7 Ways Alien: Isolation Helped Me Accept My Anxiety Disorder

The Creative Assembly

(Originally published on The Robot's Voice.)

My name is Daniel, and I suffer from a mental disorder. Specifically, I have severe anxiety, which often manifests and renders me useless in social situations and leaves me afraid of everything up to and including my shadow. It’s more than a little ironic, then, that I love horror in all of its mediums: film, literature, comics, take your pick. While I might avoid anything remotely tense in everyday life, I enjoy the primal thrill of being scared by a movie or book. Consider it a form of exposure therapy.

With Alien being my all-time favourite film, I was extremely pumped for Creative Assembly’s video game sequel, Alien: Isolation. Though overly long and—I should impress this—ridiculously stressful, Isolation is by far one of the best games I’ve ever played. Not simply for its mechanics or extreme faithfulness to the source material, but for how it allowed me to better understand the disorder that has plagued me for most of my adult life.

If you’ll bear with me, consider…

Interview: Leigh Alexander on Mona

Hi, yes, still alive, still writing. I won't bother you with the particulars of my absence, only tell you that I'm back and I have something y'all might find interesting. So let's hop to it.

Leigh Alexander is one of the best game critics in the industry right now. When I say "critic," I don't mean the usual games press shorthand for "someone who tells you if a game is good or bad," but someone who actually examines and analyzes our experiences with games: how they make us feel, how successful the mechanics are at relaying its goals and themes, what these tell us about ourselves, and so forth. In the last half year, she's become one of my go-to sources for nuanced games criticism alongside Cara Ellison and Patrick Klepek. Leigh is originally from Massachusetts, currently living in New York City, and often pops in and out of London for conferences and the like. She also, I must impress, has an incredible voice, as evidenced by the "Lo-Fi Let's Plays" she occasionally posts on YouTube. 

Leigh recently took time out from her critical work to write and self-publish Mona, a short story with illustrations by Emily Carroll, whose horror comics like "His Face All Red" often leave me feeling more than a little disquieted. It is part homage to the landmark horror game Silent Hill 2 and part fan fiction of it. I know I've written at length about the awfulness of fan fiction, but Mona is a fine exception to that rule, a character piece that emulates the dread of its source material rather than aping its characters and setpieces. Rather than following in SH2's supernatural footsteps, it's a work of what I call "moral horror," where fear or terror is derived from the characters' actions, as with YellowBrickRoad. It's at once a commentary on that game and a part of it. And Leigh was kind enough to answer a few of my questions about it.

Video Game Review: The Walking Dead, Season Two: "All That Remains"

That I enjoy Telltale’s The Walking Dead video game—nay, that I consider it one of the greatest games ever made—still surprises me on occasion. By the time I had gotten into the game in the latter half of 2012, I was for all intents and purposes burnt out on everything zombie-related. The Walking Dead TV series had reached its acme by the end of its first season and, according to most people whose opinions I trust, has been plunging in quality ever since. The comic series had turned into an unforgiving, nihilistic drag, with few if any sympathetic characters remaining. And David Wong’s This Book Is Full of Spiders subverted the whole subgenre, revealing a lot of zombie fiction to be a kind of desperate, wish-fulfillment power fantasy that, upon consideration, couldn’t be less appealing to me.

But the game is a far different, if still just as bloody, affair. Set in the same universe as the comic series but with an entirely new—and more likeable—cast of characters, Telltale’s episodic Walking Dead game placed emphasis on problem solving over zombie slaughter and turned each interactive conversation into a test of mediation, trust, survival, and sometimes a combination of all three. It put you in the shoes of a flawed but well-meaning protagonist, whose relationships with his fellow survivors could be drastically affected by what he did—or even did not—say. It was all the stuff I loved about the Mass Effect series but without its increasingly tedious combat sequences.

Analysis - On Cycles

Adam Dietrich

In my living room stand three largish bookcases, all of which are positioned around yours truly in the picture above. Each contains one or more forms of media: one holds books, another one comic collections, and a third a mixture of movies, video games and CDs. While I’m attempting to introduce new hobbies into my routine, my first and foremost pastime will remain the collection and cataloguing of media. I really do love it, whether it involves organizing, maintaining or, of course, enjoying my collected works.

Review - Brothers: A Tale of Two Sons

Summer is winding down once more, thank God, and there’s no better way to celebrate this hot, dismal season’s slow passing than with the Xbox’s Summer of Arcade promotion. Starbreeze Studios’ Brothers: A Tale of Two Sons is the first of four games to see release this month. Set in a vaguely Norse, medieval land (assuming the former based on Starbreeze’s Swedish origins), Brothers follows a pair of male siblings as they venture across country to find a cure for their widowed father’s ailment. Though simple in concept, it’s now one of my favourite puzzle-oriented adventure games as well as one of the few in any gaming genre to affect me emotionally.

Obituary - Ryan Davis, 1979-2013

I feel like I’ve lost a friend I’ve never met.

Ryan Davis, co-founder, columnist and chief raconteur of video game news website Giant Bomb died last Wednesday at the age of 34. The news of his passing wasn’t released until this morning on Giant Bomb, and as of yet no cause of death has been mentioned. I respect the late Mr. Davis too much to speculate on the circumstances of his untimely death, so I’ll avoid the subject. Instead I just want to express my sincere condolences to his wife, whose name I unfortunately do not know and who tragically was only married to Ryan for a few days before his sudden passing last week.

Review - The Annotated AvP: The Story, part 15

Holy crap, guys. It’s been nearly a year and a half but we have reached the end of my terrible Aliens vs. Predator fanfiction novel. We’ve had a lot of laughs, and we’ve felt a lot of pity, but it’s time to replace this digital tome in the virtual stack from whence it came. Let’s see off these alternately idiotic and morally depraved characters, shall we?

Review - BioShock Infinite

“Booker, are you afraid of God?” “No. I’m afraid of you.”

Irrational Games’ BioShock was the first game I ever bought for the current generation of consoles—purchased, in fact, a good three months before I even had an Xbox. Luckily, my floor in residence had no less than three 360s available for my use. The game still sits on my shelf, and let it be known that I’ve played through the entire thing no less than four times in the last five years. Just to make it clear how much I enjoyed BioShock, the only game I’ve replayed more than it is the GameCube remake of Resident Evil, which has been one of my all-time favourites going on a decade.

So understand me when I say the newest installment in Irrational’s franchise, BioShock Infinite, showed me just how broken, or at least seriously flawed, the first BioShock was in both design and storytelling. Infinite is not only a far better game, but an excellent one in and of itself, making up for any quibbles I might have with its gameplay with well-drawn characters and the sheer audacity of its story.

Review - The Annotated AvP: The Story, part 12.5

Sorry for leaving all y’all on a cliffhanger last week. Chapter 14 was just too long to snark all in one go. So without yanking the rug out beneath you any more, here’s the conclusion of “The Third Species War” from my Aliens versus Predator 2 fanfic.

(from AvP: The Story, chapter XIV – The Third Species War)

The first of the Species Wars had taken place four million years before, on the same rocky ground of Lv-1201, when Aliens and Predators battled over ownership of the planet. The second Species war was fought between the Aliens and humans in 2179, on 1201’s sister planet of Lv-426, where the humans emerged the victor, but with many lives lost. But now, the ultimate war was taking place between all three species.

I only have two questions: is it on pay-per-view, and will Paul Bearer make an appearance?

Analysis - What a Wonderful Exploding World

Following a recent—and still ongoing—gaming binge I’ve realized that open world action games, best exemplified by the Grand Theft Auto series, constitute my favourite genre in the video gaming medium. Following the fairly on-rails single player experiences of the Call of Duty and Gears of War games I’ve come to really appreciate interactivity or at the very least well-executed mechanics: games like Half-Life 2, the Halo series and BioShock give you a variety of tools but don’t hold your hand, preferring to let the player work their way through a scenario as they see fit.

In the case of open world games, where missions are accessed in a continuous environment and non-player characters abound, the beauty is how you can make other entities react, like dropping a pebble into a pond just to see the subsequent ripples. Or, in the context of GTAIV, dropping a live grenade in the middle of a traffic jam smack dab in the centre of Star Junction.

Review - The Annotated AvP: The Story, part 10

Man, it seems like ages since I wrote one of these. In spite of the almost frightening lack of quality of this lengthy work of fan fiction I wrote in grade school, I’ve come to miss it a little, like a tweaker yearning for some subpar crystal meth. So let’s jump off the wagon once again and wade into the murky terrain of the Annotated Aliens versus Predator: The Story.

Review - The Annotated AvP: The Story, part 9

EDIT: It took me a while and a lot of copy-pasting, but I got this month's edition of The Annotated AvP looking presentable. Let us never speak of this again.

This month's dissection of that shitty AvP fanfic I wrote as a pretten is going to be extra special. Assisting me in this venture is Riley Byrne, who when he isn't PhotoShopping inappropriate captions onto Renaissance paintings is talking some sense into music at Justifiable Culturecide.

Analysis - "You are still a good person."

For maybe the first time in my life, a video game has truly affected me.

Sure, video games have had an effect on me before. Portal 2, which I wrote about last week, briefly left me considering non-Euclidian paths through any room I entered. But I don’t think a game has ever truly shaken me like House of Leaves or Incendies or Essex County have. While many games have engaging stories and characters—BioShock and the Mass Effect games chief among them—the video game medium makes it difficult for those elements to transcend the far more immediate mechanical aspects of the game: sure, your favourite teammate might heroically sacrifice himself, but only after you’ve somewhat tediously cut your way through dozens of nameless, identical enemies. The impact is lessened a little, is what I’m saying.

But one game, which I first heard about less than a month ago and played over the course of two days last week, has managed to break the mould. Spec Ops: The Line is a gruelling, unsentimental military shooter that not only forces you to experience the horrors of war, but makes you culpable for them as well. It’s a damning deconstruction of the modern war game genre that’s become incredibly popular in the last half decade and possibly the only video game I would consider a genuine work of art. And I can’t get it out of my head.

Analysis - "Here are the test results: You are a horrible person."

I know I'm, oh, a year and a half behind everyone else, but I finally got around to playing Portal 2. I loved the first, having beaten it five or six times, and with the same creative team overseeing the sequel I had little doubt it would be of the same quality, if not better. But during my initial exhilarating (and occasionally frustrating) playthrough, it became my single favourite game of all time. I could talk about the new mechanics, or Mike Morasky's awesome glitchy score (available as a free download), or how well Valve's Source engine has held up nearly a decade after its release, but  nearly everything this game has to offer pales in comparison to its quite frankly surprising level of character development.

The depth and nuance of Portal 2's characters isn't just the best in the video gaming medium, but some of the best I've ever encountered. The writers of the single player campaign, Erik Wolpaw and Jay Pinkerton, have crafted a small ensemble of idiosyncratic characters, each of whom has well-defined and believable motivations. This week's analysis will look at the game's four major characters.

Analysis - Why Grand Theft Auto IV is the Best Shooter Ever Made

I’m destined to be eternally behind the curve, which is why I didn’t first listen to Arcade Fire’s Funeral until five years after its release and why I’m only now getting into Rockstar North’s Grand Theft Auto IV. I had played about an hour of the game back in my second year of university but with the sheer number of games I was playing that year it kind of got lost in the shuffle.

Come January of this year and I was finally getting around to playing Batman: Arkham City and realizing how much I love sandbox video games, so I picked up the Game of the Year edition of GTAIV from a grocery store electronics section for pretty cheap. While it took a few months for me to truly warm up to it, I can say without hesitation it’s up there with Arkham City and The Legend of Zelda: Majora’s Mask as one of the best games I’ve ever played, and for the most unexpected reason: not the open world (though I love that) or the characters and dialogue (love them even more), but because of its shooting mechanics. GTAIV beats out Mass Effect 3 and even Rainbow Six: Vegas 2 in that department, managing this not in spite of its flaws but because of them.

Review - The Annotated AvP: The Story, part 7

Man, that was a long month. I was actually starting to miss this. Yes, it’s time for the seventh installment of the Annotated Aliens versus Predator: The Story. When we last left off, the xenomorphs had proven their capacity for advanced language, had broken into Weyland-Yutani’s Forward Observation Pods and driven Dr. Eisenberg into a mild, temporary state of insanity—all thanks to the Marines overriding a pretty poorly designed security system. And that’s going to give you a good idea of how awkward every character interaction in this chapter is going to be.

Review - The Annotated AvP: The Story, part 6

It’s the last Monday of the month, which means two things: 1.) make sure you have enough money for rent, and 2.) aww fuck it’s another edition of the Annotated Aliens versus Predator: The Story. Sit back and crack open a bottle of Thunderbird while we take a look at my grade school stab at the art of adaptation. This month’s chapter takes place minutes after the last, when the worst security system ever designed shut down the defences around Weyland-Yutani’s main lab complex on LV-1201.

Review - The Annotated AvP: The Story, part 5

Hoping for some quality writing this week? Well, you’re shit out of luck. It’s the last Monday of the month, which means it’s time to critique yet another chapter of the Aliens versus Predator fan fiction novel I wrote in grades 7 and 8. This week we’ll continue to follow Corporal Andrew Harrison and his USCM comrades as they venture through Alien-occupied territory toward safe haven. Prepare yourself for overly detailed descriptions of facility layouts.

Review - The Annotated AvP: The Story, part 4

It’s the end of the month, folks. Pour a stiff one and steel yourselves as we venture down memory lane and into the breach once more and plumb the depths of my preteen self’s attempt at fanfiction. This month, we tackle the sixth chapter of AvP: The Story, wherein we’re introduced to this novella’s United States Colonial Marine protagonist, Corporal Andrew Harrison. Be prepared for a 12-year-old’s embarrassing recreation of Marine lingo.

Review - The Annotated AvP: The Story, part 3

It’s the end of the month, which means another sample of and commentary on that terrible Aliens vs. Predator fanfiction novel I wrote in late grade school. When we last left our Predator protagonist, the accurately named Swift-Death, he had just disposed of several questionably intelligent human soldiers and was about to pursue those who had incapacitated and captured his fellow hunters. Let’s see where this takes him, shall we?