Spoilers Ahead! (Depression Quest)
To better understand narrative architecture and interactive fiction, I played Depression Quest on a Chrome web-browser on my Windows computer. Depression Quest is a free game developed by Zoë Quinn in the Twine game engine. Throughout the game, you play as a character in their mid-20s, struggling with depression while maintaining a nine-to-five job, a partner, family, and friends. I played the entirety of the game a couple of times (to view the various endings) within 2 hours. The game can be found online here: Game Link. Curious to know if there were any other endings to the game, I also took a look at an online video essay (for the game’s summary) recorded 11 years ago by Noah Caldwell-Gervais, which can be found here: Video Link. Through the video, I discovered more about Quinn’s background, including that their ex-boyfriend was behind the Gamergate incident. Depression Quest is therefore also seen as a prominent piece of feminist work.
But first, a mindmap from our sponsors. (me!)
Figure 1: A mindmap on the reading “The Rhetoric of Video Games” by Ian Bogost
This game is a narrative hypertext fiction that brings the player through the story of living with depression. There are two main branching paths in the game, both of which I achieved: there is a “good” ending, where the protagonist is able to recover from their depression and start to re-integrate into a healthy lifestyle, and the “bad” ending, where the protagonist finds themself broken up with their partner and in a deeper hole than when they first started. At the bottom of the choice list, there is a an addition section reporting state, indicating what the protagonist is experiencing at any given time (see Figures 2 and 3). This state change report made my choices feel very meaningful, as I could see how my feelings were after the result of one of my actions. At some points of the game where I really wanted to see how impactful my choices were, I would scroll down and read the “depression level” before reading the actual text progressing the story.
Figure 2: State report on the path to the “good ending”
Figure 3: State report on the path to the “bad ending”
Adding more onto the state change aspect, I found it very interesting how the player’s depression was expressed qualitatively in the form of “stages” (see Figures 4, 5, and 6). There is no hard statistic measuring the player’s depression, which is much more accurate to how it may feel in real life, and gives the player some ambiguity in their decision-making. Was the option that was just chosen actually beneficial? Did it make things worse? Are you just the same as before? There were some signifiers (either through the story’s text or a shift in “depression level” description) that indicated whether a choice made a positive or negative impact on the player, but the fact that there sometimes was no live feedback led me to treat this less as a game and more of a narrative journey. Because of this (and the fact that the game is an interactive fiction), this game seems less ludology-focused and more reliant on narrative to carry the story through. In my game, I want to introduce some form of state visibility (since there is no persistent way to track this yet), so the player can see how their character is changing. I am thinking of not introducing this in the form of text, but through visual effects. Perhaps when the player becomes more isolated, there is a darker and darker vignette around the screen’s edges.
Figure 4: One of the stages of depression, “Moderately depressed”
Figure 5: One of the stages of depression, “Depressed”
Figure 6: One of the stages of depression, “Very Depressed”
Because of the text-based approach that this game takes, it felt a little primitive, but I felt that this added to the open ended-ness of the story. Rather than seeing physical people or environments around me, it was up to my imagination to fill in the gaps and imagine what the scenarios were like. I believe the game itself was also intentionally vague about some aspects of the protagonist, more strongly allowing the player to live variously through them. For example, one aspect that I picked up on was the ambiguity of the protagonist’s gender. Although the video that I watched that talked about Depression Quest gendered the protagonist as a “man” (see Figure 7), I imagined them as a woman. I suspect this may be because I approached this game and attributed the protagonist to the developer (Quinn’s) assigned gender.
Figure 7: Gendered language used in the game summary video
One of the key mechanics of this game revolved around the ability of choice (or lack thereof). In this game, you could see what choices you “missed out on” because of your depression inhibiting you from taking the necessary action (see Figure 8). It was very interesting to think about the meaning of choices that you can make, but can’t physically choose. Mechanically, it makes the player feel like they can “work their way up” to unlocking these options by getting better. Narratively, this seems to signify how people with depression are always aware about these choices they could make, but due to their depressive tendencies, they cannot bring themselves to express it. This is also echoed throughout the game when the player does try to make impactful choices. For example, if they try to try to express their love to their partner near the beginning of the story, the text will claim that they can’t find the specific words to make their feelings known. In my game, I don’t feel it makes as much sense to show the player actions that they cannot take, but I like the thought of certain actions only being available based on state. I will consider introducing more options that require state to be visible to the player, just so they feel like they can embody their player’s personality better as it is shaped throughout the story.
Figure 8: Choices that can be made (red choices are unavailable either due to it being hard-coded or the player’s “depression level”)
Additionally, I liked the event-based system of progressing the story. The story was told in the form of days, where certain days would have specific conflicts the player had to resolve. For example, sometimes the player would have to go to therapy. Sometimes, they had to deal with their parents. And in other times, they had to deal with their partner. There never really felt like there was a meaningless choice, since these events were all pretty substantial in the sense that they modeled real-life scenarios that carried a lot of weight. Even though the cat in the story (which I adopted) never really appeared in a significant context again, it felt very deep when it was down to me to make that choice. (Some of these didn’t even seem like “challenges”, but turned into challenges when you lacked the freedom of choice.) In my game, I want each day to seem different, and for the player to feel like they have agency to make a step that continues down an important plotline. I will consider adding more larger events that the player can resolve; because it is a dating simulator, this may not take forms of overt conflict, but may take forms of dealing with negative personalities like boredom or a sense of uselessness.
Depression Quest is a game that I would recommend to anyone, regardless of their current state in life. The message of the game is obvious through the message that the publisher placed both at the beginning and the end: depression is an ongoing challenge that isn’t something to be “fixed”, but also has no real “resolution”. Through its ability to allow the player to experience the story vicariously, its use of meaningful choices (and choices that aren’t actually choices), and through the daily challenges it poses, I would say it succeeds at conveying this message very well. To me, there is no easy-to-point-out place where this game suffers from a dissonance between its mechanics and narrative.
Figure 9: A screenshot from the promotional video on the game’s Steam page
As a designer, it is a great experience due to how well-written it is. As a player, it really makes you think about how regular day-to-day interactions can suddenly seem different simply based on how one perceives the world around them.
