I had planned to post my thoughts on Heavy Rain today, focusing on a specific chapter in it. Chapter 16 to be precise. The one titled Suicide Baby.
My deconstruction of it takes a considered narrative approach to it, mainly because I wanted to avoid my own personal discomfort with the portrayal of both mental illness in the broader game and it’s depiction of suicide in this particular scene. It raised difficult questions for me as I felt it trivialised the trauma of suicide and encapsulated the frequent criticisms of our medium’s emotional immaturity by using it as a tactless and complexity free plot-device.
But today is RUOK? day in Australia and I think it’s worth taking a break from all this cultural and critical naval-gazing and letting the personal bleed through the sometimes impersonal cracks of the digital.
I’ve been in difficult, dangerous, empty situations, as I’m sure many people have, and I’m incredibly grateful for the people who stuck around to help me through it, and the people who have come afterwards to make things better.
While it is a cliche, and one that is more than unbelievable and can appear to be an immutable lie, other people have been through this, and have survived, and have tools that might be able to help. In the thousands of generations and billions of people who have walked this earth, who have struggled and survived and have passed their knowledge on, there may be seeds of ideas that might help. This is the brilliance of other people and their need to connect and share and endlessly try to make the world a better place than they found it, and I think too often we forget this.
Last year, that connection was what I needed. I’m glad I got it.
Thanks to those people who helped; hello to those people who have made things better. You all know who you are.
Anyone still interested in my thoughts on Heavy Rain can read them tomorrow.
RUOK? is a national day of action that aims to prevent suicide by encouraging Australians to connect with someone they care about and help stop little problems turning into big ones. For more information, visit www.ruokday.com.au