Debris: Exploring Video Game Messages and Values Through Gameplay

"Debris" is a single-player and co-op adventure game developed by Moonray Studios that uses experiential learning to portray psychosis, placing players inside the perceptual distortions of a character who gradually loses contact with reality. The paper, presented as an extended abstract at DiGRA 2018, argues that the game's mechanics, including hallucinations, disorganized speech, and delusions that respond to player choices, can foster understanding of mental illness and reduce stereotypes and fear. It also frames psychosis as a collective experience, showing how family, friends, and colleagues are affected alongside the individual, and notes that psychotic disorders affect roughly 1 to 2 percent of the population, typically emerging in late teens or early twenties.

The game was shaped through a participatory design process in which five youths aged 17 to 19 with lived experience of mental illness worked with developers and clinicians over eight months. Their discussions were audio recorded, transcribed, and analyzed to produce a conceptual model linking gamer values such as autonomy and connectedness with mental health values such as empathy, dignity, and compassion, along with specific learning objectives and game mechanisms.

The empirical component examines player responses through ten gameplay videos with commentary, selected from more than forty posted on YouTube and Twitch after the game's fall 2017 release on Steam and Humble. These videos were analyzed against five mechanisms (experiential learning, game environment, story, narrative, and a symbiotic mechanism requiring players to depend on one another) and two learning objectives: reducing stereotypes and fear, and encouraging willingness to help someone in crisis. The sample is small and drawn from publicly posted content, so the findings are exploratory rather than generalizable.

The authors conclude that Debris is among the few games, alongside Hellblade: Senua's Sacrifice, that depict psychosis from the inside, and that most games instead reinforce "madness" stereotypes and stigma. They position the work as a basis for studying how serious games on mental illness affect players.