Summary
Video games are magic. They can thrust players into places and situations that would be impossible to experience firsthand beyond actually going and doing those things personally. As well as delivering epic power fantasies, tantalizing choices, and beat-skipping thrills, the medium is uniquely suited to conveying the very real and otherwise unknowable struggles of many people in our own imperfect world.
The words “addictive gameplay” or “addictive game loops” are commonplace terms when it comes to gaming. But while these phrases are used to denote a title that is so much fun that it’s difficult to put down, some insightful developers have chosen to examine the nearly invisible horrors of the illness (for both the sufferers and those close to them). While physical struggles are easy to convey in movies or books,video games can serve to offer compelling insight into mental illnesses; one of them, and one of the more misunderstood illnesses, is addiction.
Addiction rarely develops in a vacuum, and even if the primary cause isn’t immediately obvious, the illness is almost always working to cover up some hidden pain deep below the surface, as seen inMax Payne 3. However, throughout theMax Payneseries, players get to see exactly where the cuts and bruises (literally) began. After living through the torment of losing his family, Max goes on a rampage to find revenge for their deaths.
But as the story unfolds, it’s clear that the damage Max has endured will never heal, no matter how many bad guys hetakes down in slow-motion, head-exploding gunshot dives. By the third entry, Max is completely dependent on painkillers, a healing item from the two previous games, as well as the bottle. However, Max seems not only to be addicted to substances but to the thrill of life-or-death situations, which in turn sharpens his paranoia and anxiety to a razer’s edge.
At first glance, this gloriously stylized pixel game looks as though it would have little to say about deep issues such as addiction, never mind much dialogue at all. However, besides having asurprisingly innovative dialogue systembased on hitting timing-based answers in real-time, one of the central conflicts ofKatana ZEROis the dependency that Zero, the protagonist, has on a fictional, time-dilating, super-power-inducing drug called Chronos.
As well as fighting (and liquidating) waves of enemies, Zero must also combat the withdrawals he feels for Chronos. Of course, the drug was originally prescribed to help alleviate severe, repressed nightmares but quickly becomes a crutch in completing his day-to-day missions, mirroring the relationship that many who suffer from addiction have to the substances that they feel carry them through hard times.
Although the topic of mental illness and substance abuse is serious and requires a certain level of maturity to deal with,Disco Elysiumtakes a frank (but somehow jovial) approach to discussing the subject. The conflicting thoughts and emotions of the cop,a veteran fighter of the good fight with a horrific and tragic past, are conveyed with humor and sadness in equal measure.
The player gets to see a beautifully crafted vertical slice of all the mechanisms holding the cop back from dealing with his drink and substance abuse issues. As his investigation evolves, the player has to choose whether to help him get back on the wagon (for some stern debuffs) or give in to the party animal inside his brain that demands experiential lubrication in the form of chemical uppers 24/7. By taking the latter route, the player gains a temporary boost (but does so by quickening the cop’s downfall).
No other medium is able to truly express what cravings and inner turmoil are like, quite like games with ethical dilemmas mixed with role-playing. InVampyr, after waking up in a mass grave following a brutal experience on the front line of World War I, a doctor in 1918 London must grapple with his oath never to do hard and insatiable lust to draw blood and gain greater vampiric powers.
Although the narrative does not delve into the subject directly,Vampyrdelivers a supernaturally wrapped metaphor for the struggles of being fixated on a substance following great trauma, as anyone might find themselves burdened with after the First Great War. Rather than depicting a character going down a darker and darker hole for amusement or pleasure,Vampyrasks players to test their ethical metaljust as the doctor does against his cravings.
Cyberpunk worlds have always been the dark mirror that reflects both society’s possible future and the issues of today. While addiction does not directly affectHuman Revolution’s main character, Jenson, directly, Eidos-Montreal painted a picture of a society both enhanced by and addicted to bodily augmentation. InHuman Revolution, those who have accepted robotic implants or limbs must maintain a steady supply of Nueropozyne, a drug that wards off the body’s natural rejection of the tech.
It’s a subtle analogy to the one-sided relationship that many “consumers” have with companies that provide products or services with inelastic demand that are, because of convenient circumstances,able to bend the arms of the most vulnerable in society to make the big bucks. While there was a chance to portray this addiction in a “technologically evolve (and pay up) or die” framework (i.e., the near-mandatory ownership of a smartphone or internet connection),Deus Exstill manages to reflect a very real social crisis in the real world, especially that in the United States, which is currently working through its own profits-sparked narcotics epidemic.
In the hands of a less capable (and empathic) developer, the main subject of focus in this game could have been portrayed in a very different light. However, Danny Hayes, the indie dev behind the game, spent many years of his life researching the subject in textbooks and on the street. Naturally, anyone suffering the terrible fate of homelessness would turn to illicit substances if it helped them cope.
Change: A Homeless Survival Experienceis, in the developer’s own words, meant to put players in the shoes of someone much less fortunate. As well as having to watch their health, players have toprevent too much happiness loss throughout their runs, which can come in the form of insults from passers-by, long-term starvation, or being soaked by a bad night’s rain. Of course, the most happiness-returning items are ones that add addiction to the player’s roster of problems.
This deceptively simple-looking second entry in a series of three reveals a lot about the life of an addict, current or former. InLISA: The Painful, Joy, a fictional drug in the post-apocalyptic world that Brad, the protagonist, uses to soothe his pain, acts to replenish health, and can increase a person’s combat abilities. However, the drug also makes its long-term users more prone to violence and spontaneous bodily mutations.
The real kicker is that even if an addict finds the path to recovery, there’s always a chance that they will transform into a monster. This is a powerful metaphor for those addicted to substances in real life, as after a certain level of abuse, they can be viewed by society (and themselves) as a monster, and equally, even after many years of abstinence, they are tragically still viewed as people with the potential to, at any moment, transform into a beast.
