LogFAQs > #884821556

I'm engaging Hellblade on its own terms. When Hellblade was announced, it was pitched as a AAA indie. The very next piece of information Ninja Theory gave about Hellblade is that it would deal intimately with mental illness. The two dozen developer diaries Ninja Theory put out mostly cover these two topics, its production values and its subject matter. That Hellblade is about mental illness is the very core of its identity. Its sound design, which Ninja Theory goes to great lengths to ensure the player experiences, is predicated on the very idea. The game opens with a long credit sequence you can't ignore, and the names of Ninja Theory's mental health advisors are prominently on display. The game ships with a half-hour featurette on how Ninja Theory came to design their visual metaphor schizophrenia, paranoid type. There are in-game links to mental health resources in numerous countries the game shipped. The intention is clear: Ninja Theory want you to empathize with Senua, to experience what she does, in the ways she does. What I question, again, is to what end.

digiiiiiiiii posted...

it sounds like you're less concerned with what the game actually delivers and more on what people are saying

I think this is a point worth addressing, because what prompted me to read more about Hellblade and watch video of it was what people weren't saying. People talked about how this is a positive portrayal of mental illness. They neglected to offer a baseline. There was no interrogation of the very idea. There was no history of depictions of mental illness in games, no mention of how frequently schizophrenia, paranoid type is representative of all mental illness (particularly in games, thanks to the influence of the sanity meter, but more widely as well), not even a mention about how the very act of playing this game by a person with schizophrenia, paranoid type, or other types of mental illnesses could be triggering. It is taken as given that Hellblade's portrayal of mental illness is good and accurate and it will lead to a wider understanding of and greater empathy with people with mental illness. I think that's incomplete criticism.

TVontheRadio posted...

but that kinda stuff is a hard sell right now for an audience that leans a bit more towards the mainstream, which is the audience that ninja theory is trying to reach with hellblade. maybe the whole concept of making mental illness more "palatable" is already fundamentally questionable!

I don't think so. Look, Hellblade is a game because Ninja Theory is a game developer, and Hellblade is a game about mental illness because Ninja Theory is a developer interested in portraying mental illness in games. It is on the scale it's at because that's the scale Ninja Theory want to work in. This is all very circular, but it is what it is. I accept that. I question how effective this game is at achieving its goals. I cynically wonder if it's achieving anything other than a warm feeling after playing it.

TVontheRadio posted...

i'm optimistic enough to believe that we'll eventually have a true AAA walking simulator with zero combat and spectacle. hellblade's success would just make it happen sooner! seeing neil druckmann praise it already makes me even more positive about that outcome.

This is a good point, and I agree. I would like to see more games operate like Hellblade with less game-y elements, and not have them immediately dismissed.
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