For my final Critical Play of the quarter, I chose Depression Quest, a web-based text adventure by Zoe Quinn, Patrick Lindsey, and Isaac Shankler. This “interactive (non)fiction” tells the story of a person living with depression, trying to navigate life, encountering setbacks and small wins along the way. It is a serious game; to use the developer’s words, “this game is not meant to be a fun or lighthearted experience.” The developers made this single-player game to help people without depression understand what depression is like.
Agency (and the lack thereof) plays a significant role in the game. Depression Quest subverts Shira Chess’s ideal to use games as “agentic training tools.” Failing to meet this ideal helps illustrate the developers’ point about the misunderstood struggles of depression.
Shira Chess’s “Play like a Feminist” defines agency in feminist theory as “the will to act and gain voice in a system of power” (Chess 90). With this definition in mind, video games have the potential to serve as “agentic training tools,” offering players the opportunity to practice acting and gaining agency within the game’s mechanical system. From this perspective, Depression Quest may not seem like a very good feminist game, but I will argue later why I think it is. At each step, the player must choose their next action, but the most positive and social choices are often crossed out.
By showing the player the action they would want to take but denying them that choice, the game demonstrates how depression limits one’s agency and isolates them from others. At different points of the game, different amounts of choices are crossed out.
Crossing out these choices makes Depression Quest less of an agentic training tool, and this is intentional. Depression robs people of their agency, and experiencing choosing the option you know is worse helps players learn something about what depression is like.
Although the developers claim this game is not meant to be fun, we define fun in game design as the part where people learn the underlying patterns of a game. I agree that the fun in Depression Quest has nothing to do with a joyful gaming experience; rather, the elements of “fun” in this game surround experiences of success and failure, as well as learning the game’s mechanics. Fun in this game is the moments of surprise, frustration, or even just realization that your agency is limited. At one point, a character asks you, “What’s wrong?” and you do not necessarily have to deny that you are struggling. Choosing not to deny is how you end up getting yourself into therapy.
The mechanics of Depression Quest are an abstraction of the “mechanics” of depression. Sometimes, you know what action would be better for you, and you can’t take it. Sometimes, you know what action will make things worse, but you can’t help it. Depression is neither fun nor a game, but Depression Quest has carefully applied elements of game design to help you understand what it is like to live with depression. As you learn to navigate each day, facing setbacks and limitations, you learn how to move towards desirable outcomes even if the direct route is blocked. This experience is meant to help players understand the way people with depression have to navigate their lives in much the same way.
Another way that the game subverts the ideal of agency is with the status bars. At the bottom of the screen, the game tells you the current state of your depression, whether you are in therapy, and whether you are taking medication. As you progress, the level of depression fluctuates between values like “depressed,” “moderately depressed,” and “deeply depressed.”
In the above image, the status bar indicates that you are deeply depressed but not seeking any professional help for it. This mechanic places the player in a hybrid point of view. You are the main character making day-to-day choices, but you are also the player watching how your character is doing and how they are reacting to the events of the game. These status bars give you, the player, a clearer view of how your character is doing than the character. Often, your character struggles to find the words to describe how they are feeling; they don’t fully know themself. As a player, I wanted to get my character to reach out for help, to get into therapy, to consider if medication was right for them, but you can’t just send your character to therapy whenever you want. Instead, the status bar mechanic creates a dynamic where the player is aware that their character needs help, but the player is often unable to do anything about it in the moment. Putting the player in this situation appeals to the narrative aesthetic; the player has to experience wanting to help themself but being powerless to do so, a common experience for people experiencing severe depression. Such an experience is part of the game’s overall goal to help players without depression understand what the disorder feels like.
As a designer, there is one aspect of this game that I would consider changing. Sometimes, a choice is crossed out, but the choice below it is functionally the same, albeit with a slight hesitation or reservation. On these days, the crossed-out option feels less unattainable than on days where the choice you end up making is very different than the crossed-out choice.
One might think that, these days, your character’s depression has lightened, and they are more able to make decisions that help them get better. However, on the day shown above, the status bar indicated that the character is very depressed and has very limited motivation and energy. While depression in real life is complex, there is some ludonarrative dissonance here in this simplified formal system. To resolve that dissonance, the developers could make the status bar more descriptive and relevant what is happening on that particular day, or the developers could remove the choices that are too similar to the crossed-out choices to drive home that the desirable choice is out of reach due to the severity of their the character’s mental state.
Despite subverting Shira Chess’s ideal for video games, Depression Quest is still a good feminist game. Chess writes that good feminist games tell stories about characters who face the struggles of mainstream culture (Chess 86), and Depression Quest does just that. People with depression live in a world that does not understand them and their unique struggles, but this game attempts to tell their story by making the player live through a version of it. We should continue to make games like these that place players in the shoes of others to help generate empathy and understanding in our world.
Cited Sources:
Chess, Shira. Play Like a Feminist, MIT Press, 2020. ProQuest Ebook Central, https://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/stanford-ebooks/detail.action?docID=6270461.
