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Watching a head break apart is easier if it is literal

6 years ago2,227 words

It bothers me that I'm having to worry about this game's story and characters being too repulsively depressing, when excessive, gory violence pervades media the majority go wild for...

I'm pretty much adding finishing touches to Sindrel Song (I'll just call it that) before testing, though it's taking longer than anticipated. It's not due to lazy work-shirking or anything, or the tiredness I've been burdened by for too long. I mean, that's a part of it, unavoidably, but mostly it's just that work takes time, shockingly.

The game has seven songs. I composed the first six months ago, spending a morning on each one, so I assumed when adding the final one it'd take about as long as that. Instead, though, it took like three focused 10-hour days! It's because whereas the others came from a place of raw inspiration, this one was more deliberately constructed to tie up the narrative and pull together everything that had come before. I've got it to the point where it gives me chills, though I wonder how much of that is because it's my precious baby!!, and whether any players would get invested enough to experience a similar response. I hope so, but we'll see.

I haven't added the song to the game yet, though. Maybe it'll be appalling to actually play! I've been busy adding the dialogue I've already written (in a spreadsheet, of all things), tweaking it in the process. Again I drastically misjudged the time that'd take; I assumed since all the dialogue already existed, I'd be able to add it all to the actual game in an afternoon, but that's not been the case. I'm attaching fairly subtle facial expressions and animations to pretty much every line, which I think massively improves the feeling of aliveness and immersion, tells as much story as the words themselves if not more, but it's taking time to get it just right. And it still won't be just right when I start testing, but I'll keep tweaking it as I go.

As I work on adding the story, though, something's bothering me a lot, as it has been through much of the recent development. What to me is deeply interesting is possibly repulsive to others, and since my stupid mental issues revolve around fear of negative social judgement, I'm dreading a negative response due to this... I know I've talked about it more than once before, but I want to rant a bit about it again anyway because it's swimming around in my head again, distractingly.

Years ago, I was going down a similar path, trying to make games based around my mental health issues, and when I finally got to the testing stage after months of work, the same stage I'm nearing now, the thing I'd poured most of myself into was met very negatively because of its themes and its apparently off-putting handling of them. I think that's probably one of the biggest reasons I stopped making games for a long time. I also seem to remember that it was around that time that I first seriously started thinking about suicide, as I felt that I was broken, inept, a joke, blah blah blah. All the lovely stuff a neurotic mind does when it feels - as such minds too often do - that it's hit rock bottom.

Recently, I felt I should try watching a film every day for inspiration, stress relief, whatever. I decided on a whim to watch the X-Men series, since I'd only ever seen the first two a billion years ago and thought it might be mildly interesting to see what I'd missed out on. If anything I felt more stressed while watching them just because they weren't really engaging my mind very much (so I ended up focusing on neurotic niggles, fidgeting, etc). There was a lot of repetition, too ("we must stop Magneto from uniting the mutants against society who hates them or whatever, just like last time!! There he is, floating menacingly surrounded by swarming shards of metal!"). I didn't dislike them exactly, but I doubt I'll be fondly reminiscing about them on my deathbed in a couple of months or years or millennia or whenever that'll be.

I'm mentioning this because according to Wikipedia, the Deadpool films are part of that series, as is yet another damn film about Wolverine, called Logan. I never much cared for Woleverine as a character - a surly, hairy, violent, frequently topless man isn't someone who resonates with me in the slightest - but I felt like I should watch those films for the sake of completion anyway.

But I didn't. I can't. Because they're way too violent, or so I've read, and I can't stand seeing violence. I don't mean that in a moral sense exactly; I've just always been deeply disturbed by seeing others suffer, and seeing them chopped to bits or blown apart or whatever makes me physically sick and gives me nightmares. Or at least it did in the past, and I suppose I've spent a lifetime avoiding that reaction by avoiding this kind of content, so I don't know if I'd still react so sensitively. I'm not interested in finding out. I end up looking away from the screen even when there's minor, bloodless violence, just in case what the producers considered mild enough to include in their non-'adult'-rated film is still too much for me.

(Interestingly, despite my many ~tormenting issues~, I almost never have nightmares, and I wonder sometimes whether it's because I don't have this kind of content as input during my days.)

In Sindrel Song, I'm exploring mental illness - or more generally insecurity and lacking purpose - as I've described a few times. I've been trying to do so in a way that's not off-putting, but I'm unsure how much tolerance people would have for such things. Would any mention of anything 'depressing' be too much? Would a whole song about death be unacceptable? How much can I get away with? I'm transferring the dialogue from my notes to the game, as I said, and the first couple of stages are hopefully okay in balancing joyful optimism and broken-minded neuroticism. Maybe. Though I know I'm in a bubble and others' reactions might not be what I expect. At the start, Memody is eager to experience life, but intrusive negative thoughts come to her with increasing frequency, though as I talked about in a previous post, I've made her fretting comically absurd to sweeten its bitterness, to make it palatable.

The third stage, which I just finished adding dialogue for before writing this, is Dolour's, and his song is literally about death and how life is suffering. "Life is a light that burns, death is a dark calm slumber", it goes. Cheery! The dialogue surrounding him is similar; his personality isn't based explicitly on my own (all of the characters are I suppose caricatures made from different aspects of my own life experiences and personality), but he's very much influenced by my own depressive and suicidal thoughts and my failure to succeed on the standard path. He's a loser. He's influenced in part too by what I read about incels a while back, not in the oh-so-frustrating "they're violent evil terrorists!!" sense that I've been seeing increasingly often in relatively mainstream places recently, but more like "I was born a certain way, which has led to painful failure all my life, and lonely depression now I'm grown". It's so awful that this is such a common problem, but it's treated with fear and ridicule because obviously all men are monsters, and their misogyny is why they're in the pit they're in (rather than it arising as a response to poor, seemingly unjust treatment all their lives and maddeningly unmet needs, of course).

(Dolour isn't hateful at all, to be clear; he's depressive, not aggressive.)

I can relate to those issues to a degree, so I have sympathy for people who experience them. But I feel that too few people do, which is painful. But I don't know. It seems that (online) culture as a whole is using 'incel' as a slur based on ludicrous stereotypes, they're the demons of the moment, and most people go along with that to fit in or because they've no drive to investigate the matter any deeper. But it also seems that the idea that the majority of millenials are depressed, anxious, and suicidal is a meme, the accepted state of affairs? As always, I'm just looking on from a distance, so I don't know how much of what I see corresponds to other people's experiences of the zeitgeist from the inside. Is mental illness 'normal' among the young now, or is it still the realm of discomfiting weirdos? Seeing Instagram "thots" (what a word) talk about it for attention - which they get, not rejection - makes me assume it is more normal, but then would me exploring it be uncomfortable at all?

Anyway, Dolour's depressing stage is the third one, and I'm currently having to think how I can change it so then it's not repulsive to the majority (again!). It'd be a shame if players quit at that point because he's too much of a downer, missed out on more than half of the game. But it really bothers me because while worrying about that, I see people talking about things like, say, how you're a social pariah if you aren't able to talk with everyone else about Game of Thrones. I've never seen Game of Thrones, because it's too violent. But everyone else and their dog apparently considers that gripping entertainment. Deadpool, too, was raved about, because it was an 'adult' version of a superhero film. Rick and Morty is another thing that comes to mind as something I wanted to watch, but I couldn't endure its gratuitous gruesome gore, so I've had to miss out.

Exploring genuine suffering is probably taboo, ew, but watching others be graphically carved or blown to pieces is entertaining. I feel like such a minority for finding issue with that...

I wonder whether it's uncomfortable to people because it resonates too much with them, when they'd rather escape to something that they can't experience in their real life? Perhaps they spend all day miserable and depressed, and want to kill things - or watch them be killed - in their media because the law forbids them from laying a finger on those they're frustrated or wronged by in the real world? That's a possibility.

Or I suppose context is crucial too. I doubt quipping positivity would be expected from a dark and gritty war film or game, but Sindrel Song is a brightly-coloured obscure app about cartoon animal people singing songs. Maybe it'd have to look like the work of Tim Burton for people to come in appropriately mentally prepared, and even then it'd need to be ~quirky~ rather than painfully introspective.

I don't know. I'm running away with hypothetical scenarios because I've been affected by this in the past, and because I feel I'm walking rocky territory, I suppose. And extreme fear of social judgement pervades my life experience. I doubt whatever I end up releasing will even be seen by many people anyway, so it shouldn't matter as much as it does to me, but it does because I necessarily have to devote my life to this in order to get it done (to my standards).

I think I'm going to try to take the approach that yes, Dolour is miserable due to his misfortunes, but his darkness helps Memody in that everyone else seems so happy and she felt she was wrong for not being that way, so by meeting him, she feels less like she's 'broken alone'. That's definitely a comforting experience. Or perhaps I could go the absurd approach again and make his woes so extreme that it's funny? But then it bothers me that I can't just be honest and genuine about it because people wouldn't want to spend time with such a character...

I'll figure something out. I've certainly been thinking and writing about this issue for a while! I feel that this is the only major kink to work through at the moment; the rest I'm okay with, it's done. I can't see it taking more than a week until I get around to testing, but I seem to be quite poor at judging how long things'll take, so I'll just keep going and see how it turns out... (I'd do testing now, but I need to add the rest of the already-written dialogue and the final song.)

But yes, I thought I should post about this partly for the catharsis of it (it's been a nice break from working on this game all the time), and partly because I feel I should be clearer where I am now that I'm getting so close to the end but I'm still not actually there yet!



EDIT: If there's one word I'd use to describe this game, it'd be "FUN"! Play it when you want cheering up! Buy it for your little girl children!! Recommend it to all your friends!!!



(This image actually makes me laugh quite a bit, but I imagine that's largely from insanity.)