Giant Bomb Presents: Raising Mental Illness Awareness Via Games

Thanks Tricky

Was looking forward to this. I'm very interested in the subject of mental illness.

Mental illness definitely has a lot of ignorance around it and it's always interesting to see people trying to get into anything like it within a gaming medium.

The Asylum Jam seems interesting I will be definitely looking at the results after and take a peek at the twitter account now and then this weekend! Thanks Scoops!!

Links for the lazy.

I don't usually go in for the audio interviews, but I'll be listening to this one all the way through. Fucking fascinating subject matter on both sides.

I don't know what it is about the female Australian / New Zealand accent, but it makes me so happy.

That guitar riff at the beginning deafened me, but besides that, I'm looking forward to this jam, mainly because of how impossible it seems to make a game designed to scare/unsettle people without stigmatizing anyone.

I predict a lot of people will go for schizophrenia.

Sounds weird hearing a kiwi accent on Giant Bomb. Kind of surreal.

Cross-posting a bit from my comment on the article:

If even a single game from the jam generates enough momentum to become a full game that people want to play and effectively aids understanding and empathy, it will have been a success. Even if no game does, the effort will have been worth it. The precedent for trying will have been set.

Also, I fucking love horror games, so I'm excited to see what comes out of this on a personal level. Horror games are the perfect medium to illustrate the stresses of mental illnesses, several of which I suffer from. Checking into a psychiatric hospital was easily the most terrifying thing I've ever done.

Patrick, thanks for bringing this to people's attention.

And huge thanks to Lucy Morris for organizing Asylum Jam.

Asylum Jam is a catchy name, but maybe it wasn't the most respect one to go with considering they were trying to raise mental illness awareness and dispel a lot of the stereotypes games indulge in? The majority of people that suffer from mental illness issues are normal people, living everyday lives, and not confined to Asylums.