DEPRESSION QUEST
Zoe Quinn
2013
PC

Depression Quest is a twenty minute narrative game that exists in text, a few scanned polaroids, and some sparse music. You read an account of living with debilitating mental illness and select responses the way you do at the end of a page in a choose your own adventure book. The development software, Twine, simplifies the process of flipping to page 94 by keeping all the threads invisible to the player. It’s very easy to work with, to the point where I’ve developed a couple of very short games in the system (none of which are currently online.)

The game’s primary innovation in the interactive fiction space is crossing out and making inaccessible some of the “healthier” responses to stressors or anxieties of daily life. It communicates very effectively the cognitive dissonance mental illness sometimes creates, where you know it would be better to call and cancel plans but conflict avoidance results in you just lying in bed until you get the “dude wtf” text. It would be better to take a shower and make a meal that actually has some real nutrition, but drinking too much beer is a lot more accessible right now.

There are other, equally brilliant games in the Twine space. One of my favorites, my father’s long long legs, is a fun horror short story similar in tone to some of Stephen King’s best. Another, With Those We Love Alive, combines folklore and fantasy storytelling to aim for a more literary direction. I spend a lot of time on itch.io, playing the free games that float to the top of their recommendations. Most are just fun little mechanics explored in a small game, and occasionally there’s some really wonderful narrative play happening.

A world outside of commercial video games used to be a lot more exciting. Just before the fall, it was chronicled in Anna Anthropy’s Rise of the Video Game Zinesters, a narrative of queer and feminist indie game developers creating new and exciting small games that cannot exist with the purpose of generating profit and appealing to the masses. Both Anna Anthropy and the author of With Those We Love Alive have since been credibly accused of abuse. The Video Game Zinesters are maybe the most fractured creative art scene I’ve ever followed. Most retreated from the public gaming sphere entirely when #Gamergate set its ire against them pretty directly, the movement stemming from a positive write-up of Depression Quest on Kotaku.

These small games I love are still being made, but the effort it takes to get people to play them is growing every year. The rise of gaming blockbusters like The Last of Us, God of War, Alan Wake, and my beloved Like a Dragon games have led to games as narrative artistry looking more like soap opera TV and cinema. Even some of the people who grew out of this scene, like Sam Barlow of Immortality and the post-Telltale effort of Campo Santo, have moved bigger and farther away from mechanics first storytelling. It’s not that I want these specific people back making the games again. But replaying Depression Quest is a reminder of a time where the future of games looked unpredictable because the possibilities were endless rather than because the arms race of the mass market was simply unsustainable.