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The Game we will be discussing today is a 2021 game titled In Sound Mind, developed by the We Create Stuff studio. During the podcast we will be discussing elements of Mental Illness in video games and its intersectionality within In Sound Mind.
A podcast by students enrolled in Film Studies/Gender Studies 404. Students will discuss topics of gender and identity in In Sound Mind, What Remains of Edith Finch, and LEGO Star Wars: The Skywalker Saga.
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all right now let's go hey how's it going this is the in sound mind podcast my name is Kanyon and thanks for joining us today so on this podcast we will be talking about the video game in sound mind um which i've been having a ton of fun with um and just to introduce the rest of the cast here why don't we start off with uh one thing we really like about the game um so first off my name is canyon i'm a fifth year student at lawrence here and um doing uh film studies and music education um and so far my favorite thing in the game has been just a lot of the quirks our main character has he likes to say nom when he eats the food which i find really funny as well as being able to uh pet a cat over and over and over again um it's been just like a lot of fun it's quirky um i'm delaney i am a psychology major junior um and i really like being able to switch between each of the little weapon type things and i like that sometimes the glass can break things sometimes it can't
yeah my name is uh Dylan i am a senior neuroscience major and i really like the pacing of the game especially for a horror game where you're used to the game being exceedingly slow this game has a really nice pace to it and i feel like it's not too fast and it's not too slow and i just i've been having a really good time playing it my name is juan i'm a senior film studies and computer science major and i think for me is the aesthetics it's kind of like that really colorful but like hp lovecraftian kind of like creepy vibe and i really dig that stuff especially with like the design of kind of like the uh the the ghost or the people like kind of haunting you yeah so far we've had some really cool i think the monsters in it are really interesting too it's like you really can't distinguish what they are they're just like these colorful entities and they can be even scary too like the one we ran into today it's just like this giant pit that was like sucking you in you had to run around it was it was pretty scary um yeah so uh just to give everyone the audience uh kind of like on the same page as we are just to give you a little bit of a story and and where we've been at so we've been playing this for uh a couple weeks now and we haven't quite finished it yet but we've gotten i think about like halfway through the game um but so we first started off um we are desmond wales who is what we found out like a doctor or psychiatrist and in the beginning we don't know exactly the environment we're in it seems to be like an abandoned building or mansion or something but we start to find tapes and memories of old patients that the doctor has and we are just kind of going through the different memories and the tapes of all these different patients as well as what's wrong and how he has been intertwined with the the lives of these people
it's been really
interesting um yeah anyone else have any kind of like initial thoughts or like things they like about the story i guess or
i've never really played a horror game before and so i kind of assumed it would be like you walk around trying to figure stuff out and i it's kind of how it's been but there's also the little interactions you have and i think that makes it a whole lot better than just kind of you know an escape room type game yeah it's not so much like uh jump scare scary it's more like aesthetic like you're slowly going through it although in the the grocery store there were a couple jump scares yeah the first person the first patient we run into uh virginia she's pretty scary she'll chase you if you even like look at her yeah and i think that's the point well actually in the whole game we start talking about mental illness especially the fact that the main character is a uh a psychologist so i think that's like where we start to kind of see the themes of the game because like a lot of like horror games are usually just like monsters or like kind of like the you're stuck in this mansion with like god knows what horse and but this one is more like psychological like you're feeling guilt over patience and you're like going through your own guilt to kind of explore their mental illness which was kind of like i think the whole point of the game was exploring that and yeah so i'd say for our first podcast we wanted to focus on the topic of gender representation and mental illness and so we looked at a couple scholarly sources and i have a couple quotes i'm going to talk about or i'm going to quote them and i'm going to ask you your thoughts on them and see how they relate to the game so yeah in this article from 2016 by shapiro called graphic depictions portrayals of mental illness and video games there was a quote in there that said tyler gabbard and schneider proposed six predominant stereotypes of mental illness in cinema the rebellious free spirit the homicidal maniac the female patient as a seductress the enlightened member of society the narcissistic parasite and the zoo specimen now considering these six different tropes i was wondering have you seen any of these in sound mind so i think with uh incentive mind although of course the article talked more about cinema but i think it still applies in video games because i feel like they draw a lot from the kind of tropes and stereotypes of horror like mental illness and horror and i think especially with the newer character i don't know like um if y'all thought about this but he had like kind of the uh impulse of trying to kill us by literally sucking us into like this hole and uh literally telling us to join him in uh like join him in darkness and all these like i think edgy kind of quotes that you'd hear from like the typical homicidal maniac i guess yeah and um that's like the first impression i took from that character i think it was alex what was it the name alex uh alan i thought he's the guy there yeah and then i think even with the main character even though he's not technically like you know a villain or anything i still think he in in itself he seems to also suffer from mental illness illness which is a reason why we kind of go through this like almost surreal world and i think he goes more into the enlightened member of society you know this doctor that wants to save all these patients from mental illness but it seems like he can't even cure himself from his own like guilt and his own like shortcomings and i think that's where we're like kind of going into in the uh in the game yeah throughout the game we see a lot of um jokes that like the watcher is like making that he's like a pill-popping boomer and stuff like that like although we don't quite know what desmond suffers from quite yet but we do see kind of like this like addiction or pill popping you know yeah irresponsibility that he must have had with his patients and himself yeah i would agree with that because it's like when you think of a psychiatrist you think of someone who doesn't suffer from mental illness but this game breaks a lot of those stereotypes and showing that almost anybody can suffer from mental illness yeah i never really thought about that actually yeah so one more thing that we saw from a more casual article from stigma gender differences in mental health by the serv project is a quote that's really stood out to us is research indicates that more women seek out mental health services than men so here's the interesting thing and this is like when we first started playing the game because at first when we played and we're trying to look for topics to talk about um it talked about mental illness but it was so broad because it was just this one psychiatrist like uh going through what we thought was a bad trip um afterwards it just kind of devolved into him actually talking about patients in the past and the first patient we meet is a woman who suffers from her own image and i think that's when we start stepping into the realm of well we've seen two different people get represented like their mental illness the main character and then uh virginia and then even afterwards another milk uh character being prepared in the columnist and it's impressive how like different both mental illnesses are portrayed and actually that is i think gonna be the next topic for our next podcast is specifically kind of diving in into how like the game might represent differently the mental illness of a person that identifies as a male and a person that identifies as a female and i think that's what or i think that's like where we kind of start diving more but i do definitely think mental illness is like a major kind of topic and definitely something in the game that um they try to explore a lot even in gameplay yeah no i would agree because even like playing the game i would say virginia is especially represented as extremely dangerous as compared to some of our other characters we've seen and i feel like that is good in our next topic to touch on that because women in horror games can be extremely misrepresented and i just i think it's a good topic for next discussion yeah i think that's all the time we have yeah yeah because we're pretty quick 10 minutes sounds good so uh thank you very much for watching the podcast um we recommend playing the game it's honestly i've enjoyed it so far and hopefully we get to finish it in like the whole playthrough and if we don't well i guess i'll do it in my individual times yeah all right see ya thank you bye