{"id":3906,"date":"2014-08-28T10:56:16","date_gmt":"2014-08-28T14:56:16","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/nickm.com\/post\/?p=3906"},"modified":"2014-08-28T10:57:21","modified_gmt":"2014-08-28T14:57:21","slug":"forking-paths-and-forest-platformer-of-depression","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/nickm.com\/post\/2014\/08\/forking-paths-and-forest-platformer-of-depression\/","title":{"rendered":"Forking Paths and Forest Platformer of Depression"},"content":{"rendered":"

I’ve revisited two games about depression which seem interesting to compare. One has been discussed more recently, particularly thanks to its recent release on Steam: the Twine game Depression Quest.<\/i><\/a> (It’s also available on the Web.) The other, which is in Flash and on the Web, is the platformer Elude.<\/i><\/a> The latter was developed at MIT, in the GAMBIT Game Lab.<\/p>\n

Both of these games have seen plenty of discussion, but I wanted to mention an aspect that make them interesting to compare. Of course, Elude<\/i> is graphical and played in real time, while Depression Quest<\/i> is text-based and allows the user to select CYOA-style options. But that’s quite obvious.<\/p>\n

More interesting to me is that “Elude<\/i>‘s metaphorical<\/b> model for depression serves to bring awareness to the realities of depression by creating empathy with those who live with depression every day,” while “Depression Quest<\/i> is a game that deals with living with depression in a very literal<\/b> way.” Of course, being literal or metaphorical goes beyond having a single axis or slider, and it isn’t tied to whether one has a graphical or textual game. It’s interesting to see two games about the same subject matter that declare their intent to be different in this way. I wonder if there is a pair of games on similar topics where the text game is very metaphorical and the graphical game literal?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I’ve revisited two games about depression which seem interesting to compare. One has been discussed more recently, particularly thanks to its recent release on Steam: the Twine game Depression Quest. (It’s also available on the Web.) The other, which is in Flash and on the Web, is the platformer Elude. The latter was developed at … <\/p>\n

Continue reading “Forking Paths and Forest Platformer of Depression”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[17,11,36],"class_list":["post-3906","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized","tag-digital","tag-games","tag-mit"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/nickm.com\/post\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3906","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/nickm.com\/post\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/nickm.com\/post\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/nickm.com\/post\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/nickm.com\/post\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3906"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/nickm.com\/post\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3906\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3921,"href":"https:\/\/nickm.com\/post\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3906\/revisions\/3921"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/nickm.com\/post\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3906"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/nickm.com\/post\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3906"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/nickm.com\/post\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3906"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}