![\"\"](\"http:\/\/www.simonings.net\/wp-content\/uploads\/2017\/09\/Hellblade-1024x683.jpg\")
<\/p>\n<\/p>\n
Playing Hellblade<\/em> for New Scientist, 29 August 2017<\/a><\/p>\n You are Senua, a Pictish outcast whose lover has been sacrificed to the gods by homicidal Norse invaders. To release his spirit, you must enter Hel, their underworld.<\/p>\n But is this all real?<\/p>\n Three years ago, Paul Fletcher, a psychiatrist at the Behavioural and Clinical Neuroscience Institute in\u00a0Cambridge, UK, took a call from games company Ninja Theory. The firm wanted help creating a character who suffered from severe psychosis.<\/p>\n \u201cMy defences were up,\u201d Fletcher admits, \u201cbut quickly I realised I was in serious company. We started by discussing the kinds of hallucinations people experience, and within two or three sessions we were into the neuroscience.\u201d<\/p>\n Senua\u2019s world blurs as she moves. The walls crawl as she passes. When she looks in her mirror, the wrong voice comes screaming out of her reflected mouth.\u00a0\u201cBut more interesting,\u201d recalls Ninja Theory\u2019s co-founder Tameem Antoniades, \u201cwas the way someone in psychosis will make sense of their world by making associations: ones that outsiders might find very strange.\u201d<\/p>\n Players will enjoy the way that runic images and the features of Senua\u2019s landscape conjoin in perspectival games that further or frustrate her progress. And there are incidental delights: at one point, the embers of a distant fire pulse to the rhythm of Senua\u2019s breathing.<\/p>\n Hellblade<\/em>\u00a0is more than a journey through a hallucinatory landscape (and hallucinatory it is, passing from flaming killing fields through sun-kissed meadows to a corridor of withered arms). It\u2019s about a rational hero desperately trying to make sense of her world. \u201cMost of us are pretty bad at that,\u201d Fletcher points out.<\/p>\n He\u2019s referring to\u00a0a paper he co-wrote<\/a>\u00a0a couple of years ago, showing that people in the very early stages of psychosis are actually better at interpreting ambiguous visual information (think spotting the Dalmatian illusion, in which you see a dog image from the dots) than the rest of us. \u201cSomeone \u2014 I\u2019ve never been able to find out who \u2014 said that perception is controlled hallucination. This is true. You bring what you know to bear on what you sense. That is how we recognise things.\u201d<\/p>\n Not all people who experience hallucinations consider them a problem. Some who hear voices, for example, have\u00a0joined networks dedicated to removing the social stigma attached to the phenomenon. \u201cA lot of people suffer\u00a0not because of the content of their hallucination, but because of being ostracised<\/a>,\u201d Fletcher says.<\/p>\n At the same time, games are becoming increasingly immersive.\u00a0Hellblade<\/em>\u2019s binaural soundtrack, placing Senua\u2019s intrusive voices in distinct locales for the player, is a case in point. Fletcher\u2019s hope is that psychiatrists and designers can work together to create immersive environments tailored to the needs of specific individuals.<\/p>\n \u201cAvatar therapy<\/a>\u201c, which uses a screen-based, computer-generated figure to represent, normalise and quell an aggressive intrusive voice, is already proving its clinical worth.<\/p>\n For Antoniades, meanwhile, \u201cvideo games are becoming alternate digital realities\u201d.\u00a0Hellblade<\/em>\u2019s 8 hours of gameplay are a gruelling experience, made compelling by a staggering motion-capture performance by\u00a0Melina Juergens, a freelance video editor who was initially just filling in for a \u201creal\u201d actress.<\/p>\n Certain players will find the game rather restrictive, and some of those limits are imposed by the psychological realism. Senua\u2019s demons are consistent, staying more or less the same. Psychosis is not a variety show<\/p>\n It\u2019s worth noting, though, that the game\u2019s most traditional element is also its most radical: while Senua may be in the throes of psychosis, she is also a hero.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Playing Hellblade for New Scientist, 29 August 2017 You are Senua, a Pictish outcast whose lover has been sacrificed to the gods by homicidal Norse invaders. To release his spirit, you must enter Hel, their underworld. But is this all … Continue reading <\/div>\n