Hellblade: Senua’s Sacrifice, a Triple-A game tackling mental health
As Trump and others blame computer games for the gun violence in society, while ignoring their own contribution to the hatred and xenophobia in play, it’s worth remembering that this narrative has been used by successive governments and conservative groups against gamers for decades and has been persistently debunked.
Moreover, games can arguably be a useful tool in preventing and countering violent extremism and other sensitive issues. Discussing mental health issues, for example, was encouraged by the recent independent AAA game, Hellblade: Senua’s Sacrifice, which consulted mental health professionals at all stages of its development.
Paul Fletcher, a professor of health neuroscience from Cambridge University, was a consultant on Ninja Theory’s game and he described its impact in a video that was shown at The International Game Summit on Mental Health, a first-time event held recently in Toronto.
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[…] the game creates empathy for those with psychosis. Senua was a person, and “not a two-dimensional shell of mental illness,” Fletcher said. The game won a lot of awards, but as we learned from Fletcher, it also changed a lot of lives, as players with mental illness who played the game or knew people with mental illness contacted the company by the hundreds to tell the company what it meant to experience such a realistic portrayal of the illness.
Fletcher said that when the game was shown to some of the patients who helped create it, the patients felt like their experience had been validated. The team even changed the ending because the patients felt like it was lacking. The game won an award from the Royal College of Psychiatrists.
True, Far-Right and Islamist Extremists use first person shooters for combat training (something, incidentally, that the US military pioneered in 2002 with the free release of “America’s Army,” developed with the Quake engine in order to recruit and propagandise and which is still updated and available on Steam today) and multiplayer chat – sometimes encrypted – to communicate and coordinate.
However, last year I was involved in the training of community leaders in Preventing / Countering Violent Extremism (P/CVE) and had long chats with one of the participants, a Swedish priest involved in countering Neo-Nazi radicalisation and who was also a gamer. We considered that approaching the games companies to urge the inclusion of alternative narratives in storylines and cutscenes could be valuable.
Not because there is a risk of radicalisation from the games – although there has been the emergence of Far-Right titles – but because it reaches an appropriate audience where some vulnerable to radicalisation will be present. It also touches upon another issue of concern with the P/CVE community in general. Many simply don’t have experience of, let alone familiarity with, the spaces where those at risk congregate, online and off.
It’s why the effectiveness of alternative and counter narratives really should be questioned IMHO. Your Facebook or Youtube video is unlikely to reach the intended audience without utilising approaches such as Moonshot CVE’s Redirect Method or disseminating them within the online bubble that those at risk of radicalisation are sitting. Some might argue that very few of them are on Facebook these days anyway.
In recent years we’ve seen the promising approach of a few – Suleiman Bakhit’s comic books, for example, or the Pakistani cartoon, Burkha Avenger – but these are few and far between. Moreover, when it comes to the Far-Right, what about computer games and music? Bands like the Idles who tackle toxic masculinity and have even set up a closed Facebook group for those who need a safe space and support community around them.
And it isn’t just in the area of P/CVE where computer games, music, and other forms of pop culture can play a role. In traditional conflict resolution settings they could also play a role. In Georgia, for example, the United Nations Development Program (UNDP) and European Union worked together to create a game specifically to break down barriers between youth in Georgia and its breakaway regions of Abkhazia and South Ossetia.
“Peace Park” was developed by Georgian videogame developers, in close consultation with local and international experts in conflict resolution and online gaming, UNDP in Georgia wrote.
It intended to teach children from all over Georgia – whose land is 20 percent occupied – that working together can lead to win-win situations.
The game was tested among 60 children in six Georgian cities: capital Tbilisi in eastern Georgia, Kutaisi and Zugdidi in the country’s west, Abkhazian capital Sukhumi and other Abkhazian towns Gali and Ochamchire.
Now the initiators intend to further promote the new game and help children all over the country get along.
Of particular note is This War of Mine, a computer game that uses immersive and interactive storytelling that bestows upon players a feeling of empathy for the characters and the situation they find themselves in.
This War of Mine is a game defined by its cultural roots—it is a Slavic game, created by people from Central Europe who grew up hearing stories of Nazi occupation from their grandparents. It lacks most of the hallmarks of more stereotypically “Western” stories—there isn’t a happy ending or even a particularly neat resolution. It is not a game designed to give you a quick dopamine hit of joy or to tell a complex tale of good and evil. Instead, it is a game designed to make you feel something—to evoke emotions and then to force the player to confront and contemplate those emotions.
It would likely have been somewhat successful purely as a War Sims resource management-type game, but by tangling up the player’s feelings and expectations, it becomes so much more. Kauch puts it best: “Our message in This War of Mine is that war is not something that happens in a faraway land, in some fantasy kingdoms. That it’s something real and something that affects the people’s lives and makes people do things that they [normally] wouldn’t even think of.”
As an aside, and of particular importance given the emergence of Incel, where was Trump and others when Gamergate hit the headlines?
