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Gantolandon posted:But the latter part wouldn't work without you being freaked out and grossed by crazy people. The main idea is that you can quite easily end up like them and loving a corpse is one of the less damaging things you could do. It absolutely would work, if they introduced the supernatural element right at the start of the game, so that the game developers can send the message that "no, we're not preying on stereotypes of the mentally ill, we're clearly telling you that there is a very obvious supernatural thing affecting them." Then you restrict the information on the Walrider Project (the game goes a little overboard with the amount of documents you find mentioning it) and only explain what the project does in the very last part of the game. So you know right from the start that something supernatural is loving up the patients, but you don't know exactly what it is until the end.
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Oct 22, 2014 00:11
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xeose4 posted:It absolutely would work, if they introduced the supernatural element right at the start of the game, so that the game developers can send the message that "no, we're not preying on stereotypes of the mentally ill, we're clearly telling you that there is a very obvious supernatural thing affecting them." Then you restrict the information on the Walrider Project (the game goes a little overboard with the amount of documents you find mentioning it) and only explain what the project does in the very last part of the game. So you know right from the start that something supernatural is loving up the patients, but you don't know exactly what it is until the end. The issue with that is that it breaks the paradigm that they're insane. The fear is based on blurring what you view as sane/rational responses to the situation and insane/irrational responses to the situation. If you know that evil skeletons or something are running around spooking the guts off all the inmates, you look differently at the guy who's screaming that there's a skeleton inside of him as he tries to rip out his own bones. Yes, that's pretty goddamned extreme behavior, but you know why he's doing it, and therefore the behavior seems far less irrational compared to walking into a random building and seeing the guy doing the same thing. The way they approached the main theme they wanted to scare people with, they either had to broadcast the mitigating factor that showed they weren't just using mental illness as a perverse sock-puppet to scare you with, thereby undermining their own efforts, or they had to hide the twist that reveals you could be considered insane just as easily, which leaves you under the temporary impression that they're writing from ignorance. To go back a bit though, yes, reusing the guy jacking off on a pile of corpses was tacky as hell and was one of the moments I've mentioned where their attempts to offend/disturb the player turn into straight-up tryharding.
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Oct 22, 2014 00:37
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Daeren posted:The way they approached the main theme they wanted to scare people with, they either had to broadcast the mitigating factor that showed they weren't just using mental illness as a perverse sock-puppet to scare you with, thereby undermining their own efforts, or they had to hide the twist that reveals you could be considered insane just as easily, which leaves you under the temporary impression that they're writing from ignorance. This is one of the problems when trying to use the mentally ill as a source of horror. Most of the time, it's far more trouble than it's worth, especially with how common the trope is. Outlast manages to pull it off, but only just barely. I wouldn't blame anyone who was turned off the game by the things the game does.
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Oct 22, 2014 00:49
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xeose4 posted:This is one of the problems when trying to use the mentally ill as a source of horror. Most of the time, it's far more trouble than it's worth, especially with how common the trope is. Outlast manages to pull it off, but only just barely. I wouldn't blame anyone who was turned off the game by the things the game does. If Outlast manages to pull it off successfully, why is this even a problem? It's not like it's going to be a significant factor in making the image of mentally ill people better or worse and its final message is far from "Psychos are screwed up, man".
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Oct 22, 2014 08:05
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I find it a bit sad that even though Whistleblower did give another (albeit a very handwavey one) explanation for the female ward being empty (not, as the main game gave the impression that women would have been the first to go and be victimised without even some actually becoming predators themselves,) something I did appreciate at least for the effort, they then go on to using homophobic horror and quite effectually undoing even that small redeeming grace. As to fear of the mentally ill, I actually liked the way they subverted the stereotype with the Walrider. I at first imagined that the reason so many inmates were violent was because the others had become victims when the ones from the criminal ward got out. Unfortunately, it just becomes more and more apparent that the writers and/or developers just have an unfortunately backwards view on several things, which is detrimental to any clever plot decisions they made, undermining the game.
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Oct 22, 2014 12:00
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Speedball posted:Some people, including the Reroll guy, Angus Morrison, have said that it might have been interesting if Outlast: Whistleblower had instead taken place before the outbreak and your initial stealth sections required you to sneak about trying to gather evidence to email. Your hunter would be one of the institutionally-evil guards or something. That... would have actually had the potential to be pretty interesting.
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Oct 22, 2014 14:59
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Thesaya posted:I find it a bit sad that even though Whistleblower did give another (albeit a very handwavey one) explanation for the female ward being empty (not, as the main game gave the impression that women would have been the first to go and be victimised without even some actually becoming predators themselves,) something I did appreciate at least for the effort, they then go on to using homophobic horror and quite effectually undoing even that small redeeming grace. The most probable reason why there are no women in Murkoff facility is probably the same as the reason why children are rarely depicted in shooters and other violent games. It's additional effort (as you have to prepare more models and voices) which rarely ever pays off and gives a possibility of causing a media shitstorm. Men abusing other men in games are pretty much OK in everyone's book. Violence against women is much harder to depict without drawing a lot of negative attention and (probably) shocking a lot of players a bit too much. I really have no idea what reaction would women raping and killing men would draw because it's not a theme that's explored often. I agree that sticking to the safe choice is disappointing and a missed opportunity, but it's hard to blame the developers or writers for not going with something that the rest of the gaming industry wouldn't touch with a 10-foot pole. It's not that they are particularly backwards, they are exactly like the rest.
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Oct 22, 2014 16:51
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Gantolandon posted:If Outlast manages to pull it off successfully, why is this even a problem? It's not like it's going to be a significant factor in making the image of mentally ill people better or worse and its final message is far from "Psychos are screwed up, man". Because Outlast barely manages to pull it off and the odds of another game being able to do so without copying Outlast's supernatural twist are actually next to null.
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Oct 22, 2014 20:12
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xeose4 posted:It absolutely would work, if they introduced the supernatural element right at the start of the game, so that the game developers can send the message that "no, we're not preying on stereotypes of the mentally ill, we're clearly telling you that there is a very obvious supernatural thing affecting them." Then you restrict the information on the Walrider Project (the game goes a little overboard with the amount of documents you find mentioning it) and only explain what the project does in the very last part of the game. So you know right from the start that something supernatural is loving up the patients, but you don't know exactly what it is until the end. I can't say I agree though. The whole thrust of good horror is pacing. Like in Friday the 13th, you never see the killer at all for almost the entire film, but occasionally see through her eyes. In The Thing, you don't know what is actually going on at first--the initial explanation for the killings in the Norwegian base were that they had gone insane, and that's a major theme of the film even as it gets into body horror and alien attack territory. If you opened up the game with "Spooky Ghosts are the cause!" then you've already mitigated a very important aspect of building up fear, which is giving you a sense of dread and confusion. Every good mystery loses its impact when it is explained. You don't know if there's something supernatural going on. You have a few suspicions, you see some strange things, but you don't know whether you are losing your sanity or whether there's a real otherworldly threat. This is vitally important to the whole thrust of the game AND its final plot twist--which is that you are not dealing with something supernatural, but rather a horrifying product of mankind's invention gone wrong. Recall, the Walrider isn't a ghost, it's a cloud of nanomachines controlled by a mentally ill man subconsciously. That's the twist, that's the surprise at the end--first it's a spooky Asylum full of crazies, then it's a ghost, then it's actually a science monster. But the uncertainty and the lack of knowledge make it scary. It's why you don't show the monster--because whatever your imagination dreams up in the shadows is a lot scarier than any special effect could be. The lack of knowledge is incredibly vital to this enterprise. If, for the purposes of avoiding stereotypes about the mentally ill, the game basically shot itself in the foot in its attempt to build effective horror, would that really be better?
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Oct 22, 2014 21:22
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BottledBodhisvata posted:If you opened up the game with "Spooky Ghosts are the cause!" then you've already mitigated a very important aspect of building up fear, which is giving you a sense of dread and confusion. The problem is that the game is relying on "crazy people being gross and violent" to build up that dread and confusion. That's exactly my problem. The game, by choosing the asylum setting, is putting itself between a rock and a hard place by either playing up to the stereotypes for horror or sacrificing mystery by broadcasting to the player that something supernatural is messing with the patients. This is why the mental institution setting shouldn't be chosen lightly. Not only it's been done to death, but there's virtually no way you can have your cake and eat it too. Either you prey on stereotypes for horror or you shoot your sense of dread and mystery in the foot. For the sake of argument, I would add that it's possible to introduce a supernatural element without killing the sense of mystery. Tons of supernatural horror have done this, but it's admittedly difficult to introduce a supernatural element mysteriously while still leaving it very clear that it's the thing responsible for the patients' behaviour.
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Oct 22, 2014 21:32
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I think you could pull off non supernatural asylum horror without making GBS threads on the mentally ill if you focused more on the staff than on the patients.
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Oct 22, 2014 21:35
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xeose4 posted:The problem is that the game is relying on "crazy people being gross and violent" to build up that dread and confusion. That's exactly my problem. The game, by choosing the asylum setting, is putting itself between a rock and a hard place by either playing up to the stereotypes for horror or sacrificing mystery by broadcasting to the player that something supernatural is messing with the patients. This is why the mental institution setting shouldn't be chosen lightly. Not only it's been done to death, but there's virtually no way you can have your cake and eat it too. Either you prey on stereotypes for horror or you shoot your sense of dread and mystery in the foot. Well, preying on stereotypes IS a big part of horror in general--I mean, slasher movies are so formulaic, the formula itself has been satirized twice to great effect! But I can see your point. Do you have an example of a horror movie/game that does succeed in doing this, pray I ask? My favorite horror movie is Phantasm, which I liked primarily because it is a horror movie where the main characters are all incredibly--perhaps too incredibly--competent and there aren't a lot of stock characters or indeed very many characters at all. There's a creepy old gypsy woman who knows magical poo poo or whatever but nobody gets offended at those yet. But my second favorite horror story is Halloween, and that's basically a story of a mentally ill man going on a killing spree (provided we pretend the sequels didn't happen, but even the second one doesn't really make him explicitly supernatural. Michael Myers isn't a ghost monster thing until the 4th movie). Is there a difference in that depiction, or are you primarily focused on just the asylum setting as a horror trope?
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Oct 22, 2014 21:52
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7c Nickel posted:I think you could pull off non supernatural asylum horror without making GBS threads on the mentally ill if you focused more on the staff than on the patients. Oh absolutely. If you were to cast a mentally ill person as the protagonist of a horror story (and not the "everyone is conspiring to make me look crazy!" story, but a person suffering from depression or some other mental illness), you could definitely explore a lot of horror. I know I'd definitely prefer to watch an exploration about the horror and helplessness of mental illness over yet another stereotyped asylum horror story. BottledBodhisvata posted:Well, preying on stereotypes IS a big part of horror in general--I mean, slasher movies are so formulaic, the formula itself has been satirized twice to great effect! But I can see your point. Do you have an example of a horror movie/game that does succeed in doing this, pray I ask? There's a difference between preying on stereotypes in order to get money out of society's prejudices, and forcing the audience to think about those prejudices by confronting them. I Spit On Your Grave (or Day of the Woman) is an example (albeit a controversial one) of a movie that was intended to horrify and disturb the audience, and force them to confront the reality of rape and violence against women. Some of the Saw movies tried to have a message against the coldness of the American healthcare system, but it got completely lost in their love of pointless gore. You're Next, while comedic at points, did what the slasher genre was originally supposed to do: empower the female protagonist without exploiting her. Gaming-wise, Spec Ops: The Line was actually fairly close to being a horror story about PTSD and war. Amnesia: A Machine for Pigs tried to be a critique of Victorian dehumanisation (to a very arguable degree of success). Cry of Fear is actually a very well made exploration of the horrors of mental illness from the point of view of the mentally ill person, particularly regarding the type of depression that comes with suicidal impulses and antisocial aggression. Silent Hill 2 was an exploration in the guilt and delusions of a murderer (and Silent Hill Downpour does this for the consequences on the parents of a child abused/murdered). Halloween is definitely a case of exploiting stereotypes of mental illness, but it was made in the seventies (unlike Outlast), so it's understandable. This is probably a difference in tastes, as I mentioned before, I prefer horror to have a point/purpose/message behind it, rather than simply existing for its own sake. Outlast, in a way, could have managed this if it had chosen to focus on the power wielded by private healthcare companies over mentally ill patients and how scary it is to remove the autonomy of a person and give power over them to someone who does not care in the slightest about their wellbeing.
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Oct 22, 2014 23:00
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I think Spec Ops: The Line greatly succeeded in terms of horror related to insanity because it legitimately keeps the player guessing right up until the last minutes of the game and doesn't show its hand so early that everything gets blown wide open before it's supposed to be.
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Oct 22, 2014 23:22
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xeose4 posted:Halloween is definitely a case of exploiting stereotypes of mental illness, but it was made in the seventies (unlike Outlast), so it's understandable. It also had a loving dope theme song. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iP-jYiuDD9g Outlast doesn't have a dope theme song and suffers for it. YO and Phantasm too like seriously why did awesome theme songs get out of horror movies: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i3ieQxm_M2I Horror sucks now it was super excellent and also groovy back in the 70's. chitoryu12 posted:I think Spec Ops: The Line greatly succeeded in terms of horror related to insanity because it legitimately keeps the player guessing right up until the last minutes of the game and doesn't show its hand so early that everything gets blown wide open before it's supposed to be. Yeah, I love pretty much everything about Spec Ops: The Line and really want to see more of those games come out and less Bioshocks. I think 2K did them both, right?
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Oct 22, 2014 23:32
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BottledBodhisvata posted:Yeah, I love pretty much everything about Spec Ops: The Line and really want to see more of those games come out and less Bioshocks. I think 2K did them both, right? It was developed by Yager Development and published by 2K. Yager is an independent German studio that's only made a few games, so they could easily get away with something like that.
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Oct 22, 2014 23:42
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And now that they have made a name for themselves as niche developers of games willing to explore the dark corners of a gamer's psychology, they are developing Dead Island 2. I guess variety's important.
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Oct 23, 2014 01:11
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DumbRodent posted:And now that they have made a name for themselves as niche developers of games willing to explore the dark corners of a gamer's psychology, they are developing Dead Island 2. If any game needed a little touch of depth, it was Dead Island. A fun concept and visceral graphics engine with a dull story, duller gameplay mechanics, and a meandering pace that took too long to do much of anything. Running around beating the undead with a boat oar was fun, but after awhile it became tedious--perhaps they can do something interesting with it. Dead Island also suffered from having a ridiculously difficult to navigate map. I remember getting lost constantly in the little wooden hut section of the resort and just leveling up all the time trying to slaughter my way out of the constantly respawning enemies.
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Oct 23, 2014 01:19
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I wonder if Outlast could have been made into a more Batman Arkham-Asylum style maze where you could revisit old areas but as the story progressed even the old areas would be "redecorated" so the backtracking wouldn't be lame. There's definitely parts where you get close, REALLY close, to the exit at the beginning but you keep getting yanked away from it, so maybe at one point they meant for the asylum to be more explorable. As for Dead Island, yeah, it needed way more variety. It kind of blows its load early on with the very pretty tropical environments encrusted in corpses, but none of the abilities in the skill trees are interesting; it's not like Borderlands 2/PS where the characters get significant gameplay alterations with the right build. For me, there should be multiple win conditions for a sandbox game where you're on an island full of zombies. There's the "survivor fort" ending where you get every useful person alive in one spot and your fort becomes this huge Suikoden-like castle able to survive the next century of the zombie apocalypse. There's the "kill everyone" ending where you overload the island's nuclear reactor to kill everyone on it so all the zombies die too. There's the extermination ending where you kill every single last zombie in the game world, like say, if you were playing Dead Rising and finally managed 64,000 kills and new zombies stopped showing up. And, of course, the psycho loner ending where you get sick of this poo poo and kill every other living human on the island so they stop eating your food and you become a crazed survivalist.
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Oct 23, 2014 01:27
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DumbRodent posted:And now that they have made a name for themselves as niche developers of games willing to explore the dark corners of a gamer's psychology, they are developing Dead Island 2. The Dead Island 2 trailer has a vapid facade of capitalism ignoring the collapse of society even as it consumes him, a fact he ignores until he himself has become part of the destruction of human civilization. Also the song playing over it is pretty rad.
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Oct 23, 2014 02:26
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1stGear posted:The Dead Island 2 trailer has a vapid facade of capitalism ignoring the collapse of society even as it consumes him, a fact he ignores until he himself has become part of the destruction of human civilization. At least the trailer was more honest than the one made for the first game. They made the mistake of hyping up Dead Island as a zombie game with emotional punches when it was way goofier in its execution especially with how HARD they tried to give each of the player characters a serious back story. Eh, at least people got Telltale's Walking Dead, later. 7c Nickel posted:I think you could pull off non supernatural asylum horror without making GBS threads on the mentally ill if you focused more on the staff than on the patients. I would totally be down for this. For me, Outlast is just a crazy, silly, haunted house ride, but it falls apart when its faulty parts are examined closely.
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Oct 23, 2014 03:56
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BottledBodhisvata posted:It also had a loving dope theme song. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iP-jYiuDD9g Because John Carpenter stopped making (the music for) them. 
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Oct 23, 2014 06:40
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xeose4 posted:It absolutely would work, if they introduced the supernatural element right at the start of the game, so that the game developers can send the message that "no, we're not preying on stereotypes of the mentally ill, we're clearly telling you that there is a very obvious supernatural thing affecting them." Does it help that I thought a supernatural element was telegraphed right from the start? The first document we found, the one that shows up before you even enter the asylum, says, "Doctors talking about dream therapy going too deep, finding something that had been waiting for them in the mountain." That sort of phrase sets off my Lovecraftian senses, despite its lack of overly polysyllabic words. It made me think almost of his story, From Beyond, but with a research grant. From Umbrella Corp. Hypnotherapists try to awaken some sort of extra-sensory awareness or psychic power by breaking the minds of unfortunate souls come to be cured or at least comforted, only to find that on the psychic plane, some entity is already there. When we started gathering documents featuring cold, clinical assessments from Murkoff and only slightly more clinical ones from the doctors, and many of the inmates looked... mutated, kind of like zombie-esque Resident Evil monsters, but piteous and broken, the evil megacorp dabbling in God's domain angle seemed to be playing up. Heck, the second video in the LP, pretty early in the game, lets you watch security footage of something invisible toss around armed soldiers like rag-dolls filled with blood. It was clearly visible that something invisible was doing it. All that aside, I scanned through 15 pages of posts just to make sure this question hadn't been answered. What do you mean by saying Outlast takes place in the Resident Evil 4 universe or something, DumbRodent?
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Oct 23, 2014 13:19
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Drakli posted:All that aside, I scanned through 15 pages of posts just to make sure this question hadn't been answered. What do you mean by saying Outlast takes place in the Resident Evil 4 universe or something, DumbRodent? Oh, haha, sorry. I really should have covered this in a video by now, but if you check out the very first video and listen carefully to the very first words out of the radio, you'll find a cute easter egg. Just a tiny quirk, that's all! I'll cover it at the end, with the stuff I missed. e: Yes both Pontypool and Woman in Black were a lot of fun. The former left quite an impression on me- probably one of my favorite films of that year. DumbRodent fucked around with this message at 18:27 on Oct 23, 2014 |
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Oct 23, 2014 15:43
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BottledBodhisvata posted:Horror sucks now it was super excellent and also groovy back in the 70's. Minor  counterpoints: Pontypool and The Woman in Black are both, in my opinion, excellent modern horror movies. I highly recommend people look in to both.
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Oct 23, 2014 17:33
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Man I think that The Woman in Black was the last horror film that I've seen. Spent the entire time in the theater much the same way I spent Ju-On - cowering like a child and going "nope nope nope nope" to myself the whole time.
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Oct 23, 2014 17:37
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Drakli posted:Does it help that I thought a supernatural element was telegraphed right from the start? The first document we found, the one that shows up before you even enter the asylum, says, "Doctors talking about dream therapy going too deep, finding something that had been waiting for them in the mountain." That sort of phrase sets off my Lovecraftian senses, despite its lack of overly polysyllabic words. It made me think almost of his story, From Beyond, but with a research grant. From Umbrella Corp. Hypnotherapists try to awaken some sort of extra-sensory awareness or psychic power by breaking the minds of unfortunate souls come to be cured or at least comforted, only to find that on the psychic plane, some entity is already there. When we started gathering documents featuring cold, clinical assessments from Murkoff and only slightly more clinical ones from the doctors, and many of the inmates looked... mutated, kind of like zombie-esque Resident Evil monsters, but piteous and broken, the evil megacorp dabbling in God's domain angle seemed to be playing up. I admit that document didn't trigger my Lovecraftian sense at all. As for the mutations, that's probably one of the faults of gaming at large and how it over-emphasises things and abandons subtlety in order to get the point across. In many games, symptoms of corruption and disease are overly emphasised because the developers fear that if they're too subtle about it, the players will miss it. So it becomes difficult to tell if the mutations on the patients are supernatural in nature or if they're just over-emphasised mundane disease. Drakli posted:Heck, the second video in the LP, pretty early in the game, lets you watch security footage of something invisible toss around armed soldiers like rag-dolls filled with blood. It was clearly visible that something invisible was doing it. I suppose that is a supernatural element, yes, but it's not really implied that it's what's causing the bedlam. It's entirely possible at that point in the game that the invisible force is just the ghost of a particularly violent patient.
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Oct 23, 2014 22:43
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azren posted:Minor Pontypool really interests me so I wanna check it out. I also rather liked Insidious, some people really didn't but I think it manages an interesting plot, good characters, and REALLY solid scares, and it was a horror movie that actually cared to try and build a little bit of its own universe. xeose4 posted:I suppose that is a supernatural element, yes, but it's not really implied that it's what's causing the bedlam. It's entirely possible at that point in the game that the invisible force is just the ghost of a particularly violent patient. Uh...ghosts are pretty supernatural and generally require a touch of explanation if they are going to be featured, since even "real" ghost stories don't have ghosts violently disemboweling people. Sure, you don't know it's CAUSING the bedlam, but that's a bit of a generous handwave. It tells you immediately that something more is happening--it could be telekinesis or it could be ghosts or it could be a Predator, you don't know, but it definitely suggests that there's more than "scary insane people"--and bear in mind, too, that the first and primary Stalker of the game is NOT a crazy person, but instead a rather sane man simply obsessively trying to contain something. In fact, the majority of mentally ill in this game are portrayed as sympathetic and friendly or at least more harmful to themselves than to you. BottledBodhisvata fucked around with this message at 04:15 on Oct 24, 2014 |
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Oct 24, 2014 04:12
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http://www.hardcoregamer.com/2014/10/23/outlast-2-confirmed-by-red-barrels-co-founder/113658/ Sequel confirmed!
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Oct 24, 2014 04:21
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V!ntar posted:http://www.hardcoregamer.com/2014/10/23/outlast-2-confirmed-by-red-barrels-co-founder/113658/ Oh! Well that makes me happy.
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Oct 24, 2014 04:38
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BottledBodhisvata posted:the first and primary Stalker of the game is NOT a crazy person, but instead a rather sane man simply obsessively trying to contain something. No, I'm pretty sure you find a file that states that he's pretty insane and that his insanity takes the form of strict military protocol and "CONTAINMENT AT ALL COSTS". Still, I stand by what I said re: the depiction of the mentally ill because it's pretty obvious that the game is deliberately trying to disturb you with the behaviour itself rather than the behaviour in the context of a larger situation. That entire scene when you wake up in a cell and walk among the patients and then you get introduced to the Twins is an extended scene where the horror comes purely from the patients' behaviour and the Twins' murderous chat regarding your body parts. Like I said before, I am willing to cut Outlast some slack because it does make the effort to explain that the bedlam is happening due to the supernatural, and tries to humanise the patients a little, but there are definitely plenty of scenes where the horror comes from exploiting the player's prejudices.
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Oct 24, 2014 05:17
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xeose4 posted:No, I'm pretty sure you find a file that states that he's pretty insane and that his insanity takes the form of strict military protocol and "CONTAINMENT AT ALL COSTS". Is it really prejudice to be alarmed/disturbed by somebody acting strangely? If you see somebody walking down teh street humming and swaying back and forth and acting otherwise abnormal, does that not, I don't know, bother you a little? Like "hey, that's not normal"? That's a completely natural reaction, isn't it? I don't call that prejudiced--I don't think it's at all bizarre to be afraid or disturbed by somebody who is clearly not acting normally or rationally, is it?
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Oct 24, 2014 05:27
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V!ntar posted:http://www.hardcoregamer.com/2014/10/23/outlast-2-confirmed-by-red-barrels-co-founder/113658/ Good poo poo
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Oct 24, 2014 05:52
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BottledBodhisvata posted:Is it really prejudice to be alarmed/disturbed by somebody acting strangely? If you see somebody walking down teh street humming and swaying back and forth and acting otherwise abnormal, does that not, I don't know, bother you a little? Like "hey, that's not normal"? That's a completely natural reaction, isn't it? I don't call that prejudiced--I don't think it's at all bizarre to be afraid or disturbed by somebody who is clearly not acting normally or rationally, is it? There's a difference between a person acting strange/violently in an otherwise ordinary setting (this is very effective horror, as the strangeness of the act feels even wronger when juxtaposed with the ordinariness of its surroundings) and then having a mental patient act in strange/violent ways in an asylum setting, especially when the game overdoes it to wring as much juice as it can out of the trope. The reason the latter is prejudiced is because it preys on the misinformed irrational fears of the populace: they think that all mental patients are just beasts who do random gross and/or violent things without rhyme or reason, that asylums are prisons meant to keep them away from society rather than places where they can be treated and they can receive the help that they need (which means that if they are not locked away, the prisoners will go on a rampage), and so on. The general populace has problems accepting that mental patients are regular people who are simply ill, like a regular patient in a regular hospital. The horror trope that preys on this preys on the idea that the mental patient is a scary Other with an unfathomable mind, a creature that is both completely alien and eminently dangerous. Most mental patients are not only harmless, but are actually secluded from the outside world because they are too fragile to endure it. It's not that they are too dangerous for the world, it's that the world is too dangerous for them. Some mental patients are dangerous to others, yes, but they are a tiny minority, since most of them tend to end up dead or in jail before they are properly diagnosed. The entire point of "horror in a person acting strangely" is a thing that requires intelligence and care to execute. At the end of the day, using the mentally ill as a disposable, dehumanised source of horror is just disrespectful. Mentally ill people are already enduring a stigma and the last thing they need is a horror game that exploits how much the general public is afraid of them. Outlast manages to barely dodge the bullet on this one, thanks to some humanising moments and the supernatural explanation, but like I said, there are definitely scenes that are meant to horrify and disturb not because something supernatural is afoot or because you're in danger, but because crazy people are being gross.
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Oct 24, 2014 06:07
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xeose4 posted:The entire point of "horror in a person acting strangely" is a thing that requires intelligence and care to execute. At the end of the day, using the mentally ill as a disposable, dehumanised source of horror is just disrespectful. Mentally ill people are already enduring a stigma and the last thing they need is a horror game that exploits how much the general public is afraid of them. Outlast manages to barely dodge the bullet on this one, thanks to some humanising moments and the supernatural explanation, but like I said, there are definitely scenes that are meant to horrify and disturb not because something supernatural is afoot or because you're in danger, but because crazy people are being gross. Well, I can't argue with that on its face. I think most people are terrified of being locked in asylums, and I think most asylums themselves are responsible for the inmates within being more insane and inhuman than they were previously. I think that's the real horror of asylums and mental illness. I think the most terrifying thing to anybody is being labeled or considered crazy themselves--once you are considered such, you have a nearly impossible time convincing anyone that you are not. Mental institutions have a history of this. Actually, come to think of it, there should really be a game of somebody being wrongfully committed to an asylum and having to find a way to escape or get released. That'd be kind of interesting. Similarly, I think that was a big part of the film Shutter Island--on its face it looks like an asylum horror story complete with ex-Nazi staff performing insidious experiments on the inmates, but the later reveal actually demonstrates that all of the perceived evils in the film were a delusion by the main character, himself a man driven mad by the murder of his children by his wife.. So, I think this is a stereotype that isn't really widely used these days--I can't really think of a modern example of anything that really seems exploitative of asylum patients.
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Oct 24, 2014 14:49
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If I can throw a bit of my own perspective on this trope in horror, having once almost been put into a mental ward or psychiatric care, and having the pleasure of being someone very into history, one the of scariest thoughts in life is knowing the potential you could be put into an asylum, as far as I know, it's only been recently, in the past thirty or forty years that asylums were really even there for helping patients or treating them, consider some of the so called treatments they had for patients through the out years, some going back thousands and thousands of years, there are some things you can't get just forget as a culture, the things we've learned in medicine that haven't known before, that hey, maybe just pumping electricity into someone we think has something wrong with them until they act normal, might not be the greatest idea, or that Lobotomies probably aren't a very good treatment for anything ever, there's an inherent fear in humanity now of having those things happen to you. It really isn't even so much that we're afraid of the patients or the mentally ill, as we are of where they go, and what happens to them when they do. I can say this out of personal experience, I work in health care with mentally handicapped individuals, there were stigma's once, because people didn't understand that they weren't just freaks, they had actual things that made them that way, we understand those things now, but that doesn't change the fact that a point in these peoples lives, they were kept outside, or locked in attics because of who they were. The same goes with the mentally ill, their not all harmful, or dangerous, but we can't get over the poster children we have for the mentally ill or people we think are mentally ill. Considering the fact that every big murder/serial killer in the past seventy to eighty years has claimed insanity and more then a few of them were actually mentally ill, these are things we can't get over, the majority of people with mental illness are harmless, but there are some out there, that aren't, and sadly, media and Hollywood play on that, and play on those fears. To Bodhisvata's point, I agree completely, once you've been given a label, or diagnosed with a mental illness, no matter how small or harmless, you never really get away from those, I was diagnosed with ADHD in kindergarten, well before anybody knew what it was, and people look at you funny and treat you like your made of glass when they find out your a bit different, it's something that never goes away, put a stay in a mental ward or an asylum, and people will never look at you the same.
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Oct 24, 2014 17:19
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BottledBodhisvata posted:Actually, come to think of it, there should really be a game of somebody being wrongfully committed to an asylum and having to find a way to escape or get released. That'd be kind of interesting. I had this come into my head almost immediately after I read the quote - Runaway: A Twist Of Fate. An adventure game where you spend a good chunk in an insane asylum, although the "wrongfully" part could be debated.
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Oct 24, 2014 19:04
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Wagglyplacebo fucked around with this message at 20:16 on Feb 2, 2015 |
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Oct 24, 2014 20:04
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xeose4 posted:The horror trope that preys on this preys on the idea that the mental patient is a scary Other with an unfathomable mind, a creature that is both completely alien and eminently dangerous. Most mental patients are not only harmless, but are actually secluded from the outside world because they are too fragile to endure it. It's not that they are too dangerous for the world, it's that the world is too dangerous for them. Some mental patients are dangerous to others, yes, but they are a tiny minority, since most of them tend to end up dead or in jail before they are properly diagnosed. Thank you so much for this and for all your other posts on this thread. This is entirely the truth for the vast majority of patients, and I see the repercussions in my own work on a regular basis.
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Oct 25, 2014 06:22
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I guess I can see how something like this might annoy people if they work in the field, or if they have been institutionalised and feel vulnerable about it, but as someone who has been institutionalised during a few different points in my life, one thing I've learned is that you need to pick your battles. I don't think making a stand here, about this game, is going to change anyones mind. I take the game for what it is, I like it a lot, and I wasn't offended once. I think some of you are reading more into this and thinking more about it than the creators, which might be your point, but you need to decide if you're making a point to make a difference, or just making points for the sake of it. I can't comment on the sexuality issues I suppose, as I haven't had that as a focus for many problems in my life. But I like these videos and am just here for them and I am uncomfortable being this serious on the some thing awful forums so keep it up op and im holding you to your word about having goredongs in the special features video
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Oct 27, 2014 16:18
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