Project
Bipolar Journey

Project Creator
Theo Jean Cuthand, Independent Filmmaker

Project URLs
Description: https://www.tjcuthand.com/2020/09/10/new-video-game/
Playthrough: https://vimeo.com/456771532

Project Reviewer
KJ Cerankowski, Oberlin College

Project Overview

Theo Jean Cuthand

Bipolar Journey is a two-dimensional (2D) video game featuring the player as a rolling head drawn to look like the artist behind the project when he had his first manic episode. The video game goes through depression (falling into a pit and needing to catch enough antidepressants to float back out of the hole), mania (choosing between hallucinations or real objects), inevitably staying in a psych ward and talking to other patients, and then being discharged to try and live in the community again without getting depression or mania again (by catching pills that will keep them even enough to get a hot dog). Created to educate people about experiencing mental health crises and trying to manage symptoms, the cyclical nature of bipolar disorder is echoed in the game where if you lose the hotdog you are either sent back to the mania level or to the depression level depending on whether you are up or down when you lose.

This game was developed by TJ Cuthand with Dames Making Games (DMG) in Toronto during a workshop for Indigenous women artists. There was a version created in 2015 which was then updated in 2020 to create the psych ward level and the park level, finishing the game. The project was also developed as part of a residency with the MacKenzie Art Gallery in Regina Saskatchewan. Both DMG and the MacKenzie provided technical support. The graphics, story, and concepts were all created by TJ Cuthand. TJ Cuthand also did coding with C#. It was created with Unity.

The intended audience are people living with mental health disabilities, people who work with disabled people, primary care providers, mental health care providers, artists and punks, and anyone interested in neurodivergent thinking. The game is easy to play but hard to win, and intuitive to many game players. The movement is just using arrow key inputs, and all interactions come from bumping into pills and patients and hotdogs. 

The artist made specific choices around design to talk about his experience. For instance, the psych ward walls are in Baker-Miller pink (#FF91AF) which is a colour used in psych wards and prisons because it is thought to calm people down. The developer also made the visuals to look like a zine, even typing and photocopying text to give it a zine/riotgrrl feel. 

While there is English text in the game, the game mostly guides the player through the experience and the only real part where you might lose is the park level where you are trying to stay stable and get the hotdog. This level reflects the most challenging part of being bipolar, keeping stable and sane and out of the hospital. The possibility of losing and being trapped in a mood cycle loop reflects real life experience of life with bipolar disorder.  

Project Review

KJ Cerankowski

“What’s going on in your head?” For anyone who has ever had to navigate mental health care through the battery of social stigma and the “curative violence” of the medical industrial complex in this “pharmacopornographic” era, the questions of what’s “wrong” with your head and what the quickest “fix” might likely ring all too familiar. And these are exactly the questions award-winning video artist TJ Cuthand shines a critical spotlight on in his two-dimensional single-player video game, Bipolar Journey. 

Gameplay is simple: your task is to navigate a disembodied head, using up, down, left, and right movement keys, through multiple levels of treatment. Beginning in a pit of depression, additional levels move the player through the inside of an apartment, through a psych ward, and finally through a park where “winning” the game means making it to the hotdog stand (well, technically it’s a floating hotdog) and chowing down on that favorite salty street food. 

The game, though simple, is evocative in the way it challenges binary ways of thinking around wellness and illness, treatment and cure, as well as the extremes of bipolar characterization — mania vs. depression. Beginning with the disembodied head, we enter a critique of western medicine’s overwhelming failure to embrace holistic healthcare. When dealing with mental health and diagnoses of depression, bipolar disorder, or “personality disorders,” the focus tends to remain largely on the head or the brain. Rather than treating a whole-bodied self, the patient is simply prescribed pills that presumably offer a quick adjustment to brain chemistry in order to keep one as close to “normal” and “functional” amidst the demands of the capitalist world we live in. Similar to Eli Clare’s thinking on the ambivalence of cure, the game demonstrates the fraught utility of pharmaceutical treatments — they are needed to lift the head out of the pit of depression in order to move forward in the game, but they also present an obstacle in the final level. Will it be the pink pill or the purple pill? The answer seems to be both or neither. As the head journeys through a park where the different pills rain down, the impact of the pills can inhibit one’s ability to move forward through the park: the purple pills weigh the head down to the ground where it must wait for a pink pill to fall down and lift it up again. It seems to make it to the end and to gain the reward of the hotdog, the player must strike a balance between catching enough pink pills to stay afloat and enough purple pills to not float away entirely. The other nearly impossible option is to attempt to steadily navigate around the pills entirely. Both taking the pills and not taking the pills has consequences; there is no simple either/or solution.

Even the two-dimensional rendering of the gameworld can be read as a critique of the flattening of the world under the influence of pharmaceuticals and under the spell of deep depression; both the treatment and the symptom seem to similarly strip a dimension from the atmosphere of living. Perhaps the takeaway of this thoughtful and intentionally designed game is that there is no single, clear solution. Instead, we must hold the seeming contradiction that pharmaceutical treatment is not an answer to mental healthcare, but suffering still occurs without it. How do we strike a balance? Cuthand’s game reminds us that there’s always something to savor if only we can figure out how to stay free and afloat in a world that otherwise wants to dull and entrap those deemed “sick” or “abnormal.” We must do what we can to mitigate the violence of institutions and find our way to the hotdog — life’s small joys and pleasures that feed our soul among its many challenges and pains. 

References

Clare, Eli. Brilliant Imperfection: Grappling with Cure. Durham: Duke University Press, 2017.

Cuthand, TJ. Bipolar Journey. https://mackenzie.art/tj-cuthand-bipolar-journey/

Kim, Eunjung. Curative Violence: Rehabilitating Disability, Gender, and Sexuality in Modern Korea. Durham: Duke University Press, 2017.

Preciado, Paul B. Testo Junkie: Sex, Drugs, and Biopolitics in the Pharmacopornographic Era. Translated by Bruce Benderson. New York: The Feminist Press, 2013.