3 Minutes to Midnight is an adventure game themed around 80’s horror movies, offering cheesy humor, scares, and unfortunately, some of the genre’s upsetting representations of mental illness.
There are many good aspects to the game: the visual style is lovely, and the raccoon you interact with is full of character. However, that doesn’t change how troubling it is to interact with one of its characters: Pam.
In 3 Minutes to Midnight, specifically in the demo I got to play at EGX 2018, you need to interact with a ‘troubled’ young child named Pam. She is shown chopping wood, harshly, in the corner of the screen. Pam erratically switches between three vastly different personalities, each of which are visually and audibly different. These each chat to themselves as Pam viciously chops wood towards your character.
Pam appears to have Dissociative Identity Disorder (Multiple Personality Disorder). Dissociative Identity Disorder (Multiple Personality Disorder of DID) is a very complex illness – there is not a lot of information out there about how people develop DID. There are several different forms of DID, each with their own trials to overcome. Many individuals hear multiple trains of thoughts going through their head, almost like comments on the world they are currently living with, while others switch in their core personality. Some don’t remember large portions of their lives as their ‘host’ self wasn’t present. [1] [2]
Your character seems to be put off by Pam – as was I while playing the game. Everything you ask her to do, she refuses, sometimes talking about other versions of herself and how they wouldn’t be happy with her if she did. Despite her youth and slight size, she clearly scares the character you play as.
What makes me uncomfortable about 3 Minutes to Midnight is the way I am meant to be afraid of Pam, both in character and as the player – to be frightened of someone who is clearly suffering from Multiple Personality Disorder. The way Pam is shown as this scary child with this scary mental illness – that she looks like she could murder me – is upsetting.
You can’t avoid talking to Pam. You can’t skip through any text that makes you uncomfortable. I attempted to not interact with this character, as she, and her presentation of a person with this mental illness, were quite upsetting. One of the people running the booth came over and asked if I was stuck, and then suggested talking more to Pam. My reply was that Pam made me uncomfortable, and they said ‘Don’t worry, no one dies.’
I walked away from the demo as I was unable to interact with Pam and feel okay with myself – with allowing this to be the character I tried to trick, with interacting with this character I was meant to fear. This illness is very scary to the individuals that suffer from it, and I feel that it is obvious that this is not something that should be used as a cheap scare tactic, or played up for laughs, in a comedy horror game.
“More than 70 percent of people with DID have attempted suicide, and self-injurious behavior is common among this population. [3]” This is a serious illness that affects many people, and it doesn’t help to make this condition the subject of mockery, or worse, its sufferers people you should be afraid of.
I am not one to write about video games in a negative light. I tend to look at each and every creation I play with rose-colored glasses. These works of art – these different stories and experiences – they are each hand crafted full of love and passion.
Mental illnesses have long been looked at in such a negative light, despite the strides that games have made to help people understand these illnesses. Many, many games have taken the opportunity to add in characters with mental illness to add to the experience. Others have allowed you to take on a character with a mental illness to learn about the world through their eyes.
Before I Forget, a game currently being developed by 3 Fold Games, does a wonderful job of putting you in the mindset of someone suffering from dementia. Shrinking Pains showcases both male and female characters who suffer from an eating disorder and depression, allowing you to see the world from their point of view. Behind Every Great One showcases a women who is experiencing depression. If you are looking for scares, The Asylum Jam, a yearly game jam, focuses on creating horror games that don’t have the negative mental health stereotypes that tend to come with the genre.
Still, I keep seeing 3 Minutes to Midnight appear in top lists of games for EGX, but a game that showcases mental illness as a scary element or comedic relief is not something that should be rewarded or highlighted in a positive way. I truly hope the rest of the game, when released, doesn’t contain more of this, and I strongly hope the developers of 3 Minutes to Midnight re-think the way Pam appears in this game, how she acts in the scene, and her fate in the game.
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I think it’s a tricky double-edged sword of offensive vs. hyper-inflation of characters, as my interpretation of ‘3 Minutes to Midnight’s general motifs is that of parodying tropes of the genre. The ‘scary, crazy little girl’ trope is a very common one in a lot of horror/thriller media, and it makes sense (if my reading of the motifs was correct) to put one in here. It IS true that mental illness isn’t portrayed correctly in a lot of games, but tropes ARE made to over-inflate and potentially criticise if utilised correctly. Not saying that was what was done here, but I could see that being the intention.
One could also argue that:
A) Speaking as someone WITH a mental illness, sometimes you WILL feel uncomfortable around individuals with mental illness – not because either of you are bad people, but because humans are social animals that instinctively approach different behaviour with caution.
B) The portrayal is so far removed from a faithful depiction of DID, it could maybe not even be considered a depiction of it at all. Rather, an ominous “what is REALLY going on here?” sort of play, like Danny in The Shining, or Damian in The Omen.
Obviously, this isn’t all my opinion – just me indulging my habit of playing Devil’s Advocate. It’s certainly an interesting topic to discuss, and is always WORTH discussing, and your article brought up some very interesting points! Great read, as always! x
One could argue these things. However, part of that fear of people with mental illness in A comes from these representations of people with mental illness as someone to be afraid of, and therefore having more of these kinds of representations is grossly irresponsible as they’re feeding into an irrational fear that harms sufferers. Accepting that irrational fear with our art and games does little to help a situation that is already difficult for many of these people.
As for B, I had two writers separately come to me about their discomfort with the character. So, I don’t think it’s so far removed that it can be dismissed as a mystery.
While I assume the developers meant to create parody here, the punchline of the joke is still ‘people with multiple personalities are weird’, which is punching downward. There is enough ridiculousness in the horror genre without trying to make a person suffering from mental illness into the butt of a joke. Also, there seems to be little effort to criticize using mental illness as a horror trope, as far as the demo is concerned. As such, it’s still a discomfortingly tone-deaf representation, regardless of what the devs may have intended with it.
Speaking as a humble psych post-grad who studied the validity of a wide variety of mental health diagnoses, it is my opinion that multiple personality disorder is not a valid diagnosis (an opinion which is shared by the majority of European psychologists). It’s an American thing born out of a few case studies, therapy hoohaa, confirmation bias and media hype. That’s not to say that people who *supposedly* exhibit these symptoms are not mentally distressed in some way – its just that the particular symptom set has no real validity. Look at the way the diagnostic criteria have changed drastically over time (from simple oscillations between fugue state and waking, to the full blown Hollywood criteria of the 80s, to the more recent “dissociation from identity” in the latest DSM).
It makes for great b-movie dramatic fodder e.g. split, psycho, dressed to kill – I mean I could go on. Even if DID were to be perceived as a valid disorder, are we to never portray an individual who may have it in a negative light for fear of propagating negative stereotypes?
Shall we stop portraying fictional characters who have PTSD as violent and unstable (Im thinking rambo)? I dont think we should, the diagnosis merely adds a flavour to a characters choices and story arch – most adults know that not everybody with ptsd turns into a violent maniac.
Whatever your studies have told you, DID is still a medically-recognized condition at the moment, and people are being diagnosed with it. You can feel that it’s invalid all you like, but there are still people living with this diagnosis right now. Therefore, to turn someone’s suffering, whether you feel they’ve been diagnosed properly or not, into ‘b-movie dramatic fodder’, still feels insensitive to what they’re going through.
“Are we to never portray an individual who may have it in a negative light for fear of propagating negative stereotypes?” I wouldn’t, at least without a great deal of nuance and care. Turning someone’s mental suffering into a narrative device is a complicated matter, and one I would take extreme care to ensure I covered properly. In your own example of Rambo (movie, not the book), there is a sympathetic slant towards John Rambo’s condition. Yes, he becomes violent when pushed and pushed, but it also shows some of the scope of his suffering beforehand, and how the cruel treatment of others exacerbates his condition. It takes time to illuminate how the treatment of veterans leads to further suffering, and how John can be quite peaceful beforehand, showing different sides to his character. He is not just a monster with PTSD, as we take the time to really explore his character.
Pam gets no such treatment here, but is instead put in as a throwaway nod to 80’s ‘psycho killers’. For someone suffering from this condition, having it used as cheap entertainment can be hurtful and help internalize damaging stereotypes without any attempt to show that there is a human side to this condition. There is no story arc – just the statement that this condition and its sufferers are scary. That’s not a message I’m at all comfortable with. By all means, explore this condition in media, but do so with some sensitivity to the fact that people are in pain from it. Explore it in-depth not only to avoid damaging stereotypes (which don’t help anyone, and adults are just as prone to as anyone else), but to help its sufferers over worrying about whether everyone else has a right to look at their suffering as entertainment.