This is an academic paper I wrote while attending U of M for the course EDUC 333: Video Games and Learning. This is only part of the full project which also required me to create a larger poster version of this paper, essentially a synopsis, and present it to the class. This is an important game for many reasons, which you will find out in the paper, and I believe anyone who truly appreciates video games as an educational tool and art form should experience.
Video games to many people are primarily a source of entertainment, a simple sit down and play way of overcoming puzzles and taking in stories. Many games attempt to stay in this realm of simplicity to make sure they don't make their audiences uncomfortable, or so they can establish franchises and meet sales numbers. Others attempt to exist explicitly for educational purposes, and while they rarely reach mainstream appeal they often do reach their goal of educating students. In 2017, a game attempted to bridge this gap of creating a deep and involved story with puzzles and combat which also taught players of the effects of mental health in an effective manor. This game was Hellblade: Senua’s Sacrifice.
Description
Hellblade is a third person action-adventure game where the player takes on the role of Senua, a woman who suffers from schizophrenia. The game’s setting is described on the Steam Marketplace as, “ … a warrior’s brutal journey into myth and madness. Set in the Viking age, a broken Celtic warrior embarks on a haunting vision quest into Viking Hell to fight for the soul of her dead lover” (Hellblade, n.d.). This title has been met with critical acclaim receiving ratings of 9/10 on Steam, 9/10 from IGN, and 58/65 positive critics reviews and 112/152 positive user reviews on MetaCritic. The primary gameplay comes from puzzles and combat with the story generally given through cutscenes. The puzzles, story, and combat are all displayed through Senua’s perspective which is a fog of confusion where reality and hallucination mold into one indiscernible existence. Senua’s life in the game is a living hell and throughout the story you are being taken even deeper into the inner circles.
Why I choose Hellblade
This title deals with an extremely sensitive topic that many games tend to shy away from, mental illness. Mental health issues are something of a rarity that main characters suffer from in video games and even more so having the main protagonist suffer from such a prominent and severe case of the disorder. To be sure their presentation of mental illness was portrayed accurately, Ninja Theory consulted with Professor Paul Fletcher from the University of Cambridge. Discussed in a video diary released by the studio, Professor Fletcher describes that his task was to insure the game was as accurate as possible when demonstrating the visual and auditory hallucinations that people with schizophrenia experience (Ninja Theory, 2015). Because of this deep research into the topic the game and it's studio have been recognized for their achievements.
At The Game Awards 2017, an annual event that’s held in December to honor and recognize ground breaking and influential titles, HellBlade received the award of Best Game for Impact. This award is given to titles that most effectively represent “a thought provoking game with a profound pro-social meaning or message.” (The Game Awards, 2017). The studio had also been given a grant worth $395,000 from the Wellcome Public Engagement Fund to assist in further research and to promote the organization's mission, “... To use creative approaches in engaging the public with health research.” (WellCome Foundation, n.d.; Takahashi, 2017) Because of all the recognition going towards this game I wanted to play through it with the lenses we were taught in this course, and see if the title not only could cause emotional impact or generate awareness but if it could also educate.
Motivation & Flow
Describing my own experience with HellBlade and how it affected me would be fruitless and arguably counterproductive to the goal of the title. It’s meant to fully encapsulate your sense of immersion and drag you along this story as though you were genuinely a part of it. Because of this, nearly every player will experience the emotional impact of this game differently. The way HellBlade is able to accomplish this is through its ability to motivate the player and force them into a state of flow.
Depicted by Malone & Leeper, “ … an activity is intrinsically motivating if people engage in it for its own sake, rather than in order to receive some external reward or avoid some external punishment.” (Malone & Lepper, 1987). HellBlade’s strong sense of immersion is what allows the title to satisfy this idea of intrinsic motivation. Players will find themselves so immersed and in a state of flow that moving through the story will no longer feel like a series of objectives but a series of experiences they want or need to work through. To bring players into this state of flow the game focuses on two different senses.
One of the main gameplay mechanics throughout this title is combat. To prevent the game from ever becoming to easy or difficult Ninja Theory incorporated an auto difficulty setting. This causes the game to learn how well you are doing and it pushes or pulls on how difficult the title is. This can range from being easier than the standard difficulty or even harder than the default maximum. Because of this the game constantly follows the state of flow, in terms of difficulty, to wherever the player needs it to be rather than what the game demands it to be. The title also encourages the player to enter a state of flow through its immersion.
Defined by Csíkszentmihályi, “... flow activities have as their primary function the provision of enjoyable experiences.” (Csíkszentmihályi, 1990). Interestingly, this game is not what would commonly be defined as enjoyable, but it is immersive.
The game is haunting, disgusting, and heartbreaking yet through its remarkable visuals and binaural audio for its hallucinations it drags you in and forces you to become immersed. You get dragged into a state of flow because you believe that you are not just controlling Senua through this journey but that you are actually with her.
Interestingly, while this game is motivating and capable of bringing players into a state of flow it lacks heavily in its ability to promote autonomous play styles. Presented by Rigby and Ryan in their book Glued To Games, autonomous play styles in video games are promoted by a sense of identity, choice of activity, the ability to plan different strategies, and an open-world design. (Rigby and Ryan, 2011) HellBlade is unable to satisfy any of these criteria. Due to the game telling a compelling story it has become very linear in fashion, losing any sense of an open-world, ability to plan strategies, and a choice of which activity to do. The game’s deep connection to telling Senua’s story has also taken away nearly all of the game’s sense of personal identity. While the game may be very motivating with a compelling story, its lack of autonomous play styles is a reminder that this is Senua’s story, and we are simply going along with her.
Learning Principles
HellBlade also follows several of James Paul Gee’s 36 learning principles. Starting with principle 30, Cultural Models about the World: “Learning is set up in such a way that learners come to think consciously and reflectively about some of their cultural models regarding the world, without denigration of their identities, abilities, or social affiliations, and juxtapose them to new models that may conflict with or otherwise relate to them in various ways.” (Gee, 2003) The game’s ability to successfully display the visual and auditory hallucinations that suffering from psychosis can cause allows it to touch on very sensitive topics. Experiencing this first hand can cause players to think consciously and reflectively on the effects that psychosis puts on people as well as how successfully or unsuccessfully our mental health system helps people living day to day with this condition.
Principle 1, Active, Critical Learning: “All aspects of the learning environment (including ways in which the semiotic domain is designed and presented) are setup to encourage active and critical, not passive, learning.” (Gee, 2003) The game satisfies this principle with its puzzles. By having the player actively searching throughout the environment for hidden pathways and different perspectives to find portals and sigils, they are actively taking in their environment and thinking about their surroundings.
Finally principle 28: Discovery: “Overt telling is kept to a well thought out minimum, allowing ample opportunity for the learner to experiment and make discoveries.” (Gee, 2003). The games backstory, main events, and objectives are told through the eyes of Senua and her memories allowing the player to see and experience events rather than being simply told or reading them. The way that this principle is handles also ties into why the game is so effectively immersive.
Metacognitive Approach to Teaching
HellBlade is a very inward focused title. Dialogue is generally Senua talking to herself or with voices in her own head, combat is with her own hallucinations, and the story is of her own struggles. The way in which the game promotes the learning of mental health is with an inward focused, metacognitive, learning principle. Described in How People Learn 1-2-3, metacognition is a form of learning that takes place with internal conversation, be it with a player or student. Since the game never overtly discusses or describes the symptoms of Senua’s mental illness it is up to the player to internally think about and digest what they are being presented. While the game does not help in building these metacognitive thinking skills, it does promote their use by requiring the majority of its educational potential to be achieved with this inward dialogue.
Violence
Defined by Christopher Ferguson in his article “Can Violent Video Games Be a Force for Good?”, he defines what it means for something to be violent, “... intentional behavior produced to cause considerable physical harm to another person who contrastingly wishes to avoid the harm.” (Ferguson, 2010) Throughout HellBlade nearly every source of gameplay or narrative is violent in nature. Senua dominating her internal demons is represented through physical combat, her will to continue on is represented by a virus infecting her body slowly berating her until she can no longer go on, and the voices in her head (who act as a narrator and dialogue) can cause physical pain by screaming when she messes up. So how can a game that is so centrally focused on violence be such an effective tool to educate and bring awareness of mental illness?
In Ferguson’s article, he discusses the positive effects of violent video games and how they can assist in educational games becoming more appealing to the common player. By taking such a serious topic, such as cancer or mental health, and disguising it into a form that is more comfortable and engaging to a larger amount of people, the game can be used to educate serious topics. HellBlade achieves this with the disturbing imagery of its visual and auditory hallucinations, that attempt to be as realistic as possible. While at the same time slightly embellishing so that they can incorporate puzzles and combat. This educates and brings awareness to Senua’s disorder while also keeping players comfortable enough with gameplay they are accustomed to.
Conclusion
From my time with HellBlade I have learned a great deal about the traumatic suffering people with severe cases of mental disorders live with. I have also learned of the game’s techniques and how it is able to so effectively represent these disorders while also being a high quality video game. From its ability to promote metacognitive thinking to the ways it handles violence, HellBlade is a very powerful teaching tool and deserves all of the recognition it has received.
References
Csikszentmihalyi, M. (1990). Flow: The psychology of optimal experience. New York: Harper & Row.
Ferguson, C. J. (2010). Blazing Angles or Resident Evil? Can Violent Video Games Be a Force for Good. Review of General Psychology, 14(2), 68-81.
The Game Awards, . (2017). In The Game Awards 2017. Retrieved from http://thegameawards.com/awards/
Gee, J. P. (2003). What video games have to teach us about learning and literacy. New York: Palgrave Macmillan.
Hellblade (n.d.) [Steam page]. Retrieved January 5, 2018 from http://store.steampowered.com/app/414340/Hellblade_Senuas_Sacrifice/
How People Learn: Brain, Mind, Experience, and School (p. 4). (2000). N.p.: National Academies Press.
Malone, T. W., & Leeper, M. R. (1987). Making Learning Fun: A Taxonomy of Intrinsic Motivations for Learning.
Ninja Theory (2015). Hellblade Development Diary 12 [Online video]. YouTube. Retrieved from https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zS6wHzwUDI4
Ninja Theory (n.d.) Posts [LinkedIn page]. Retrieved January 5, 2018 from https://www.linkedin.com/company/ninja-theory/
Rigby, S., & Ryan, R. M. (2011). Glued to Games (pp. 39-63). N.p.: Praeger.
Takahashi, D. (2017, December 7). Hellblade wins 'games for impact' at The Game Awards for depicting mental illness. In VentureBeat. Retrieved April 12, 2018, from https://venturebeat.com/2017/12/07/hellblade-wins-games-for-impact-at-the-game-awards-for-depicting-mental-illness/
WellCome Foundation, . (n.d.). In Public Engagement Fund. Retrieved April 12, 2018, from https://wellcome.ac.uk/funding/public-engagement-fund