Maybe I’m getting into too thorny a subject, but summer is heating up and I’ve long wanted to reflect on how games, like any art form, are a reflection of the society in which they are born into, more or less deformed. In them we pour our longings to escape, feelings such as love, loneliness, hate, desire… and through their stories, and above all with their game mechanics, we can experience situations that would be impossible (or not advisable) to reproduce in the real world. And here I have formulated a reflection on a most unlikely pairing: drugs and video games.
No, this text is not a list of games in which a moustachioed plumber eats a mysterious mushroom that gives him superpowers, but a safe journey through several examples of games that, in one way or another, introduced drugs as a theme in their story, as an interactive object or as the very core of their gameplay. All of them provide a different vision of this practice which, in the real world, is experienced in a very different way to games. Is it right to mythologise its consumption? Is it better to avoid it? Or, perhaps, is it better to integrate it as a function of a larger experience and offer the player enough tools to voluntarily renounce this function? Big questions, not so simple answers. I am a video game player, but I am also a parent, and in this article I will reflect on various ways of dealing with drugs in video games and, in the process, recommend some great games that might be worth your attention.
Super Mario and the Mushroom: Debunking the oldest urban legend in video games
It is difficult to start talking about video games without passing, albeit on tiptoes, their most recognisable character, who was also, for a time, linked to drugs to prevent children from getting hooked on screens. We have to go back some 30 years in time to remember those campaigns by parents’ associations calling for video games and their chubby, red-capped hero to be kept away from your children. Consumption of hallucinogenic mushrooms? Nothing could be further from the truth. Nor was it a reference to the mushrooms and cakes that Alice, the protagonist of Alice in Wonderland, took to change her size.
This is an ad:
The mushroom that looks like Amanita muscaria is merely a simple device that Miyamoto-san then associated with fantasy and fairytale worlds, not a reference to a real-world hallucinogenic species. Mario eats mushrooms, as they could have been apples, stones, or any other object. That’s all.
Sorry mum, but your theory of a drug-addicted Super Mario in 1990 doesn’t hold water.
This is an ad:
The frivolity of modern Fallout and The Elder Scrolls: All benefits, no consequences.
I have to explain the headline because Fallout, as we all know, is much more than what Bethesda has been offering us since Fallout 3. In fact, although in its universe the same substances are still taken in all the games (Buffout, Jet, Mentats, Psycho, X-Cell, etc.), in the Black Isle games their use was much more marked by risk-reward. For example, addiction to Jet (a drug that dramatically improves your damage in combat) is almost incurable in Fallout 2, but barely a mild annoyance in Fallout 3 and Fallout 4, where it can be easily “cured”. It is this impunity that blurs the concept of drugs in a game from being a last resort to just another consumable.
The nuance is that taking drugs in the Fallout universe is often more beneficial than harmful to the character, so the message can be more muddled there. Of course, we don’t want to tell anyone how to live through the nuclear post-apocalypse either, do we?
When you have to live with the aftermath: We Happy Few and the grey zone
There are many dystopian games, but few that explore the grey zone of hallucinogen use (voluntarily or fittingly by compulsion) like Compulsion Games’ bold title, We Happy Few. Drugs cease to be a secondary concept to occupy the very centre of the game’s narrative, in which a drug called Joy (a recurring name for drugs in games, as we will see later) keeps you in a state of artificial “joy” to forget the loss of your children at the hands of the Nazis in World War II.
The setting of We Happy Few, Wellington Wells, shows us the two sides of the coin between those who choose to delude themselves by taking Joy (even though they have no choice, really) living in the colourful Hamlyn Village district, versus the outcasts who chose not to forget or face their loss without Joy in the Garden District. While clearly two distinct collectives, the game explores the shades of grey between the two; those who were first marginalised and now try to get Joy at all costs, and those who find themselves trapped by the authoritarian Hamlyn Village government, losing their own identity in the process as they submit to the lethal authority of the drug.
Yes, We Happy Few is a strange title and it’s not perfect, but it introduces a few reflections on how consumption dominates the addict’s existence, and exposes it in a way that would only be possible through video games.
When the game system humanises the real problem: Dealing with alcoholism in Disco Elysium
Role-playing games are a perfect setting to explore the concept of substances that alter the organism in any way. If before we talked about the “joyful” impunity of Fallout, now we do it starting from the basis of a character whose addiction both adds and subtracts possibilities, creating a singular narrative. “Harry” Du Bois maintains from the outset an interior monologue that, more than a reference to detective film noir, is a reflection of his own Delirium Tremens provoked by a life of alcohol and drugs.
Harry’s Terrible Tie, a reflection of this addiction to alcohol, is the one that introduces him to thoughts and paranoias that deform his physical appearance, which is, naturally, a way of showing us the degradation of his mind. The story of the protagonist in Disco Elysium is that of a man broken by his excesses who seeks one last moment of redemption, and for that alone it is worth playing.
That, and it’s one of the best cRPGs in recent history.
These have been just a few examples of how the topic of drugs and addiction is dealt with in video games. As you can imagine, we have left out many other examples that deserve attention, which we will publish in a second part. If you think there is one that should be included and that we might have missed, don’t hesitate to leave us the title in the comments.
