The Art of Video Game Madness

How video games have portrayed insanity - and been shaped by it.
Games have always borne an unusually close relationship with madness. Any creative medium that asks you to accept jumping twenty feet into the air or killing two thousand soldiers single-handed as a normal state of affairs has clearly got a screw loose. Yet while films such as Fight Club and Shutter Island used madness as a storytelling device to stunning creative effect, for a long time gaming seemed oblivious to its inherently loopy nature.

In its more lucid moments gaming has used madness to bring us some of its finest characters: BioShock's Sander Cohen and Portal's GLaDOS straddled the line between humorously manic and violently sociopathic, and Far Cry 3's Vaas was a memorably unhinged performance too. But games can use madness to many other ends than creating a clever plot or compelling character. It can form part of a mechanic to affect how players experience the virtual world around them, to toy with their expectations. It can also be used to explore, criticise and confront some of the readily accepted genre conventions which many games adhere to. And it is just possible that games might be able help better understand the nature of psychological disorder itself.

One of the most familiar bedfellows of madness is horror, and games have developed some unique ways of implementing it in this genre. Tom Jubert is a British game writer who has penned stories for games such as the reality-bending Driver: San Francisco and the sci-fi roguelike sensation FTL. But his debut scripts were written for Penumbra, the horror trilogy by Frictional Games, now better known for Amnesia: The Dark Descent.

One of the most familiar bedfellows of madness is horror, and games have developed some unique ways of implementing it.

"I started emailing people while I was on my English degree suggesting I could do some writing for them, and the last one that I sent was to Frictional games." says Jubert, "They'd released their Penumbra tech demo and I re-wrote the intro for them and sent it to them. Just as a cold-call, and they got back and offered me a royalties position on the full game."

Set in an Arctic mining station-cum-research facility, Penumbra derives much of its horror from madness. The game features a sanity meter which drains if the player comes into contact with enemies or stays in the dark for too long, causing hallucinations and loss of control over movement. Meanwhile, the player is guided through the trilogy by a series of distinctly unreliable companions, most notable of whom is the second game's Clarence, a figment of the player character's imagination who becomes increasingly separated from and antagonistic toward the player as the game progresses.

"Clarence gave me some good opportunities and more than anything gave us chances to do cool things with the limited budget." explains Jubert, "Once he's in your head we can do all sorts of things with the level geometry and quite cheap things that allow us to show the character's influence in the world, for them to have a presence beyond just being a voice in your ear, without actually having to cash out on animated characters".

The strength of Clarence as a character, and the game's portrayal of madness rely on an intricate collaboration between writer and designer. Levels in Black Plague frequently rearrange themselves behind the player's back. Doors and corridors will disappear and reappear as Clarence unravels your state of mind, and then mocks you for it. " We had a great big narrative design doc, a parallel of the level design doc, it had 2D sketches, top-down-sketches for all of the levels, and then every single narrative element was marked out," Tom says. "Then the guys went through everything that I wrote up at every benchmark and ticked the things that they thought will work and then crossed the things that they didn't have time for."

What happens when you bring madness into a game genre which is usually played straight??

The Penumbra series shows how effectively games can be at depicting an abnormal state of mind. But madness naturally fits into horror, simply because there are few prospects as horrifying to an average person as losing control over your own self. By comparison, what happens when you bring madness into a game genre which is usually played straight?

Walt Williams is a game writer at 2K games, and was the lead writer on last year's Spec Ops: The Line, the shooter set in Dubai in which Spec Ops Captain Walker sets out to rescue the 33rd regiment and their leader Colonel Konrad from the sandstorm-ravaged city. While mechanically a little rote, was hailed for its writing and anti-war stance. According to Williams, however, the Line's line was not anti-war, but was in fact about how shooters portray violence and killing.

"Every step of the way as we were coming up with what would be the next thing that Walker did, it became very apparent to us that no sane person would be doing the things that this guy was doing," says Williams. "Walker being insane came from simply being honest with ourselves about the things that our protagonist was doing and really what other protagonists do in games and how none of it falls into the category of sane logical decisions."

Unlike in most FPS games, the player's moving forward and killing of enemies makes the situation in Dubai worse, eventually becoming so bad that Walker's mental state begins to unravel, as he is incapable of reconciling his view of himself as doing the right thing with the atrocities he commits. The player's complicity in this also has consequences, as they are forced to fight soldiers who aren't actually there, and the loading screen's helpful hints become questions and accusations. "We wanted to have the feeling that the game itself was turning against them, much like Walker would be feeling that the world was turning against him, we wanted to break down the wall of you being simply someone playing a game."

While both Spec Ops and Penumbra use madness in very different ways, they are similar in that they use madness as a mechanical device to provide an experience, as opposed to being an exploration of madness in themselves. But is using madness to create scares and clever plot twists not rather insensitive to people who actually suffer from psychological disorders?

Interestingly, both games deliberately avoid an attempt at a realistic depiction of any psychological ailments. Tom Jubert points out that the character of Clarence was influenced far more by the Malkavian character of the RPG Vampire: The Masquerade: Bloodlines than by any research into split-personality disorder. "If you look at the vast history of the depiction of mental disorders in fiction and drama, it's usually more on the dramatic side than the factual side, right? It's pretty shamelessly used, and I hope that's OK because it's not always purporting to be a factual approach, and it is a useful device. It lets us talk about a bunch of things that we couldn't talk about otherwise."

And what about Spec Ops? Is having a shooter protagonist who goes mad appropriate when both video games and mental instability are often cited when there is a particularly troublesome occurrence of gun-crime in the US, such as a school shooting? Williams points out that Walker's madness is a consequence of his actions rather than a cause of them . "If it was a story about a normal person who had a gun and was in a situation where he was killing people, whether he was justified or not, I think if we used mental illness in that capacity it could have been a very bad creative decision."

It's possible that games could have potential to help us better understand psychological disorders.

It's certainly the case that madness enables a whole range of creative storytelling techniques, and both Spec Ops and Penumbra weave it into their narratives in very effective ways. But just as madness has demonstrated itself to be a useful tool for telling stories in games, it's possible that games could have potential to help us better understand psychological disorders.

Games like Depression Quest have begun to explore the more nuanced nature of the human mind and psychological disorders beyond caricatured generalisations of "madness", albeit in a limited fashion. Might it be possible to use Penumbra's technique of placing you in the shoes of another person with an altered perception of the world in ways beyond horror? Jubert's answer is straightforward "If any creative medium is appropriate for broaching that topic, and I hope it is, then I see no reason why games should not."

Williams meanwhile is a little more sceptical, "I like to think that it's possible, but at the same time I don't know that it is, because I think in videogames we have trained ourselves to simply accept broken worlds and broken realities, and I don't know if we could turn that off." Spec Ops' narrative was written to highlight that broken nature of many videogame worlds and what they expect the player to accept as normal - but games like it are very much the exception rather than the rule. So it's likely that before games can be used in this more empathetic, experiential way, they must first acknowledge their own inherent insanity, and find new ways to overcome it.