Fractured Minds : Madness Within RPGs

 

Sometimes, I just really want to lose my shit. To go completely off the wall, to be someone in no way myself, to be someone who sees reality in such a different way than me that any means of drawing comparisons would be farcical at best and infuriating at worse. Within this niche of absolute escapism exists that “mad” character, someone who in some indefinable way is clearly troubled, and going about their business regardless.

This desire to play someone so removed from the normalized experience does not just exist within player urges to create such characters, but in a multitude of RPGs themselves as well. Anytime a game tracks something such as sanity or stress, it is to give a player the slow countdown to that awaited destination of playing someone or something that you no longer recognize. Something alien.

In doing this an interesting question is proposed however: what are we doing when we “go mad” in a game? Interestingly enough there aren’t many real-world parallels to this phenomenon we chase within games, which is probably for the best. Madness does not in any way equate to mental disorders, at least in our modern understanding of them, so if someone said there character had lost their marbles my assumption would not be “Oh, he’s just bipolar now!” Avoidance of this issue allows one to get away from the ground of representation, as that is an incredibly difficult task to do respectfully when one takes in the myriad of mental disorders that do exist.

Art by Sylvain Sarrailh 

When playing a character who is “crazy” people are not looking to create a in depth assessment of their characters diagnoses (if you do that though, hell yeah, send me what you got). But generally, madness is in some way separate from what we would typically see in things such as the DSM-V, and I hope your local psychiatrist doesn’t use the term madness, or else you are most likely trapped in a 1800s Bethlehem hospital.

The closest parallel to the convention of madness might be in the broad range of disorders labeled as psychotic, as they run the full gamut of things one might find on a standard madness table, ranging from hallucinations to delusions. They depart however, in that within an rpg, a character remains coherent in some fashion much of the time. Few people would wish to play a character who cannot communicate, or in doing so cannot be understood. For those with actual psychotic disorders, there is no guarantee of this. Incoherent speech patterns is an actual diagnostic symptom for schizophrenia this reason.

The closest one gets to this is incoherent function is as a form of character death. For example, in games that track sanity, when one hits zero a normal convention is that the character can no longer function as they become a gibbering mess, unable to accomplish tasks. While also unfair to say that this is a display of psychotic disorders, it can be true of those on the further end of the spectrum, at the point where they may need hospitalization and medical attention.

So, madness as defined for the average rpg system and player rides the strange line of psychosis, toeing it just enough to depart from reality, but not enough to get into any of its true hang-ups. In many ways, it’s a sanitized version of mental illness, in the same ways that genius savants are portrayed in the media, “suffering” for their art while hiding away from showing the true suffering that occurs. This is all while also ignoring how many times depictions of “madness” branch further away from even just psychotic disorders, running the full breadth of disorders in order to cherry pick what may be fun.

Now, with all this comparisons to the real world, one might assume that at this point that I have a dim view of madness as convention. Let me fix this notion and refer you back to the first paragraph. I love playing someone “mad”, and I love playing in games that have it as some sort of mechanic. All I am interested in is examining it as a phenomenon, cause we all have to admit it’s pretty weird right? It really is just picking up real world problems, buffering them until they shine a bit differently, and then calling it fun.

And yet it is.

Art by Mark Tarrisse 

Any time a game has a class or role that has the air of crazy, I’m drawn to it. I love my trash wizards, my fucked-up scientists, my crazed cultists. This, to me at the very least, is the actual strength of how madness is depicted within the gaming sub culture. It harkens more to the ideas of gothic horror or goofy comedy, without trying to be to realist. Whenever a game attempts to make it real and give a rundown of real disorders as possible outlets for madness is when real problems occur. Here the issues of real-world representation becomes problematic, and it can too easily grow offensive.

For example, a common type of madness that could be seen within rpg systems is something that harkens to PTSD. Putting PTSD on the same level as largely imaginary illnesses, and without incredible sensitivity, can be offensive at best, and down right harmful at worse. Madness, as a convention and as a system, is at its best when it focuses upon the tropes of madness and ignores the real-world parallels.

It’s usually not very good at emulating real disorders, nor should it be.

Madness is fun when it doesn’t try for the real but instead for an ideal, a separation from the real in games where one is already separated from real. Where it helps in aiding the separation between myself and the character I play, or when the NPC I act out must also involve a separation of perceptions and beliefs . Perhaps there’s some cowardice in that. Perhaps I enjoy the excuse to say dumb shit and have someone confuse the difference between waffles and bacon, between time and a subway station.

Anyways. See ya next week. Or is it yesterday? Things get a bit warped down here.