Perhaps I've watched one to many Cronenberg movies lately, but I've became very interested in madness, insanity and hallucinatory states of psychosis (watch Videodrome or David Aronofskys brilliant Pi, or even better yet, read some Lovecraft) How does it happen that an ordinary man leading an ordinary life all of the sudden starts seeing things and slip into madness? And could this type of development lead to anything interesting in the way of games? American McGees Alice uses madness to create an interesting surreal enviroment allowing for a few whacky (but oh so brilliant) level-designs. An old Amiga game called Dark Seed, which featured some graphics by H.R. Giger (if memory serves me right) was esentially about madness and I remember that it scared the living hell out of me, waaay freakier than any of the Silent Hill or Resident Evil games. So while this is definitively not untapped territory, I believe insanity has much more to give to games. So let us brainstorm a little, flex our creative muscles and see what we can come up with. What kind of ideas does this post spawn? Also please share your experiences with sights and hallucinations, feelings of being insane and phenomena you have witnessed which you could not attribute any kind of reasonable logic. I think this could potentially be a pretty interesting thread. Best regards, Madvillainy

Sanitarium is a great game about insanity, each level has a new delusional theme. One is a town where an alien plant ate all the adults, one has cartoony 4-armed minotaurs, one has an evil circus, one has a statue walking around historical south america with temples and sacrificial altars, and one is a memory of the character's childhood home. Instead of being a descent into madness, it is an ascent from madness, as the character tries to find out who he was before he was put in the sanitarium.

Personally, I always thought it would be neat to give your player character an imaginary friend that the other NPCs would think you were nuts if you talked to.

I agree, a great untapped resource, but I have reservations...

Like you say, there have been games that involve madness etc, but I think there is a reason that it isn't taken advantage of more frequently.

Have you played Max Payne? If you have you already know which bits I'm talking about. The drug induced 'madness' or 'tripping' lead to some interesting (if infuriating) levels of the game. The problem with madness is logic. How can you construct rules and conditions in a game about a state of mind where logic and rules are thrown out of the window? To have a truly 'mad' experience, you would have to make the game totally illogical, maybe even changing the 'rules' as you go along.

I'm not saying it couldn't work, or its a bad idea, but I think you would have to be very careful with how you handle it. Too little wackyness and it won't feel very 'mad', too much and it would just be a confusing experience.

Sanitarium looks like a pretty rad game, I'll have to see if I can track down a used copy. As for Max Payne, it's not my type of game so I haven't played it, but now I might. Thank you very much.

"Personally, I always thought it would be neat to give your player character an imaginary friend that the other NPCs would think you were nuts if you talked to."

That's a brilliant idea. It's like Philip K. Dick in Valis, projecting this Horselover Fat character all the way through the book ... very good surprise factor. Although I guess a lot of people would take it for a Fight Club rip off.

I am going to write something up and post it later, see what it's worth.

- Madvillainy

Check out "Eternal Darkness" on the Gamecube. Sanity was a fairly important gameplay device used in the game. The UK magazine EDGE had an excellent "Making Of" (or similar) piece on it about 6+ months ago that is worth reading - it describes the effects (visual & interactive) that a loss sanity in the game causes.

Also I believe that Nintendo has (within the last year) filed an application for (and possibly been issued with) a patent that covers the effects of a characters sanity to gameplay and/or player interaction (roughly). God Bless the American patent office.

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Original post by Madvillain Sanitarium looks like a pretty rad game, I'll have to see if I can track down a used copy.

I have a copy but unfortunately I haven't been able to get it to run under windows XP. :(

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Original post by sunandshadow Sanitarium is a great game about insanity, each level has a new delusional theme.

Ahh, man, what a game. Definitely one of the gems of the adventure genre.

Max Payne, I think, did a really good job with the dream sequences. Such simple effects--slow down the animation, wide angle lens, short depth cue--but the emotional sensation of urgency and isolation it created was pitch-perfect. I think that's really the key: you can't show the mental situation, you have to create it in the player. That, of course, is a tricky thing to do on cue.

On a related note, google for Don Hertzfeldt's "Rejected" video for an exceptional look at madness from a writer/cartoonist's viewpoint.

There's a few games that deal with madness I can recall. The computer game I remember is, "I have no mouth and I must scream". It's the kind of game you need a walkthough for, but it deals with a group of five people trapped by a computer who uses their phobias and mental stumbling blocks to hurt them as they play their "games".

A Pen and Paper games deal with insanity as well. Call of Chthulu has an insanity rating, where everytime a player sees a horror, they start losing their grip on reality. CyberPunk 2020 and Shadowrun have a humanity stat, where players lose their grip on reality everytime they add a new cybernetic part. And of course, Paranoia! The game where everyone is a traitor, except the computer, who is always right, even when it's wrong. Failure to be happy with this is punishable by execution.

Personally, insanity is a weird topic. To be really insane is to simply not be able to function in society. How to create gameplay functions for a PC who doesn't funtion well. It's a great idea for plot devices, expecially in a puzzle or adventure, but very limited for a character's interaction with the world.

One important thing to remember is that gameplay is enjoyable because it (for the most part) involves a self-consistent system. The rules of the system are the player's interaction with the world, and if the rules themselves become inconsistent, you open the door to player frustration. It's the old design adage on a grand scale: "If you have a bunch of treasure chests full of random amounts of gold, don't ever put a bomb inside one." To get the player used to a particular cue, like a treasure chest, and then bait-switch them with a bombed chest (more importantly, a chest with no visible/detectable sign that it is a bomb) is a terrible kind of design evil.

I bring this up because insanity is, really, the essence of inconsistency. The idea is that the rules are always different; change the steps and get the same outcome, use the same steps and get a different outcome. This kind of "insanity" is easy to generate with a pseudo-random number generation algorithm. It fails, however, to be fun.


Insanity is a great topic, because it's one of those unknowns that we can only really safely explore through imaginary media. Games in particular are great because they allow interaction. So I'd say that, to really exploit the power of the "insanity" concept in a game, we'd have to find a way to make the inconsistency explorable and controllable by the player, to a degree.

One option is to just have totally "bizarre" worlds, where things are different from reality in profound and likely confusing or weird ways, and yet the "crazy world" is still self-consistent. A lot of great games do this, to good effect, but I'd call it more of a flirtation with surrealism than genuine exploration of "insanity."

The other major route I see is to give the player some sort of high-level control over the insanity's inconsistency. The player "plays" in the meta-world realm, where their decisions affect the types and degrees of inconsistency that leak into the "concrete" game realm. For instance, the player talks only to plants in the game (by choice), and thusly the human NPCs in the game become more vegetative, and the plant life becomes more anthropomorphized. Every now and then, we can justify "breaking" this weird arrangement by having a plant-human say something to the player, or having a talking-plant just sit around dropping leaves all day. In a sense, this kind of inconsistency is sort of expected, and I think could be used to great effect.

Of course I have no idea how this could be acheived, or leveraged to an interesting type of gameplay, but figuring that out is half the fun [smile]