LogFAQs > #884773450

TVontheRadio posted...

what about the buzz around hellblade is turning you off? the subject? the presentation? the tone? the mechanics? the people hyping it up?

the game looks genuinely not fun from a gameplay perspective. the puzzles, the combat, the simple act of walking forward. which, fine, whatever, I've liked games more for less, and have even found meaning in lethargy. but what that leaves the game with is its presentation of mental illness, and it looks uneven.

I feel like games people, particularly games people with AAA background who now find themselves with a little bit of freedom thanks to past success or current indie direction, have it in their mind that video games are Important, and in order to prove that games are Important they need to be able to present Big Ideas. and that's okay. I'm not arguing that games shouldn't tackle big societal problems. it's just that sometimes it's a poor fit; sometimes the structure of the game interrupts the presentation of an idea, and things go wrong. sometimes the history of racism and power dynamics gets hand-waved away because a shooter needs another fetch quest. sometimes suicide gets reduced to whether a third party said the right thing. sometimes physical disability is portrayed as a punishment. in the case of Hellblade, it looks like a story about "mental illness" is gamified in such a way that it only really portrays schizophrenia, paranoid type. Hellblade might be a very accurate portrayal of schizophrenia, paranoid type, but if it's only about that one specific DSM (with its own history of negative portrayals in literature), does it really add much to the conversation? what's the intent? is it even helpful?

the problem with Big Ideas is that often the people most excited about portraying them aren't interested in the mundanity. and boy, does mental illness live in the mundanity; the day-to-day; the small interactions with the world at large.
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