a reward. So how do you design a game that feels like depression when conventions of game design rely on the opposite? You have to ask the player not to care. You have to put the player in a situation where the reward isn’t worth the effort. Where in fact there are no rewards at all.

OLIVER: When it comes to depicting any sort of mental illness or disability in a video game, the first thing I would want to do is research the topic I’m designing for as thoroughly as possible. Personally, I’ve dealt with a little bit of anxiety, though other than that I don’t have any firsthand experience with things like depression or psychosis or anything else. I wouldn’t feel confident in my ability to depict a situation I don’t have firsthand experience with, unless I knew a whole lot about it upfront, so that’s why I would make sure to start the process with plenty of research.

Once I feel relatively confident about the research I’ve done, I would try to make one or a few prototypes that I feel might depict the topic (whether it’s anxiety, depression, etc.) accurately. Designing game mechanics often centers around the objective of getting the player to feel a certain emotion or have some type of interesting experience as a result of actively engaging with the mechanics. Through playtesting and gathering player feedback on these prototypes, I would try to pin down which aspects of the play experience affected players in a way that’s in line with the research I had done (e.g., does this mechanic make the player feel anxious, does this type of gameplay paired with this specific audiovisual feedback put the player in a depressive state of mind, etc.). A prototype’s success would be measured by how effectively it was able to make a player feel the emotions I wanted them to feel / have the experience I wanted them to have.

Then, taking feedback of any inconsistencies or other points of improvement into account, I would take the most successful prototype and iterate on it, while continuing to playtest, until I’m satisfied with the end result’s ability to depict whatever mental health challenge or disability I’m trying to portray. Given the subject matter, I would also like to try and playtest the mechanics specifically with people who have had relevant experiences to it (e.g., people who have struggled with anxiety, etc.), with their consent of course, in order to make sure the design is as accurate and respectful as possible.