Since Grand Theft Auto and Mortal Kombat caused moral panic with their violent and irreverent style in the 1990s, the relationship between games and mental health has always been a topic of discussion. But it’s only been in recent years that games themselves have begun to address this issue in their storytelling.
Mind Scanners, from Danish studio The Outer Zone, is set in a dark and gloomy future, with a cyberpunk aesthetic and a synth-based soundtrack. Despite this, your objective will not be to shoot laser guns or hack into computer terminals as is customary in this type of game. You will have to diagnose and treat mental disorders.
“The inspiration came from a 2015 visit to a psychiatric hospital in Ghent which is now closed,” says Malte Burup, founder of The Outer Zone. “The hospital had been turned into a museum, the Musée du Dr Guislain, and I was immediately fascinated by all these bizarre methods they used to treat people at that time. Methods that almost sound like pure conjecture .”
The disturbing emergence of 19th century psychiatry, which generally cared little for the actual well-being of the patient, made the graphic-trained game designer wonder if this experience could somehow be turned into a video game. After publishing the interactive children’s book Sofus and the Moon Machine in 2016, he teamed up with programmer Rasmus Mølck Nilsson and they started developing Mind Scanners. A game with which you can experience “alternative” psychiatric treatments yourself.
“By playing psychiatrist, as a player you will directly feel the consequences of the ethical issues facing psychiatry and reflect on the challenges you will face.”
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The developers of The Outer Zone don’t try to hide the fact that they were inspired by Papers, Please. The 2012 indie hit put you in the shoes of an overworked border guard in a fictional Eastern country. By comparing documents such as passports and entry permits, you will have to decide what will happen to people. Will you let the person in question pass or refuse them entry?
In many ways, Mind Scanners resembles its original game. With the obvious difference that the Danish game takes place in the future and the player, instead of judging whether a person is a law-abiding citizen or a spy, must decide whether he is mentally ill. The dilemmas that the game poses to you do not end there, since the player must not only diagnose his patients, but also treat them.
Psychiatric treatments are done using futuristic machines, each connected to a specific mini-game. You can use futuristic glasses to decipher the symbols in the patient’s eyes, or you can bombard their ears with some sort of rhythmic Morse code that you’ll have to decipher. In most cases, the treatments will probably be more upset than the patients. Something from the mental hospital visit, Burup reveals:
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“In the museum in Belgium, there were strange devices everywhere. As I walked by, I thought to myself, ‘what are they supposed to do with these buttons on this strange machine from 1905?’ For example, a kind of piano where there were five cats meowing while putting thorns or nails in their paws. Apparently it was supposed to cure something. It was very rare and I wanted to include this characteristic. It it wasn’t just about taking a look at a simple report.”
I had originally envisioned mind scans taking place in the past. But that wouldn’t work, because the player would think they were playing some kind of torture simulator.
Thanks to mini-games, Mind Scanners can suddenly become a hectic experience. You only have 200 seconds a day to complete your task, and during treatments time flies by as strange symbols dance across the futuristic diagnostic equipment. Your equipment is not delicate at all, if you put too much pressure on the patient, he may end up suffering from psychosis and losing his personality.
Time constraints are rarely included in game design because they often cause too much unnecessary stress,” says Burup. “But we wanted that feeling of stress. Inevitably, you will make mistakes, human errors, and this will affect people in the game world. So your time becomes a kind of resource. It is also something that we see in the health sector in reality. Workers are pressed for time and resources, which leads to errors.”
It is true that the working conditions of psychiatrists and mental health personnel have been debated in recent years, but unfortunately there is not much to do about it in the dark universe of Mind Scanners. You work for a totalitarian city-state called The Structure, so there’s not much you can do to improve working conditions. Especially since they have your daughter held hostage in a psychiatric clinic. What you can do is infiltrate the system from within. Perhaps with the help of the mysterious underground organization known as Moonrise. Or you can also concentrate on your work properly and wait for the authorities to reward you.
The development of the story is in your hands. Mind Scanners has several different endings and they depend not only on your choices during the story, but also on the results of the treatments. The Outer Zone team chose the structure so that your choices have consequences. Whether or not you mistreat your patients also matters. However, the open narrative structure also posed a big challenge for the humble programmer, says Nilsson, who handled most of the complex coding:
“We had a pretty reasonable schedule that we managed to stick to. But the story, all of the choices and the various offshoots, was probably the biggest thing that went over budget and time. A lot of times we went back and We changed things up for I feel like the game reacts to the way you treat patients and the decisions you make along the way.”
Burup adds: “You might not see all the hard work we put in in a game, but you can feel it when you play. Whatever you do, you will feel there is a consequence.”
While other games like the depressing Hellblade: Senua’s Sacrifice and the nerve-wracking teen drama Life is Strange have led the way somewhat, turning sanity into pixels and entertainment is still a tricky subject. Video games sometimes tend to trivialize serious subjects. Without going any further, the way war is treated in games like Battlefield or Call of Duty. On the other hand, being so interactive, it can also sometimes be too close. For example in the already mentioned Papers, Please, in which you not only see how inhuman the bureaucracy is, but you are also part of it.
The Outer Zone team put a lot of thought into considerations like these. “I originally planned that the Mind Scanners would take place in the past,” Burup reveals to us. “But that wouldn’t work, because we now know that none of these treatments actually worked. The player would think they were playing some kind of torture simulator.”
Ethical aspects also ended up influencing the art and tone of the game. “I wanted the game to be high resolution with realistic 2D graphics. and more colorful with a low-res style. All with the aim of making it look like you’re playing a game. Now the darkness is more limited to text. We want to point out issues on a societal level, we didn’t want to point a finger at a real individual.
What I like the most about this studio is that they drew inspiration from a lot of things outside of other video games. In Death Howl we again see inspiration from other games in particular, but we also find references to shamanism, the collective unconscious, and many other ideas.
For this reason, at first glance, Mind Scanners may look like an old Nintendo game, with its pixelated graphics and chiptune-inspired soundtrack. However, its universe is still very dark and the audiovisual section is quite inspired by classic science fiction cinema. Especially in Blade Runner and more precisely the convoluted Voight-Kampff machine, but also the satirical and slightly exaggerated style of the classics of the 80s by David Cronenberg and Paul Verhoeven, like Videodrome and RoboCop.
“We drew a lot of inspiration from that sort of sci-fi social satire,” says Burup. In addition to writing most of the script, he also drew the graphics and composed the soundtrack. “(In these films) everything feels a bit fake or some kind of game show. Almost like a video game. They have a sort of rigid, mechanical and also playful universe. At the same time, they provide insightful social commentary.”
With a decent number of sales on PC and later releases for Xbox and Nintendo Switch, it seemed more than obvious that The Outer Zone’s next project would have to be set in the Mind Scanners universe, or at least start from the same. base. However, this is not the case.
At the moment, the Copenhagen studio is working on Death Howl. A Slay the Spire online card game with tactical RPG elements and an open world that the player can freely explore between battles. The setting is a magical and spiritual version of the Stone Age in which you will put yourself in the shoes of a young woman named Ro. But according to the developer, the story is secondary. The important thing is the action and the gameplay.
“What I like the most about this studio is that they drew inspiration from a lot of things outside of other video games,” says Lasse Sommer, third and newest member of the studio. “Like in Mind Scanners, which combines Papers, Please with the ideas and thoughts born out of a visit to a mental hospital. In Death Howl we see inspiration from other games in particular, but we also find references to the shamanism, to the collective unconscious and many other ideas”.
From the future to the ancestral past. From storytelling to gameplay. The Outer Zone team isn’t afraid to explore new ideas, and we can’t wait to hear more about their next game as development progresses.
