Exploring Minds Through Interactive Entertainment

I emerged from the underground at Oxford Circus and rested against a wall beside a rubbish bin. I believed I was blending in, a youngish man in faded blue jeans, a Ralph-Lauren jumper I had picked up on Vinted, and a cap adorned with the old Sega Master System logo. My phone burned in my right pocket, but I resisted the temptation to get lost in its light. Instead, I stood and watched.

I watched as the throng of pedestrians contorted and shaped their way through each other, all on their own schedules and deadlines, with their own duties and responsibilities. I fought hard against the urge to turn them into a Persona 5-like mass of silhouettes. These weren’t a background. They were real people with lives as rich as my own.

It was 5:32 PM on Thursday, February 1^st, the end of most people’s day. The last time London would feel an exhilarating rush hour course through its veins. In a half hour, I was due at The Toucan, a pub fabled to have the superlative ‘best Guinness in Soho’. Drunken shenanigans are usually the most sacrosanct method of meeting old friends, so I afforded myself a moment to slow down. A reconnection of minds once so close and now so strange always requires me to recalibrate.

As I watched the London commuters pass me by and the impressive urban infrastructure aided them on their journey, the city felt established. The thick, towering buildings hid any kind of horizon to wonder what lay beyond. The crowds filled with those who have claimed this city as their home, obscuring the views down the old and well-trodden streets.

Living in a city was getting to me.

Yes, you can explore a city, but can you find something new? And what of the country? I have hiked its hills and stumbled upon the odd-looking tree and charming stream, but I had been directed along my routes by those who had already ventured and catalogued the land. Instead, all that had been new to me in the city were its people. The new connections I had made through proximity and familiarity.

It can sometimes feel unfair that exploration has been relegated to history. To create a map of worlds once considered a myth, soon to be understood by mortals. To traverse the wild and unforgiving country that will succumb to my own human determination. To inspire others to go into the dark and illuminate it themselves is alluring on a cosmic level.

It is a shame then that such feats are now obsolete. I can gain an overview of any place to a degree of accuracy greater than any first-hand experience could afford. By simply loading up Google Earth and lazily scrolling across shockingly well realised virtual terrain, I acquire information about our world once thought only accessible to God.

No, for the would-be explorer, there is only one place left to go to satisfy that itch. Only one plane has escaped the understanding of anyone brave enough to chart its mysterious expanses. It is ever-present and essential, but we have no greater knowledge of it than we did when humanity first began mapping its surroundings.

To discover the hidden, we must turn inwards and explore our minds.

To discover the hidden, we must turn inwards and explore our minds.

Our inner cities

Pentiment, Obsidian’s 2022 narrative adventure game, immerses players in the role of Andreas Maler, a journeyman artist working in the scriptorium of Kiersau Abbey. Set in the small Bavarian town of Tassing in 1518, Andreas aims to complete his masterpiece, a meticulously crafted manuscript. As the story unfolds, he becomes entangled in the seemingly mundane struggles of Tassing’s inhabitants, a murder at the abbey, and the rapidly changing social dynamics of the Holy Roman Empire in the early 16th century.

Act I begins with Andreas in a liminal space, a memory palace he has created called Providence, being questioned by a colourful cast of historical characters, both real and fictional. The memory palace is a mental method that transforms abstract thoughts into vivid, spatial representations. By associating memories, feelings, and ideas with specific locations within an imagined architectural structure, a map of knowledge and experience is created. Andreas concocts a labyrinthine city that mirrors both his peace and turmoil. The events Andreas experiences alter not just the town of Tassing, but Providence as well.

The game’s director, Josh Sawyer, credits the inspiration for Providence to The Memory Palace of Matteo Ricci (1984), a biography of the Jesuit Priest Matteo Ricci as he set out from Italy to bring Christian faith and Western thought to Ming dynasty China in 1577. As a missionary and scholar of the late Renaissance, Ricci pioneered the mind's ability to visualize and organize information spatially. His memory palaces were not mere mnemonic tools but gateways to deeper understanding and reflection. By mapping knowledge onto the familiar contours of imagined spaces, Ricci and his contemporaries could access and recall vast amounts of information with unmatched clarity and precision.

It would be wrong to characterise Pentiment as a game that treats our subjective consciousness as a form of the divine, a space fundamentally separate to our own reality. In the game's second act, we find Andreas’ life has become more complicated. We learn Andreas is tormented by the death of his young son, his grief manifesting itself in peculiar and personal ways. The colourful and varied inhabitants of Providence are replaced by a single entity named Melancholia, the once straight and ordered pathways of his internal world are now a winding maze, difficult to navigate through and engulfed in flame. His material reality has reached across the threshold and directly affected the world of his memory palace. In this sense, Pentiment can be said to put forward an understanding of the mind that is rooted in the philosophy of physicalism. Physicalism is the belief that everything about the mind can be explained by physical processes and properties, without needing non-physical or supernatural explanations.

In this sense, Pentiment can be said to put forward an understanding of the mind that is rooted in the philosophy of physicalism.

Wilfred Sellers, in his seminal 1956 article, “Empiricism and the Philosophy of Mind”[1], posited that our conception of mentality may not be derived from a direct understanding of the inner workings of our own minds, but rather, is informed by a primitive theoretical framework that we inherit from our culture. Pentiment considers the ways in which our reality shapes our mentality, and how our memories and experiences construct the cities we inhabit within our consciousness. Indeed, much of the history of the philosophy of mind is concerned with this ‘mind-body’ problem. How do the immaterial mental world and the material physical world manage to interact with each other in what appears to be such an intrinsic and inseparable way? As of now, there is no satisfactory answer.

When a murder takes place at the abbey and you are tasked with helping your mentor Pierro prove his innocence, a choice presents itself to visit the town’s surgeon, Doctor Stolz. You watch him interact with and prod at the corpse hoping that his autopsy will yield the identity of the culprit. But this is 1518; medical science is not close to being able to provide any physiological evidence that can meaningfully aid you in solving the case. Similarly, in 2024, those who hold that our inner consciousness is entirely explained as the result of the material and physical forces in our environment and our brain are just as primitive, scientifically speaking, as Doctor Stolz. We are still involved in the mystery of finding the source, the ‘culprit’, of consciousness.

Instead, it has only been through physical representation - in recorded pages, manuscripts, paintings, music, film, video games - that we have successfully managed to translate an approximation of our inner lives to others.

In Act III we assume the role of Magdalene Druckeryn, the daughter of Claus, a typographer in control of an early printing press. As this technology developed, the humanist sensibilities that went on to become the foundation of the Renaissance became more widespread. The mental substance of thoughts and ideas more easily and cheaply replicated, began to seep out and disseminate, no longer hidden away in scriptoriums, but available to wider swathes of society. It is within this interaction of the mental and the material that Pentiment finds its tension, taking the position that our mental worlds, and culture more generally, are directly informed by the physical world.

It was not the will of one man or the brilliance of a single, perfect manuscript that opened the minds of so many in medieval Europe. It was the collectively felt material conditions of each person’s world that spurred revolution, upheaval, and change. This worked in tandem with the newfound ability to transmit the ideas of others to sections of society that had not previously had access to such collective thought and organisation. These are the people you get to spend time with in Pentiment, to understand that their concerns and desires, despite living in a world far removed from our own, remain the same as they are today and have remained the same for most of human history.

Pentiment demonstrates this interaction between the physical and mental world; how the two inform and shape each other, and how the will of humanity both relies upon and conflicts with the reality it faces. Despite the separation between our own consciousness and those who wish to better understand it, there exists a way to transmute our personal experiences onto the pages of the world.

Much like the manuscript that Andreas toils to make, Pentiment is a shining window into the ideals and beliefs of those who created it, a way to walk the streets of their inner cities, so that we too may marvel at its unique architecture.

Pentiment demonstrates this interaction between the physical and mental world; how the two inform and shape each other, and how the will of humanity both relies upon and conflicts with the reality it faces.

Our connections

Psychonauts 2 was released on the 25th of August 2021 to critical acclaim. As a fan of the first game, I jumped in on day one and within two days I had managed to 100% the game.

I expected to play a quirky, inventive platformer with hidden secrets and unique characters, and…sure, I got that. What I wasn’t expecting was one of the most mature and accomplished narratives told in a game, one that beautifully touches on a litany of profound topics from mental health and aging to power and empathy. In my view, it is one of the best pieces of interactive entertainment ever released, that provokes thought and introspection in any player lucky enough to traverse it.

For a game that was so well received I continue to lament that the game seems to have not landed with the cultural impact it should have.

Much has been made of the original game's lack of commercial success and I won’t rehash that conversation for fear of causing Tim Schafer to roll his eyes, but I am confused why the second game has not stuck around in the public consciousness as much as its comparatively less successful predecessor.

Perhaps the game is just too weird. The art style is abstract, while the dimensions of characters and objects are flung about at strange and disorientating angles. Our protagonist Raz is reunited with his bizarre family, traveling circus performers from the fake Balkan-inspired country of Grulovia. Its genre (narrative platformer) has had very few notable entries since Psychonauts 2 was released. Maybe the world has just moved on from this kind of game.

In a brilliantly inventive set-up carried over from the original, narrative and mechanical progression sees you explore the inner worlds of different characters you encounter. You start by arriving at the Psychonauts headquarters as an intern, only to get dragged into a plot that ultimately ends up grappling with the consequences of a ruler who would rather see their world destroyed than relinquish their power over it.

What I wasn’t expecting was one of the most mature and accomplished narratives told in a game, one that beautifully touches on a litany of profound topics from mental health and aging to power and empathy.

If there is one key criticism that can be levelled at Psychonauts 2 (and there are only a few), it is that the jumping feels off. For a platformer with so much precarious terrain to navigate and gaps to jump, it seems weird that the essential element to all its challenges isn’t as refined as it might be. 

A similarly frustrating gap exists in the study of our minds; the instantiation of the phenomenal from the noumenal, or, in simpler terms, how our strictly immaterial mental world arises from what appears to be the purely physical processes that take place in our heads. David Chalmers (1995, 1996)[2] famously named this, “the hard problem of consciousness”, the issue of explaining why a physical state is conscious rather than nonconscious.

The inexplicable existence of what it is to be me is what Philip Goff termed our ‘O-experience’[3] and there is currently no satisfactory explanation for how and why it seems to only emerge from the physical mass of flesh between our ears. Why is it that the specific material and chemical makeup of our brains cause consciousness to emerge? After all, rocks aren’t conscious. At least, we have no immediately obvious reason to think so.

Many different conceptions of explaining our consciousness have been proposed throughout the history of philosophy. Psychonauts 2 can best be thought of as a representation of the philosophical idea of dualism. At the heart of dualism is the proposition that mental phenomena are non-physical and fundamentally separate from physical reality. In Psychonauts 2 Raz has access to unique mental powers emanating as quasi-magical and supernatural abilities that aid him in combat and platforming. Be it a literal ball of mental energy to bounce on, or a big psychic hand to slap down foes, the mind and its powers are something that the Psychonauts can utilise and train, a hidden box of tricks that exists in its own right, separate and distinct from the physical reality it is able to meaningfully interact with and impact.

But ultimately, Psychonauts 2 is not all that concerned with understanding the exact philosophical and mechanical underpinnings of the brain. Instead, it can best be thought of as a game suggesting, beyond any other tool or method, that empathy is the key to understanding each other’s inner worlds.

When Raz dives into the minds of the characters in and around Psychonauts HQ, he does so to help them, to better understand what they are going through. In the case of Bob Zanotto, a character who struggles with alcoholism, Raz doesn’t enter his mind to understand the exact chemical imbalances and dependencies that are creating an addiction, he delves deeper into the root cause of what makes someone turn to drugs as a solution. Similarly, when entering the mind of Helmut Fullbear, whose brain has been separated from his body and now floats alone in a jar, Raz is less concerned with the implications this separation has on the hard problem of consciousness and rather gets to work proving that Helmet’s friends did not abandon him. It is this approach to empathy that punctuates Double Fine’s treatment of the mind in Psychonauts 2.

‘What colour is the sky in your world?’, is the title of the first episode of ‘Psychyodyssey’, the thirty-three-part documentary on the creation of Psychonauts 2. The documentary is revelatory, not just because it is possibly the most thorough document that exists in chronicling what it takes to make a game, but due to its honest, and at times painfully raw portrayal of the human side of making art. The developers at Double Fine disagree, they argue, at times they hate each other – but what rises above is a group of people who must strive to understand each other, to work together to create something that incorporates all of their own personal thoughts and feelings, and this same process is what typifies the game.

Psychonauts 2 proposes that the exact details of what is happening inside each of our heads might not be the most important thing. Rather, what matters most is how we can help each other share our thoughts, feelings, and emotions. An accurate description of our brain's physical interactions ends up merely as minutiae; rather it is the connections between others that define who we are and what we stand for.

The developers at Double Fine disagree, they argue, at times they hate each other – but what rises above is a group of people who must strive to understand each other, to work together to create something that incorporates all of their own personal thoughts and feelings, and this same process is what typifies the game.

Our everything

Everything is an odd game. Published in 2017 to widespread interest, if not critical acclaim, it allows you to inhabit, well...everything. From the smallest pebble to the largest galaxy, the main gameplay conceit is for the player to take control of the entire universe. You can guide a blocky, animation-less deer, rotating it at ninety-degree angles like a strange marionette show that would surely give any creature under your guiding hand a headache. Or, if preferred, you can possess a blade of grass, sliding it along the ground while admiring the insects gliding by.

Throughout the game, as you inhabit more and more stuff, excerpts from Alan Watts begin to play. Watts, a professed philosopher but more accurately described as a new-age spiritualist emerging from the counterculture movement of the '60s, chimes in with his ideas on consciousness. His thoughts are vague and disparate, with no real throughline or relation to anything concrete, but he paints a picture of an interconnected world, one in which an underlying energy permeates all things and connects them, despite their apparent distance from one another.

While Everything is not explicitly concerned with exploring the human mind in a direct way, its approach to the universe is an excellent demonstration of a new and increasingly popular branch of the philosophy of mind, Panpsychism. Whether Watts knew it or not, he was touching on some of its foundational beliefs.

Panpsychism is the idea that consciousness is a fundamental and widespread part of the natural world. It can be seen as a middle ground between physicalism and dualism. Dualism, which separates mind and matter, can lead to a view of nature that is disconnected and makes it hard to explain how the mind and brain come to interact. Physicalism, while simpler and unified, struggles to explain how consciousness emerges. Panpsychism, though it may sound ridiculous at first, offers a way to understand the mind as part of a unified theory.

The word “panpsychism” literally means that everything has a mind, but it is more accurate to think of it as the view that consciousness is a fundamental and ubiquitous part of the physical world. Everything, down to the smallest atom and up to the largest galaxy has some mental properties to it. When considering this view in relation to the hard problem of consciousness it is easy to see why it is appealing. No longer do you need to bridge the gap between the physical and the mental, they are now inseparable at a fundamental level. 

The video game Everything exists as a contemplative and mesmerizing illustration of panpsychism, weaving its philosophical underpinnings into an interactive experience that invites players to manifest themselves in all things. In this way, it is almost a meditative experience. The slow pace, the spacey soundtrack, and the lack of any clearly defined objectives force the players to simply exist in this digital world for a bit, to see the world from different perspectives and consider it as a whole, not as something different to us.

Indeed, Everything’s creator David O’Reilly described the game as "about the things we see, their relationships, and their points of view. In this context, things are how we separate reality so we can understand it and talk about it with each other.”[4] Everything tries to instil in the player the feeling that the boundaries between self and other are eroded and to demonstrate the underlying sentience that threads through the fabric of reality itself, the reality that Panpsychism describes.

Is it always successful in doing this? No. The game can be overly indulgent in its attempt to be profound. Pentiment and Psychonauts 2 are games that strive for a reading that goes beyond the surface, beyond the immediate narrative, to something that can be analysed and appreciated on a layer above the mechanical and the technical. While arguably none are explicitly concerned with the philosophy of mind, that each can support analysis through this lens is a testament to their creation.

[1] Empiricism and the Philosophy of Mind, Robert Brandom (ed.), Harvard University Press.; Cambridge, MA; 1997.

[2] Chalmers, David J., 1995, “Facing Up to the Problem of Consciousness”, Journal of Consciousness Studies, 2(3): 200–219

–––, 1996, The Conscious Mind: Towards a Fundamental Theory, New York: Oxford University Press.

[3] Goff, P., 2019. Galileo's Error: Foundations for a New Science of Consciousness

[4] Muncy, Jake (March 10, 2016). "In the New Game Everything, You Can Be, Well, Everything". Wired.