Mental health disorders in-game

[Pyroxene]

I would like to add mental health disorders to the game.

Just like body health, mental health is critical to the Survivor.

I'm considering psychosis, depression, bipolar disorder and Adhd.

[Leeanda]

This has been mentioned before,and I'm afraid it didn't go down too well..

A lot of people play this game to relax and escape from these things ,me included in part, ..    even cabin fever isn't taken too well  so adding those would probably  be even worse... .

Sorry but it's a no from me...  

[UTC-10]

A better case for how having the character subject to mental disorders (presumably can recover from them) would add to the game play is going to have to be made. 

A player deciding to roleplay the character as having some mental disorder would be one thing but having the game impose a mental disorder that could materially affect the character's well being and possible survival is probably not going to sit well with many a player.  

[Lexilogo]

Mental health being a factor in a survival game is a big stylistic decision, and one TLD has generally decided against, which IMO is fine. Even if we were having this discussion five years ago with lots of development time still ahead for Hinterland to change things, this would probably still be a no.

To engage with the idea hypothetically, there's a few big things to think about.

 

Firstly, sensitivity is important here. Not to shame you, but the idea that you can "catch" ADHD or bipolar disorder in such a gamified way is the worst case scenario for a mental health system in a game. It's much better to give things a fantasy flair (Eg. Don't Starve's "Sanity" system is actually representative of cosmic forces' influence), to deal with more universal feelings as opposed to specific diagnoses, (Project Zomboid keeps track of moods like boredom, stress, and panic) or to make it so absurd it could never be taken as analogous to real mental health. (Dwarf Fortress having your dwarves strip naked and murder each other because there was no beer this morning)

But you really, really don't want a situation where players have caught psychosis for the nth time and take pills to cure it like a videogame status effect. It's just yucky.

 

The second thing is to think about what this would add to the game. I do think a general happiness tracker, with varying side effects for neglecting it, could have made a neat expansion of the relatively simple Cabin Fever system, so eating a varied and tasty diet or reading books could keep you indoors for longer without consequence, getting into too many fights recently could have cumulative consequences beyond your immediate Condition, eating nothing but one animal's stale meat for a month would have more drawbacks, etc.

But nowadays we have Vitamin C to stop you from relying on nothing but meat, and the Feat to delete Cabin Fever from the game is everything I've ever wanted a solution to that mechanic too, so there's much less of a need for it nowadays.

[Pyroxene]

If there's this much resistance among the player base to add it, then I'm not sure it should be added.

[Leeanda]

15 minutes ago, Pyroxene said:

If there's this much resistance among the player base to add it, then I'm not sure it should be added.

Don't take it personally... 😊.    

Honestly it's why I'm not interested in a few games,like green hell..the insanity on that is quite frankly silly..  

[Pyroxene]

Let me just say that it's not stranger to be sick in your mind than being sick in your body, even if there's a stigma around mental health disorders

[ThePancakeLady]

23 minutes ago, Leeanda said:

 

Honestly it's why I'm not interested in a few games,like green hell..the insanity on that is quite frankly silly..  

Yeah, I have to agree. I keep looking at Green Hell, and keep passing it up because of it. Heck, I love the concept and the art style of some of the silliness of making flower headbands for pigs in Don't Starve, but the sanity meter and trying to deal with the night terrors- never could really get into the game. Played it, but hated that damn sanity meter. 

As far as Cabin Fever goes- yeah, it was not well received when it was added. It wasn't really a mental health mechanic- it was a way to prevent players from just sleeping and passing time for hundreds of days, never exploring, never leaving their cozy base, never facing the challenges the game was built around. You *can* turn it off in Custom Settings (and don't have to deal with it at all in vanilla Pilgrim), but not everyone wants to use Custom Settings, not everyone wants to play Pilgrim Mode. They did do something about it for players with the TFTFT DLC- the new Feat you can get if you own the DLC- Settled Mind. "You are immune from Cabin Fever and Research actions happen 20% faster." You still have to earn the Feat, so the challenge of doing that is there, but for people who own the base game only- nope.

I would probably stop playing, or not play as much if I had to deal with complex mental heath mechanics in the game, the same way I stopped playing Don't Starve. And yes, it would be very difficult to do without causing issues for some players who may deal with h these conditions in real life- how do you portray conditions that aren't one-size-fits-all, and may seem unrealistic to an absurd degree for some people who do deal with these conditions IRL, while becoming meme or attack material (against the devs and other players) for the edgelords and memesters.

I am a "No" vote on this idea as well. At least for this game- if they can find a way to add mental health mechanics to a new game from day 1 that aren't going to cause anger or trauma or outrage, maybe. But MH mechanics in survival games seem to be very hit and miss. I don't really want to play games that have them. I have chronic severe clinical depression- this game is an escape from it for mw. A chance to not have to deal with it while I roleplay as someone else.

Edited August 11 by ThePancakeLady
Typonese, always typonese

[Leeanda]

21 minutes ago, ThePancakeLady said:

Yeah, I have to agree. I keep looking at Green Hell, and keep passing it up because of it. Heck, I love the concept and the art style of some of the silliness of making flower headbands for pigs in Don't Starve, but the sanity meter and trying to deal with the night terrors- never could really get into the game. Played it, but hated that damn sanity meter. 

As far as Cabin Fever goes- yeah, it was not well received when it was added. It wasn't really a mental health mechanic- it was a way to prevent players from just sleeping and passing time for hundreds of days, never exploring, never leaving their cozy base, never facing the challenges the game was built around. You *can* turn it off in Custom Settings (and don't have to deal with it at all in vanilla Pilgrim), but not everyone wants to use Custom Settings, not everyone wants to play Pilgrim Mode. They did do something about it for players with the TFTFT DLC- the new Feat you can get if you own the DLC- Settled Mind. "You are immune from Cabin Fever and Research actions happen 20% faster." You still have to earn the Feat, so the challenge of doing that is there, but for people who own the base game only- nope.

I would probably stop playing, or not play as much if I had to deal with complex mental heath mechanics in the game, the same way I stopped playing Don't Starve. And yes, it would be very difficult to do without causing issues for some players who may deal with h these conditions in real life- how do you portray conditions that aren't one-size-fits-all, and may seem unrealistic to an absurd degree for some people who do deal with these conditions IRL, while becoming meme or attack material (against the devs and other players) for the edgelords and memesters.

I am a "No" vote on this idea as well. At least for this game- if they can find a way to add mental health mechanics to a new game from day 1 that aren't going to cause anger or trauma or outrage, maybe. But MH mechanics in survival games seem to be very hit and miss. I don't really want to play games that have them. I have chronic severe clinical depression- this game is an escape from it for mw. A chance to not have to deal with it while I roleplay as someone else.

Love the idea of flower headbands lol...   But really not worth buying a game and having to deal with issues like that for it..

I know cabin fever has options on custom,and nothing on  regular pilgrim but it can still be cheesed,as they call it.. plenty of very long runs are like that because of passing time in fishing huts etc..,and of course the new feat.. I think htl have done the right thing in not adding any other kind of mental affliction.. misery aside ,if there's any in that...     

There is also the issue of how far would it have to go... We already have not being able to sleep indoors,but what then ..stripping off your gear and running around screaming....  No thanks.. depression is not simple and is indeed unique for everyone.. it can't be categorised into specific boxes

Edited August 11 by Leeanda

[ThePancakeLady]

4 minutes ago, Leeanda said:

Love the idea of flower headbands lol...   But really not worth buying a game and having to deal with issues like that for it..

Finding the pig hamlet and making flower headbands for the pigs was one of the only things that I really enjoyed about that game...

I have to admit, it was cute. But it didn't make up for having to deal with that damned sanity meter.

 

[Leeanda]

9 minutes ago, ThePancakeLady said:

Finding the pig hamlet and making flower headbands for the pigs was one of the only things that I really enjoyed about that game...

I have to admit, it was cute. But it didn't make up for having to deal with that damned sanity meter.

 

Very cute💗.     But I definitely agree..  

[Lexilogo]

1 hour ago, ThePancakeLady said:

But it didn't make up for having to deal with that damned sanity meter.

This does reveal a problem with sanity meters of them being often unintuitive. You actually have a lot of options to deal with Sanity in Don't Starve (especially as Willow, who can just light things on fire to get it back) but, especially before you learn Crock Pot recipes, those solutions can be completely obscured to you. Don't Starve in general has a problem of the skill floor being way too high and wiki memorisation being necessary to play.

 

It can get worse in games with a lot of time acceleration, like TLD. Project Zomboid sometimes has people asking "Bored? Why am I bored?!?" when they've been exercising in their room for two days straight. It's just from the player's POV, that all happened in a couple of minutes via fast forwarding.

[ManicManiac]

Searching through the archives... this topic has come up many times since (at least) 2019.
Frankly I've never been in favor of it.

Mosly (as I've previously pointed out in the past) because I think it would require a lot of nuance to keep a "mental health" mechanic from feeling like a negative consequence instead of just being a part of the human condition that it truly is.

Granted, for certain games these sorts of things make more sense to include as a core mechanic... such as horror, survival horror, eldritch & cosmic horror where a character loosing grip on reality is perhaps integral to the story/events of the game.  In that context, it works (often it's an external force that acting on the player character)... just as it works in the very limited scope of one of the TLD Challenges: "Escape the Darkwalker," but again though, that's because of the survival horror/eldritch horror aspects of the challenge.

The point really, I think, is that outside of a survival/horror or eldritch/cosmic horror sort of game context... I think that "mental health" mechanics tend to be rather tone def and frankly frustratingly reductive.  To put it another way, I don't think "mental health" should be reduced to means of player punishment because they "didn't play good."

Also, I'm not wild about the idea of having to deal with a depression simulator.

In any case, that's my opinion.

On 5/31/2019 at 5:30 PM, ManicManiac said:

I'm not sure how well this kind of thing would fit into this game.  I mean for a Lovecraftian / cosmic horror type game, a sanity meter works fine as a core gameplay mechanic... but I'm not sure how well I would like something like that in this game.

I know for a while there was an idea about having something like a photograph or some kind of personal belonging that was meant to give kind of a "will to live" buff or something to that effect.  That the more you used it the quicker it would get worn out... but I think that idea went to the wayside a few years ago.

We do have the cabin fever affliction, but that is an arbitrary condition dependent solely on time spend inside vs. outside (the specifics are not important so I'm skipping them here).  Even with that, there are no mitigating factors at all... it's a firm metric.

Something like a "mental health" or "morale" mechanic would take a lot of nuance to keep it from feeling like a negative consequence instead of just part of the human condition that it truly is...

Edited August 11 by ManicManiac

[ThePancakeLady]

2 hours ago, ManicManiac said:

Granted, for certain games these sorts of things make more sense to include as a core mechanic... such as horror, survival horror, eldritch & cosmic horror where a character loosing grip on reality is perhaps integral to the story/events of the game.  In that context, it works (often it's an external force that acting on the player character)...

DREDGE- a game I actually loved, uses "Panic". Very Lovecraftian, and the condition acts in an unusual way.

You *need* to reach a level of Panic to activate certain features in the game, and to interact with certain items or locations (aberrations/aberrant fish and Obelisks which reveal some of the story and lore). It makes sense in that game- you are dealing with supernatural events and magics, Lovecraftian horrors and Eldritch forces that don't want you to discover their secrets. You can play the game and complete it (for the most part) without allowing the condition to reach its highest level, but you will miss out on a good bit of the story and lore. 

But it also isn't a survival game, doesn't have permadeath, and it does not try to be even a little bit realistic. It works for that game (and is still a bit controversial for some players), but would make this one really "un-fun" for me if it was a mechanic in Survival Mode.

[The Feng Hunter]

Absolutely not (as it would pertain to DSM-V dx’s), though I’d argue the general idea of mental health is already baked into the game.

Side note: both “Cabin Fever” and “Insomnia” are classified in-game as mental health issues.

Spoiler

HOWEVER, as they are both directly tied to the lore of the game and as side-effects of Rüdiger’s Machine, I’m willing to let them slide, as they are a core game mechanic that are also plot points. (TFTFT)

I strongly *suspect* the disease outbreak Astrid is being asked to treat in Perseverance Mills via the Hardcase is related to this mechanic, as well.

Spoiler

After all, the disease that affected the men in the Langston Mine was “not a known pathogen.” (TFTFT)

Moreover, I’m going to assert right here the **Machine** is what makes the Wolves overly aggressive … after all, look at what happened to Team 3. (TFTFT)

Proximity to the Mine — and the Machine — has a direct effect on the mental stability of the mine workers. (ibid.) We also know mental mindfulness exercises such as those used by practitioners of DBT (dialectical behavioural therapy) allowed Security Chief Vertasky, the Foreman, AND Rüdiger to last as long as they did — hence the name and effect of the Feat “Settled Mind.”

As for “depression,” “bipolar,” &c — that’s the land of roleplay and imagination. That’s where *you* get to exercise your creativity. Make the game your own. Establish your own rules. Thrive … or don’t.

Take care. ✌️💜