The relationship between gaming and mental health has been discussed frequently since Grand Theft Auto and Mortal Kombat created a moral panic with their violent and irreverent style in the 1990s. However, it’s only in the last few years that games themselves have begun to deal with this theme in their narratives.
Mind Scanners from Danish studio The Outer Zone is set in a dark and gloomy future, with a cyberpunk aesthetic and dripping synth soundtrack. Still, it’s not your job to shoot a laser pistol like that genre or hack a computer terminal. Instead, you must diagnose and treat mental disorders.
“Inspired by a visit in 2015, or about to visit a now-closed psychiatric hospital in Ghent,”Malte Burup, founder of The Outer Zone revealed.“The hospital has been turned into a museum[吉斯蘭醫生博物館], I was immediately drawn to all these strange methods that have been used to heal people in the past. The method is almost pure conjecture.
Sobering insights into 19th-century psychiatry, often with little regard for the patient’s actual health, got the graphics-educated game designer to wonder if the experience could somehow be turned into a game. After releasing the interactive children’s book Sofus and the Moon Machine in 2016, he teamed up with programmer Rasmus Mølck Nilsson to start developing Mind Scanners. A game where you try “alternative” psychotherapy yourself.
By playing as a psychiatrist, you, as a player, feel the consequences of the moral dilemmas psychiatry faces and reflect on the challenges that lie ahead,”Burup explained.
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The developers from The Outer Zone don’t try to hide the fact that they were inspired by Papers, Please. The 2012 indie hit puts you in the shoes of an overworked border guard in a fictional Eastern Bloc country. By comparing documents such as passports and entry permits, you ultimately have to decide people’s fate – are the citizens in question allowed to cross the border or denied entry?
In many ways, Mind Scanners is reminiscent of its source material. The obvious difference from the Danish game set in the future is that instead of judging whether a person is a law-abiding citizen or a spy, players must decide whether they are mentally ill or not. The game’s woes don’t stop there, as your mission isn’t just to diagnose your patients. You also have to heal them.
Psychiatric treatments are performed under the instructions of futuristic machines, each connected to a specific mini-game. You use a pair of futuristic goggles to decode the symbols in your patients’ eyes. Or you might bombard their ears with a sort of rhythmic Morse code that you have to decipher. In many cases, the treatment can be crazier than the patient. A few things from a visit to a mental hospital that reveals about Burup:
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“In the Belgian museum, there are strange devices all over the place. I’m walking around thinking ‘what the hell are these buttons on this strange machine from 1905 supposed to do? Like, on a piano, you have five cats in their paws Putting thorns or nails on it to meow, obviously that’s supposed to heal something. It’s weird, I wanted to include that dimension.”
Originally, I envisioned Mind Scanners taking place in the past. But that doesn’t work, because as a player, you just think you’re playing some kind of torture simulator.
Thanks to the mini-games, Mind Scanners can quickly become a hectic experience. You only have 200 seconds a day to complete your tasks, and during therapy, the clock keeps ticking while confusing symbols dance across the futuristic diagnostic equipment. As if that wasn’t enough, you also have to balance your patient’s stress levels. Your device is by no means gentle, and if you push your patients too far, they can end up psychotic and depersonalized.
“Time constraints are rarely included in game design, as it often leads to unnecessary stress,”Burup explained.“But we wanted that sense of pressure. You’re bound to make mistakes, human errors, people that impact the game world. And then, your time becomes a resource. That’s what we’re seeing in real healthcare as well. Staff time and resources are under pressure, which leads to errors.”
While the working conditions of psychiatrists and mental health personnel have been discussed a lot in recent years, unfortunately, there isn’t much going on in the bleak world of Mind Scanners. When you work for a totalitarian city-state called The Structure, there’s not much you can do to improve working conditions. Especially since they’re holding your daughter hostage in a psychiatric clinic. All you can do is infiltrate the system from the inside. Perhaps under the instructions of the mysterious underground organization known as Moonrise. Or you can do your job well and hope the government will reward you.
How the story develops is entirely up to you. Mind Scanners has several different endings and reactions, not only to your choices in the story, but also to the results of your healing. The Outer Zone chose structure, so your choices matter. Whether or not you mistreat your patients should matter. But the open narrative structure was also a big challenge for small developers, reveals Nilsson, who handled most of the heavy coding:
“We had a pretty reasonable schedule that we pretty much managed to stick to. But the story, with all the choices and the different branches, was probably the one that ended up developing the most in terms of time and budget. We often went back and changed things to really nail the game Feeling responsive to how you treat patients and the choices you make along the way.
Burup added: “You might not see all the work we do in one playthrough. But you can feel it when you play. Whatever you do, you can feel that there are consequences.
While games like the depressive Hellblade: Senua’s Sacrifice and the anxious teen drama Life is Strange have paved the way to some extent, translating mental health into primitives and fun gameplay is still a somewhat sensitive topic . Games sometimes have a habit of downplaying serious topics. As an example, think about how warfare is handled in games like Battlefield or Call of Duty. On the other hand, as an interactive medium, it can also sometimes bring you too close for comfort. As the aforementioned Papers, Please, you’re not just watching or reading about an inhumane bureaucracy – you’re actually a part of it.
Considerations like these are things The Outer Zone has been thinking about for a long time.“Originally I envisioned Mind Scanners taking place in the past,”Burup revealed.“But it didn’t work because it’s now well known that none of the treatments at the time really worked. As a player, you think, you’re playing some kind of torture simulator.
The moral aspect also ends up influencing the art and tone of the game.“I had wanted the game to have high-res and realistic 2D graphics. But I kind of went from dark and bleak to a lighter, more colorful low-res style. It gives the feeling that you’re playing the game. Darker now Limited to text. What we want to do is point out problems on a social scale.”
What I really love about this studio is that the inspiration is part games and part other things. With Death Howl, we once again took inspiration from a specific game. There is also shamanism, the collective unconscious and many other ideas.
Because of this, Mind Scanners appears at first blush to be an old Nintendo game, complete with primitive graphics and a soundtrack in the style of Epica. However, the universe is still very bleak, with audiovisual aspects heavily inspired by classic sci-fi movies. The most important thing is Blade Runner, especially the intricate Voight-Kampff machine, but also the satirical and slightly exaggerated style of David Cronenberg and Paul Verhoeven’s 80s classics such as Videodrome and RoboCop.
“We were inspired by this sci-fi social satire,”Burup explained that in addition to doing most of the writing, he also drew the graphics and composed the soundtrack.“[在那些電影中]Everything feels a little fake or like a game show. Almost like a video game, actually. They have a kind of rigid, mechanical, interesting universe. “
With good sales on PC and subsequent releases on Xbox and Nintendo Switch, it seems obvious that The Outer Zone’s next installment should be set in the Mind Scanners universe, or at least build on the same mechanics. but it is not the truth.
Currently, the Copenhagen-based studio is developing Death Howl. A card game in the style of Slay The Spire, with elements of a tactical RPG and an open world that players can freely explore between battles. The setting is a magical and spiritual version of the Stone Age, in which you play as a young woman named Lo. But the story is ultimately secondary, the developers explained. Gameplay is the focus.
“What I really love about this studio is that the inspiration is part games and part other things,” said the studiosaid Lasse Sommer, the third and newest member of the group.“Like Mind Scanners, it combines Papers, Please with thoughts and reflections about going to a mental institution. With Death Howl, we’re again taking inspiration from a specific game. There’s also shamanism, the collective unconscious, and many other ideas.
Never to the ancient past. From narrative-driven experiences to gameplay-first. The Outer Zone isn’t afraid to explore new ideas, and as development progresses, we’re excited to learn more about their upcoming title.
