Daniel Benmergui

Freud

These days I am hacking out a prototype for a concept I had in mind for quite some time: a game about being a psychotherapist. I’ve always been fascinated by the resolution of some clinical cases carried out by professional psychologists, as well as the more mundane interventions some sensitive people make with the people they love, even with no formal education.

Whether the game is going to be enjoyable or not, I do not know at this point. I have a vision on the experience I want to achieve, and some interesting ideas on how to achieve it, but the execution is demanding details I am still struggling with. I wanted to share some thoughts and insights on this process I’m going through while attempting to build something unusual…

My Drive

I admire empathic people. Empathic people have a strong perception and sensitiveness that allows them to resonate with the emotional states of others. I also admire wise people. Their wisdom allows them to understand the rationale behind other people’s drives and behavior even if they are unaware of it.

We are lacking in games with mechanics based around wisdom or empathy. Games about people’s troubles, their weaknesses and their way to deal with life. Games that reward sharp gut feelings. Managing to get an empathic person to use their skills in the game successfully is my goal: I want to prove that a game like that can be done.

The Challenge

Shrink is set in a psychotherapist setting. Patients seek help to deal with whatever they are making themselves unhappy with. But their cooperation is limited as they will block things out, lie, and refuse sharing stuff that could be critical for treatment. Psychologists use their knowledge of the patient’s life, some general laws that apply to most people, and put themselves in the patient’s shoes to attempt discovery of their drives. But their job is mostly an informed guess.

Therefore, Shrink is about guessing. The information you need to do those guesses is not intrinsic, so the game does not present you all the information. You will need to fill in the holes using your real-life intuition (though no hard psycho-nerd stuff is required to play).

But the execution poses some problems:

Disarming logical approaches: I don’t want players to brute force the patient to win or allowing solutions that don’t imply making an honest, intuitive guess. This is quite hard to achieve with the current design, since the patients are hand-made and the solution space is still small. Still seeking a good solution to this.
Hellish level design: By “level” I mean “patient”. Designing a person’s life, their drives, situations and memories while at the same time making sure that their psyche is challenging enough is unlike anything I dealt with before. It has the same problem as adventure games…something that makes sense for me might not for most people.
Keeping the laboratory germ-free: I want to stick with the initial idea of making a game about empathy and not a game that just includes some usage of empathy. Still, I feel tempted to add some known mechanics like resource management and puzzle solving. This is because the blind spots in the design are making me feel lost and insecure. Fighting back this temptation is the hardest bit of doing this project.

Now I’ll go back to continue working on the damn thing. I’ll post about the actual design soon, together with the prototype demo.

8 Comments so far

[...] psychology in the hopes of creating a simplified model for Shrink, I discovered myself building wacky theories on how the human psyche may work that would make Freud [...]

Are you aware of The Asylum?
http://www.gamershood.com/flashgames/276

What’s up with this game? I’d love to play it.

about the first problem, for the “intuitive guess”, i think it would help that the patients have very inusual, fantastics or no sense problems. so, this way, cant be affected by human logic to “win” the game. some like metaphors.

(sorry for my english)

My advice is to pick up a copy of DSM-IV, otherwise known as the Diagnostic and Statistic Manual of Mental Disorders, episode 4.

You’ll want to focus on personality disorders. Other diagnoses like drug or alcohol dependency, mental retardation, and/or psychosomatic disorders may add some flavor, but should be disregarded since you want to focus on a gaming experience based on psycho-analysis (at least, that’s what I’m guessing since you have a picture of Freud on here). Since you’re focussing on the psychoanalytical model, i.e. purely focussing on the patients’ thoughts, dreams and emotions, you should probably stick to (dysfunctional) personality traits, lest you overcomplicate matters for the sake of realism.

So my advice is, crack open a DSM-IV, look at personality disorders, then base each character on those disorders, only give them only one or two traits as described there.

You see, a psychiatric diagnosis based on DSM IV is made by comparing the personality traits listed there with the patient’s, and when a certain number of personality traits are identified (usually about 4 or 5), the diagnosis is made.

As you will probably notice is that when you imagine a person having 4 or 5 traits of any of the personality disorders listed, you can be pretty sure that the person in question can be diagnosed by laymen as ‘batshit insane’. In other words: you lose any incentive to delve deeper into the psyche of your client. After all: you’d rather see that person behind bars.

No, instead focus on only one or two personality traits. You should build your characters/levels around those: how would such a person act, given those personality traits? How would he or she react to your questions? How would the client deal with stress or disappointment?

As the client/level advances, maybe throw in another dysfunctional reaction. That’s how a player gets sucked in.

–

The reason I’m giving this particular advice is because EVERYONE has one or two personality quirks that would fit nicely into the diagnoses as presented by DSM-IV. In fact, you can have a blast with your friends just diagnosing people you know. It’s both the strength and the risk of the manual. And since everyone knows at least one person with personality quirks belonging to the Theatrical or Avoidant personality disorder (to name only two), it’s all the easier to relate to clients/levels that exhibit the same behaviourisms. And by recognising those behaviourisms (possibly subconsciously), players are all the more motivated to play through the game.

That said: Sorry for the great big wall of text, I guess I’m just really inspired by your innovative and experimental approach. And a game about shrinks? I’m giddy!

Also: sorry for the spelling errors. I’m inclined to say that english isn’t my native language, but that doesn’t excuse me from spelling ‘focusing’ with two ‘s’es. >_<

you could go for a “psychonauts” angle, visualizing the different patients’ mental states.

@Frank:
Indeed, I got DSM-IV as well as some case studies of family therapy that are very interesting…

Then I put this game on hold, but I might pick it up again. In a sort of way, my current games have a vein on what I wanted to achieve with Shrink.

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