What are some topics in games that make you uncomfortable or hesitant to recommend it to others?

Authoring General Design Discussions
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For what it’s worth, I didn’t take the message that way—the game’s also not trying to say (spoiler but not ableism) “schizophrenia lets you time travel”. Sort of like how classic Gothic madness and hysteria isn’t really analogous to actual mental illness, and combining the two tends to produce significantly worse results (I’m thinking in particular of the tabletop games where seeing Cthulhu gives you a random DSM diagnosis) than treating them as fundamentally different things.

To me, the Logos is so different from actual mental illness (including the mental illness of the other patients in Bedlam) that the one can’t really say anything about the other. But, I’m also infamously bad at interpreting themes in works, so take this with a grain of salt.

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I do elaborate on why I think that the ableist message is the thematic message in the post I linked – I agree that the effects of the Logos are not actually like real schizophrenia as opposed to stereotypes of it, but characters in the game explicitly ascribe its effects to schizophrenia. The characters are incorrect, but the game does not treat them as fundamentally different things; the comparison is drawn in the text itself.

Excerpt

Patient History
Arrival Date/Time: 2 - 3 - 55 23:00
Processing: James Houlihan
Attending Alienist: Dr. Thomas Xavier
Depositing/Transporting: unlisted

Patient arrested for disturbance of the peace, neighbors described screaming and raving at all hours. Found comatose in his flat (see personal information). Awoke in transit - mostly compliant though some resistance – completely silent, refused to answer questions.

Diagnosis: (for specifics see attached) Disassociative disorder, acute schizophrenia with paranoid tendencies. Does not, however, seem dangerous to himself or others.

Prognosis: To be kept under observation until such time as attending alienist decides on further treatment [uncertain of necessary duration].

Departure Date/Time: 10 - 3 - 55 5:50
Status: Deceased

Anyway, I think I am coming across the wrong way to yall–I do think that the game is valuable for not just the IF world but also to me, and I enjoyed it a lot. I’m not trying to damn the game because it’s got an ableist message, I’m trying to say that I would not recommend the game to friends for various reasons including its ableist message.

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You aren’t the only one; I was talking to someone else recently who felt very similar about the game and about lost games involving mental health institutions. That’s actually the conversation that prompted this thread, to find out what people thought about this exact sort of thing.

Edit: And it’s okay to have a diversity of opinion. I have never suggested Photopia to anyone in my personal life and rarely recommend it online because it starts off with strong language and sexual innuendo. I think the majority of people on this forum wouldn’t care about it, but I do, and it’s okay that we differ. Although, I just checked Photopia and it looks like at some point after the competition he edited some of that stuff out, so that’s nice

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you should have avoides writing this when your audience includes a Naval and Military historian… everyone knew what is the stereotypical schizophrenic grand delusion, hardly a more perfect narrative device for time travel into, well, the late XVIIIth-early XIXth Century :wink: :smiley: , whose in turn allows full freedom from all those paradoxes around time travel !!

(in all intellectual honesty, as actual mil & nav historian I can endure some of the recent, often very bizarro, alt-history novels by pretending to read a fictional diary of a schizophrenic… whose raise a very interesting point on unconfortableness: one can endure uneasiness thru adding a layer of own metafiction ? it’s an interesting point to debate in both authorship and readership/playership)

Best regards from Italy,
dott. Piergiorgio.

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This whole thread is a great example of why content warnings are so important. Unless I know a lot about a person and know what they don’t like, I’ll recommend any game I liked and hope that either that the game has adequate CWs to let them make their own decisions, or that they can handle hitting something offensive and quitting the game. It’s not my job to keep a running list in my head of everything that might bother every person, and we’re all grown folk who can handle turning off the TV if it gets too scary or sexy or whatever.

Good CWs, y’all. Put them in your game descriptions.

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Excellent point. Also, memory isn’t perfect. When recommending a game/movie to someone I might only remember that I liked it, but not all the specific things that are in it that might bother some people, especially if significant time has passed since my playing/viewing.

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Since a lot of discussion appears to be about Slouching Toward Bedlam (directly or indirectly), a game that some people might associate with my own post about representations of mental illness and institutionalization in media, I’d like to add a couple of thoughts. There is an important detail near the end, so I hope you’ll read the whole thing.

Romantic or spectacular characterizations of mental illness typically emerge from historical realities: abuse, neglect, ostracization, exploitation. These are not all in the distant past, nor has privilege always protected the victims of sanism. John F. Kennedy’s sister, for instance, was lobotomized at the age of 23. If I had been born twenty years earlier, I might have been lobotomized. In a thread that asks, “what are some topics that make you uncomfortable,” I hope we as a community can handle someone being bothered by inept characterizations of mental illness, even if one doesn’t feel so powerfully affected themselves.

It isn’t very comfortable to declare publicly that you’ve been in a nuthouse, which you may not know if you’ve never felt a need to do it. But how else can somebody rise above the usual grousing over people being too sensitive, or whatever? Or else avoid a pivot to discussing the relationship between people having a hard time and the wider problems of the world, which I certainly haven’t caused. This thread may be a tiny blip in your media consumption journey, but this kind of tiring stuff happens all the time.

Opinions often come cheap. Anyone can have one, and everybody has a right to one, but I paid a dear price for mine, and maybe rushing in to defend a game that was never mentioned by myself or anyone else, well, why do that? In terms of audience reception, Slouching seems to be doing just fine without anyone’s help.

Here’s the surprise twist. I have, and have had, five star rankings at IFDB for Slouching, Cragne Manor, Anchorhead, and Vespers, among others. It’s possible to respect the craft of a work while having a legitimate beef with something. It’s possible to discuss legitimate beefs, I hope, on a forum where we discuss such things.

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Aster did make a comment focused on Slouching Towards Bedlam as the single game they were most reluctant to recommend, and it looks to me like most of the subsequent discussion of that specific game is in direct response to them. I don’t think people are trying to take swipes at your more general earlier comment at all.

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Yeah, I never felt personally attacked, nobody said “I don’t care about your story, Drew.” I don’t think that’s how this kind of thing works. I think environments can be hostile to certain types of discourse, that… things get into the air, if that makes sense. I agree that mentioning Aster’s post would have been productive, but even if I recenter my comments around Aster’s post, it’s discouraging to see “I wouldn’t recommend this to my friends,” which is also the answer to a question asked by the OP, wind up a little sideways.

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I can definitely understand being unhappy that that’s the only personal preference in this thread to have received significant disagreement! I just thought you might have missed Aster’s comments because you seemed to be characterizing the situation as people jumping to defend a game no one had specifically criticized. And while it’s unpleasant when someone expresses their personal feelings about a specific work and people seem to be trying to argue them out of it, it definitely comes off more hostile to me if someone expresses a general opinion that doesn’t even name names and a bunch of people go “how can you insult [specific example] like that?”, so I figured if I thought a situation was the latter and it was actually the former, I’d want to know. But it sounds like I was misreading that part of your comment to begin with?

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I don’t see how this can be improved or avoided, since that’s the impression people have from some special topics. It IS disturbing. I personally have been in the funny farm (I like that term, but you can say nuthouse if you like). But still I’m not sure whether I would recommend a game about mental illness to other people. I don’t know if that means I’m insensitive.

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I think “Lovecraftian Madness” is kind of the crutch people use and it’s kind of the fantasy version of mental illness like how slasher movies portray “fantasy murder” that doesn’t make you feel awful about enjoying watching it. It’s kind of a literary device that mortals don’t know how to deal with Fantasy Madness sometimes any more than actual mental conditions and are put into civilian facilities kind of by default. I’m sure there was more than one episode of X-Files where someone who was actually an alien or had superpowers was confined because nobody knows how to deal with it.

This put me in mind of the movie Pontypool which is on it’s surface about people holed up in a radio station during a zombie event but it turns out the vector for the zombie virus is “affectionate words or passionate discourse in English” which immediately breaks people into a zombie in Lovecraftian fashion.

I’m not saying it’s correct, but it often can make sense why this occurs narrative-wise in the nuts and bolts of human experience and plot-authoring. Like in The Exorcist how they pursue physical medical and psychological routes before determining the problem is supernatural. Of course there are good and bad ways to portray this and sometimes there is fumbling. And of course content/trigger warnings are well-deserved in a game like Slouching Towards Bedlam.

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Sorry, that’s not what I meant! Aster stated that se wouldn’t recommend it to er friends, and I support that as er decision to make.

If you’ve been there, you have a right to call it whatever you choose.

Possibly, I wrote that post maybe six times, as I always feel that I have to be very careful with my words. These are high stakes conversations! For me. Truthfully, I wrote most of this because I felt a lot of solidarity with Aster’s last post in the thread and wanted to speak up. I’m sure it would have come up anyway, but I regret mentioning mental illness in the first place.

Thanks for asking for clarification.

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I think Drew’s comment was misunderstood here. The full meaning I’m getting is:

as in, “It’s discouraging to see the statement [that someone would not recommend a game] get misinterpreted in the current conversation”.

It’s not insensitive to be hesitant to recommend a game with uncomfortable elements (such as weird treatment of people put into grippy socks land, which I am also intimately familiar with) (an experience which I also hate feeling like I need to admit for people to take my critiques seriously). I think some of the comments here have tended toward dismissiveness of these feelings, and that is, as Drew says, frankly tiring.

Also fwiw, I do understand this narrative phenomenon quite well. I think sometimes it’s really awesome and cathartic to see thematic parallels being drawn between the public’s fear of mental disorders and the fear of the supernatural. Warm Bodies (the book to a larger extent than the movie) comes to mind, I love that book. I think that’s part of the thematic merit of Slouching Toward Bedlam, but imo it does it in a WAY rougher way.

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This is true – but it’s got enough delights for fans of wordplay that I’d recommend it anyway. My sons (12 and 10) have barely played any other IF and glommed onto it immediately.

On the main thread topic: I have a low tolerance for rape and suicide in game narratives, not because I think they can’t be handled well, but because they so rarely are…

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I find it interesting that nobody has touched on another aspect of Slouching Towards Bedlam that I find relevant to the discussion: the concept of ideas spreading like a virus and altering reality, which delves into fears of misinformation and the power of language to shape perceptions and beliefs. This is actually anxiety-triggering in the context of current societal issues related to information warfare and the spread of harmful ideologies..

Let it be known that I personally enjoy StB a lot and think the game is excellently crafted; but it’s not the mental health angle in it that makes me step back from recommending it, but rather the above, since I have some IF-loving friends sensitive to the theme. And the interesting thing is that one could argue that the game should be recommended precisely because it touches on that theme, from an educational / awareness standpoint. There is no one-size-fits-all conclusion with these matters.

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I’m jealous of this statement.

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I may have advocated for IF a bit in the past. Doggedly.

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I have quite the contrarian view on “uncomfortable topics”.

I don’t remember where I learned about this, but someone once said the kind of optimistic, happy stories especially about family upset them. Too romanticized, too wistful a depiction when the same family dynamics can be so abusive and hurtful.

I feel similarly whenever I’m on Itchio: I am drawn to subject matter that is dark and personal because I know they are going to be a little bit upsetting. Of course, there’s going to be some media too extreme for my taste. But I usually know what I am going into.

But when I play something that is considered wholesome and cozy (to use the marketing parlance in the indie video game scene) that uses a location or idea that has hurt me in the past, then I feel physically ill.

It’s definitely a reflection of my upbringing that I can’t handle approaches that soften what I see to be too toxic. I simply become uncharitable and assume the worst: oh, they must be writing apologia for colonialism or gaslighting. That’s why I like to steer away from the greener pastures of video gaming. They tend to alienate me and I am reminded of my own vulnerability when I play games.

It’s been interesting to read the thread, especially on the discourse on recommending Slouching Towards Bedlam. I have no problems recommending it to my friends since I am only suggesting it for historical relevance to the parser medium and not its depiction of institutionalization. It’s hard for me to take its treatment on mental health seriously.

Meanwhile, Bez’s titles like My Pseudo-Dementia Exhibition would require some content warnings not because of the subject matter but because of the optimistic and uplifting tone it takes. Bez’s games are great, mind you, but I think the reflective and positive attitude makes it quite tough for some folks whose negative experiences with institutions are too overwhelming to play the game. I had a conversation with someone that literally couldn’t handle the game but could handle darker subject matter, so I wished I was a bit more careful.

Indeed, it’s always the stuff you don’t perceive until it’s too late that can hurt you. Content warnings are still nice to have, but they aren’t foolproof. Nothing is. Just gotta realize everyone has unique circumstances and it’s fine to be upset by things other people aren’t upset about.

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As you said, experiences and vulnerabilities are different for different people. I had a completely different (and positive) experience with Bez’ exhibition.

Yeah, I think so, too.

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